What Is Process Christianity?

What Is Process Christianity?

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

---

1. Introduction

Christianity is the world’s largest religion, with deep historical roots, global diversity, and profound cultural influence. It is centered on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, understood as God’s unique revelation of divine love. Over two millennia, the Christian tradition has grown into a vast family: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical, and many others.

Yet, as the world changes, Christianity must continually re-examine itself. New scientific discoveries, ecological crises, philosophical shifts, and interfaith encounters all raise pressing questions. What does it mean to follow Christ in the twenty-first century? How should Christians understand God, the world, and salvation in light of modern knowledge and experience?

Process Christianity is one such contemporary re-examination. Rooted in process philosophy (especially in the process philosophical work of Alfred North Whitehead), it interprets Christianity not through the (Platonic et al) metaphysics of timeless substances but through the categories of becoming, relationality, and novelty/creativity. It is both deeply faithful to Christianity’s essence and radically open to reinterpretation.

---

2. Christianity: The Traditions and Evangelicalism

Traditional Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant)

Christianity’s “Great Tradition” is expressed through three major branches:

• Catholicism: Centered on the Pope in Rome, Catholicism emphasizes the sacraments, apostolic succession, and the unity of the universal church. Its theology draws heavily on Augustine, Aquinas, and the scholastic synthesis of Greek philosophy with Christian faith.

• Orthodoxy: Eastern Orthodoxy treasures continuity with the early church, the mystical experience of God’s energies, and the beauty of liturgy. The Orthodox vision of salvation (theosis) emphasizes participation in God’s life.

• Protestantism: Emerging from the Reformation, Protestantism stresses scripture as the ultimate authority, justification by grace through faith, and the priesthood of all believers. It is an eclectic collection of past philosophical approaches and has produced a wide family of faith traditions - Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, and beyond.

Together, these streams shaped the cultural, theological, and institutional life of global Christianity. They carried immense depth but also inherited limitations - especially a God seen through classical metaphysics as unchanging, impassible, and omnipotent in coercive control.

Evangelical Christianity

Evangelicalism is a subset of Protestant Christianity that emerged with great vitality in the 18th and 19th centuries. It spread through revival movements, missionary work, and later the global growth of Pentecostalism. Hallmarks of Evangelicalism include:

• Biblicism: Strong emphasis on the authority (and often inerrancy) of the Bible.

• Conversionism: The necessity of a personal conversion or “born again” experience.

• Crucicentrism: The cross of Christ as the center of salvation, often in substitutionary or penal terms.

• Activism: Evangelism, missions, and social reform as essential expressions of faith.

Evangelical Christianity has been a source of spiritual passion, missionary zeal, and social engagement. Yet it has also tended toward narrow literalism, exclusivism, and alignment with political-cultural agendas.

---

3. Why Process Christianity?

Process Christianity emerges as a response to the limitations of both the Great Christian Tradition of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestant and the relative new lense of 18th-20th century Evangelicalism.

• The Great Tradition, influenced by Hellenistic metaphysics, often pictured God as unmoved, unchanging, and beyond relationship as a transcendent cosmic monarch. This made it difficult to reconcile God with suffering, change, and human freedom.

• Evangelicalism, while vibrant, often reduced Christianity to personal salvation, biblical literalism, and juridical atonement (see the 3-part series on Atoning Sacrifice), sidelining ecological care, interfaith dialogue, and systemic justice.

Process Christianity asks: What if God is not the unmoved monarch of classical theology, nor the severe managerial overseer of evangelical culture, but the inspirational and relational companion of creation? What if salvation is not escape from the world but the healing of the world itself?

By anchoring itself in process philosophy, Process Christianity reimagines the Christian story in categories of relational love, persuasive power, and co-creative partnership.

---

4. What Is Process Christianity?

Process Christianity is Christianity reframed through process thought:

• God: Not a remote ruler but the Most Moved Mover - present in every moment, feeling the world’s joys and sorrows, guiding with persuasive love.

• Jesus Christ: The fullest embodiment of God’s relational presence. His life, death, and resurrection reveal not simply a legal transaction but the depth of divine solidarity with creation.

• Holy Spirit: The ongoing energy of God in the world - animating creativity, inspiring justice, and sustaining communities of compassion.

• Bible: A dynamic, evolving testimony of humanity’s encounter with God - a library of voices rather than a static code.

• Salvation: The flourishing of creation, the reconciliation of relationships, and the fulfillment of God’s loving purposes - not escape from history but creational transformation within it.

• Church: A community of co-creators with God, partnering in ecological care, justice, and spiritual renewal.

---

5. Differences in Theological Orientation

Aspect	Traditional Christianity	Evangelical Christianity	Process Christianity
View of God	Immutable, impassible, omnipotent	Sovereign authority, intervening ruler	Relational, dipolar, persuasive love
View of Jesus	Savior through incarnation & sacraments	Savior through atoning death (often penal substitution)	Embodiment of divine love, model of relational solidarity
Bible	Authoritative, interpreted with tradition	Inerrant, literal	Dynamic witness, evolving testimony
Salvation	Sacramental participation, grace, faith	Personal conversion, assurance of heaven	Healing of creation, co-creative partnership with God
Power	God as ruler over all history	God as interventionist	God as persuasive, non-coercive
Church	Institutional, sacramental	Gathered believers, evangelistic	Relational community, co-creative with God
Mission	Extend the faith, preserve tradition	Convert the lost, defend truth	Collaborate with God toward justice, peace, and ecological wholeness

---

6. Applications of Process Christianity

Faith & Worship

Worship becomes not obligation to a monarch but communion with a companion God. Prayer is dialogue with a relational presence who truly responds and suffers-with creation.

Ecology

If every creature is a “drop of experience” within God’s body (Whitehead), then ecological care becomes central to discipleship. Creation-Care is not backdrop but participant in God’s life.

Justice

God’s love empowers social transformation through persuasion and solidarity, not coercion. Process Christianity aligns faith with movements for equity, peace, and liberation.

Interfaith Dialogue

Process categories - relationality, creativity, becoming - provide common ground for respectful dialogue with Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Indigenous spiritualities, and secular humanism. More so when processual elements between each faith are identified and enlarged between differences.

---

7. Conclusion

Christianity, in its traditional and evangelical forms, has offered the world profound gifts - deep worship, vibrant mission, spiritual renewal. Yet both have also inherited limitations from metaphysics and culture.

Process Christianity does not discard the Christian story; it deepens and expands it. It honors the central narrative - God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ - while reframing it in categories that resonate with science, ecology, justice, and interfaith community.

At its core, Process Christianity proclaims:

• God is not aloof but relational.

• God is not coercive but persuasive.

• God is not static but the living companion of creation.

This vision calls believers not to withdrawal but to co-creation - partnering with God in the ongoing adventure of the universe.

What Is Christianity?

What Is Christianity?

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

---

1. Introduction

Christianity is one of the world’s largest and most influential religions, claiming more than two billion followers across every continent. It began as a small Jewish movement in first-century Palestine, yet its story is inseparable from the shaping of world history, culture, and human imagination.

At its core, Christianity is not just a collection of doctrines or institutions. It is a way of life centered on the belief that in Jesus of Nazareth, God has acted uniquely and decisively. The earliest Christians proclaimed that in Jesus’ teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection, God’s love was revealed for all humanity and creation.

Thus, the heart of Christianity lies in this question: Who is Jesus Christ, and what difference does he make for God, for humanity, and for the world? Every Christian tradition, however diverse, orients itself around this question.

---

2. Origins & Core Story

Historical Roots

Christianity arose in the early first century CE within the Jewish context of Roman-occupied Palestine. Jesus was born, lived, and taught as a Jew, interpreting the Torah and prophetic tradition in fresh, radical ways. His teachings centered on the Kingdom of God - a vision of justice, peace, and divine fellowship breaking into the world.

Life and Mission of Jesus

• Jesus proclaimed good news to the poor, healed the sick, welcomed the marginalized, and challenged oppressive systems.

• His parables and sermons emphasized forgiveness, compassion, humility, and love even for enemies.

• The Roman authorities, seeing him as a threat, crucified him around 30 CE.

The Resurrection and Birth of the Church

His followers, however, proclaimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. This experience transformed their despair into conviction: Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, through whom God had acted to redeem the world.

• These convictions birthed the Christian movement, spreading first among Jewish communities, then out into the Gentile world.

• The apostle Paul and others carried the message throughout the Roman Empire, planting churches and writing letters that would later become part of the New Testament.

Thus, Christianity’s foundation rests not only on Jesus’ life and death but also on the conviction that God’s love triumphed through resurrection, inaugurating a new creation.

---

3. Core Beliefs

Though expressed differently across traditions, most Christian communities affirm a set of shared convictions:

1. God

   • There is one God, creator of heaven and earth, who is both transcendent (beyond creation) and immanent (present within it).

   • God is understood relationally through the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - three persons, one divine reality.

2. Jesus Christ

   • Jesus is confessed as the Son of God, both fully human and fully divine.

   • His life reveals God’s character, his death reveals God’s solidarity with human suffering, and his resurrection reveals God’s victory over sin and death.

3. Holy Spirit

   • God’s Spirit is at work in the world, inspiring faith, guiding communities, comforting the afflicted, and empowering people for service.

4. Bible

   • Sacred scripture includes the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) and the New Testament.

   • Christians read the Bible as testimony to God’s work in history, though interpretations vary widely.

5. Salvation

   • At its heart, salvation means reconciliation with God, liberation from sin, and the promise of eternal life.

   • Traditions differ: some emphasize grace through faith, others highlight sacraments, works of love, or communal transformation.

6. Church

   • The Christian community is seen as the Body of Christ, gathered to worship, serve, and bear witness.

   • The Church is both local (parish, congregation) and universal (the global communion of believers).

---

4. Practices

Christianity is lived not only through beliefs but also through practices that embody faith in daily life:

• Worship: Christians gather weekly, often on Sunday (commemorating the resurrection), for prayer, scripture reading, preaching, music, and communal fellowship.

• Sacraments: Most traditions recognize Baptism (initiation into the Christian life) and Eucharist (Communion, sharing bread and wine as remembrance of Christ). Some traditions include Confirmation, Confession, Marriage, Ordination, and Anointing of the Sick.

• Prayer: Both personal and communal, prayer connects believers with God in thanksgiving, lament, petition, and meditation.

• Ethics: Christians seek to follow Jesus’ command to love God and love neighbor - lived out in forgiveness, generosity, service, and social justice.

---

5. Diversity of Traditions

Over time, Christianity developed into multiple streams, reflecting cultural, historical, and theological differences:

• Catholicism: The largest branch, centered on the Pope in Rome, emphasizing sacramental life, tradition, and global unity.

• Eastern Orthodoxy: Rooted in the Byzantine tradition, emphasizing liturgy, mystical theology, and continuity with the early church fathers.

• Protestantism: Emerging from the 16th-century Reformation, stressing scripture as authority and salvation by grace through faith. Includes Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and many others.

• Global and Indigenous Christianities: In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Christianity has taken on unique expressions, blending with local cultures, liberation movements, and spiritual traditions.

This diversity shows Christianity’s adaptability, but also raises ongoing debates about identity, unity, and authenticity.

---

6. Christianity in History & Culture

Christianity has profoundly shaped history, for better and worse:

• Philosophy & Art: From Augustine and Aquinas to Bach and Michelangelo, Christian thought and creativity have shaped Western civilization.

• Institutions: Christian monasticism preserved learning; cathedrals became centers of culture; universities grew from Christian contexts.

• Politics & Law: Christianity influenced ideas of justice, rights, and governance, but also aligned at times with empires, colonialism, and oppression.

• Mission & Expansion: Christianity spread through missionary work and cultural adaptation, but also through conquest and colonization.

• Modern Challenges: Christianity faces secularization, scientific critique, pluralism, and the call for justice around gender, race, environment, and global inequality.

Thus, Christianity is both a bearer of profound gifts and a tradition in need of constant reformation and renewal.

---

7. Conclusion

Christianity is a living faith that spans cultures, languages, and centuries. It is centered on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, interpreted through scripture, lived in community, and expressed in diverse traditions.

Its essence lies in proclaiming God’s love and calling humanity into lives of faith, hope, and love. At its best, Christianity is not a static system but a dynamic journey of discipleship—a way of life that seeks justice, embodies compassion, and celebrates God’s presence in creation.

As the faith continues to grow and adapt across the globe, Christianity remains an open story - a movement that constantly reinterprets itself in light of new questions, challenges, and contexts. Its heart, however, endures: In Jesus Christ, the love of God is made known, and through that love, the world is invited into wholeness and renewal.

What Is Process Theology?

What Is Process Theology?

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

---

1. Introduction

Philosophy and theology have always walked closely together. Philosophy seeks wisdom in its broadest sense, asking questions about reality, truth, and value. Theology takes up those same questions but turns them toward the divine: What is God like? How does God relate to the world? What difference does this make for human life and hope?

Theology cannot exist without philosophy, because every vision of God rests on assumptions about what reality is. At the same time, philosophy without theology can become abstract, disconnected from humanity’s deepest spiritual longings. The two disciplines form a dialogue: philosophy sets the ground, and theology builds upon it in the search for meaning.

Process theology belongs in this conversation. It is a theology rooted in process philosophy - drawing its metaphysical categories from Alfred North Whitehead’s vision of a world made not of static things but of events, relationships, and becoming. Just as process philosophy reshaped metaphysics, process theology reshapes how we imagine God.

---

2. What Is Philosophy?

At its heart, philosophy is the love of wisdom (philo-sophia). It is humanity’s attempt to think carefully about the great questions: What is real? How do we know? How should we live?

Historically, philosophy has developed systems to explain the world:

• Substance metaphysics (Aristotle) saw reality as made up of stable essences.

• Dualism (Descartes) separated mind and matter.

• Materialism treated reality as a machine.

• Idealism (Plato, Hegel) elevated ideas or spirit above matter.

• Existentialism (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus) emphasized human freedom and angst.

Each system has left a mark on religion and culture. But each has also shown limitations, especially when confronted with modern science, ecological crisis, and the human yearning for relational meaning.

---

3. What Is Process Philosophy?

Process philosophy, most fully expressed by Alfred North Whitehead, reframes the very foundation of metaphysics. Instead of seeing reality as a collection of unchanging substances, it sees reality as a dynamic web of events and relationships.

• The building blocks of reality are not things, but actual occasions - momentary drops of experience that arise, interact, and perish.

• Prehension describes how each moment “feels” and takes account of others.

• Concrescence is the act of becoming one unified experience.

• Creativity is the ultimate principle: the drive toward novelty, the ever-emerging flow of reality.

• God in this system is dipolar: the primordial nature provides order and possibility; the consequent nature receives and redeems the world’s experiences.

Whitehead’s system is not just abstract speculation. It provides a metaphysical framework that resonates with quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and ecological interdependence. It portrays a world that is alive, relational, and creative to its core.

This metaphysical vision is the anchor and foundation for process theology.

---

4. What Is Process Theology?

Process theology is theology done with Whitehead’s categories in mind. It asks: If reality is truly processual - relational, creative, and becoming - then how should we think of God, creation, and faith?

• God is not the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, untouched by the world. Instead, God is the Most Moved Mover—the one who feels all things and responds with love.

• God does not coerce the world by sheer omnipotence. Instead, God persuades creation - offering lures toward beauty, truth, and goodness.

• The future is not fixed in advance but open. God works with creation in co-creative partnership.

• Divine power is not unilateral control but relational love.

In short, process theology reframes God from a monarch to a companion - not less than transcendent, but also deeply, immanently connected, living as the very DNA within the very fabric of creation.

---

5. Key Distinctions: Philosophy → Theology

It is important to note the shift:

• Process Philosophy describes reality in general metaphysical terms: creativity, concrescence, prehension, actual occasions.

• Process Theology applies those categories to God and faith: divine creativity, divine suffering-with, divine persuasion.

For example:

• Creativity in philosophy is the universal principle of novelty. In theology it becomes God’s creative love drawing the world forward.

• Concrescence in philosophy is how each moment unifies its influences. In theology it helps us describe how God integrates the world’s sufferings into the divine life.

This shift shows why theology is more than an echo of philosophy. It is a reflection on the divine-world relationship grounded in, but not reducible to, metaphysical categories.

---

6. Core Themes of Process Theology

1. Dipolar God

   • Primordial nature: the realm of possibilities and order.

   • Consequent nature: God’s living relationship with the world, where every joy and sorrow is felt.

2. Divine Persuasion

   • God does not force but invites; not compels but lures.

   • Love is persuasive, never coercive.

3. Relational Immanence

   • God is not separate from the world but present in every moment of becoming.

   • Panentheism: the world is in God, and God is in the world.

4. Christ / Spirit

   • Christ as the fullest embodiment of God’s persuasive love.

   • Spirit as the ongoing presence of God’s relational energy in the world (sic, divine /creational panpsychism)

5. Theodicy

   • Evil is not “sent” by God but arises from the tragic possibilities of freedom and creativity.

   • God shares in suffering and works with creation toward healing.

---

7. Applications

Process theology is not only a theory; it has practical implications:

• Church & Faith - Worship becomes an act of co-creation with God. Prayer is not pleading with a distant deity but conversing with a loving companion who genuinely responds and works together with creation towards a loving, redeeming, transformative ends.

• Ecology - If all creatures are interrelated drops of experience, then every life has intrinsic value. Process theology undergirds ecological ethics: caring for Earth is caring for God’s body.

• Justice - God’s persuasive love empowers human communities toward liberation, peace, and equity. Process theology resists domination and violence because God’s power is never coercive.

• Interfaith Dialogue - Because process categories are metaphysical rather than sectarian, they provide a common grammar across religious traditions. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Indigenous worldviews can find resonance in the relational vision of reality. This is the essence of "mission" between systems of belief where disparate faiths can work together processual towards common value-driven goals.

---

8. Conclusion

Philosophy asks the deepest questions about reality. Process philosophy reshapes those questions, showing that what is most real is not permanence but process, not isolation but relation, not coercion but creativity.

Process theology grows out of that foundation. It reimagines God not as an aloof monarch but as a companion in becoming - the one who suffers with creation, persuades with love, and lures all things toward beauty and wholeness.

At its heart, process theology is a love-centered, relational, globally relevant vision of faith. It bridges science and religion, ecology and spirituality, justice and hope. It invites us to see ourselves not as passive recipients of divine decree but as co-creators with God in the ongoing adventure of the universe.