How God Became God (1) - The Sacred Cosmos

HOW GOD BECAME GOD

Essay 1

How the Idea of God Changes Over Time

Affecting Religion, History, and the Divine Idea

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

The history of religion is not the story of an unchanging God,

but the story of humanity learning, generation by generation,

how to speak the name of the divine.

- R.E. Slater

The divine is not discovered once for all.

It is encountered again-and-again in every age.

- R.E. Slater

The many voices of divine history

become as one unfolding song reflecting

humanity's idea of itself.

- R.E. Slater

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A Personal Note

I began as a Christian fundamentalist by birth. In my twenties I became affiliated with, and ministered within, a (conservative) evangelical setting due to my later marriage. After twenty years, in my forties, and at my pastor's urging, I became active in a progressive evangelical church within emergent Christianity. In my mid-fifties things changed yet again....

It might be easier to say I was entering into a kind of "mid-life crisis" but I rather think it was more correctly an "internal crisis of faith". It was intense. Deeply personal. And somewhat lengthy period of interior collapse. After a time I came to recognize it as a  rejuvenating process for internal faith transformation. Still, it held all kinds of blackness and lostness and left me feeling God had abandoned me. More curiously, I felt God's abiding presence. I still can't explain it. But I have come to think the feeling of "divine abandonment" may have been that part of my faith that need to be let go.

It was also a very unwanted - and quite unexpected - period of life and not unlike a very dark pit with no way out. It became deeply interruptive, and a necessarily deconstructive. It was also crucial to my expanding faith-journey I was entering into - unbeknownst to me. I describe it as a kind of spiritual darkness with no bottom and no top. When done, I very clearly, almost intuitively, knew where I was going (I believe, by the Spirit of God) but had no way of knowing how to get there. So I began to write in order to work out the deep and unsettling revelation I had gained through this very hard, and extremely difficult, spiritual experience.

Essentially, the God of my youth had met me in my iterative evangelical faith expression. I had been sensing for some time the disruptively bad influences of a hyper-Calvinism (now known as Maga evangelicalism) growing in popularity to its Christian dogma and influences. It began years earlier in seminary but untimely crystallized at this time in my life. As a result, it caused me to cast a wide net and re-examine everything I thought I knew. My search eventually discovered the need, not for a new hermeneutic, but for an integral philosophy preaching value and a philosophic-theology preaching love.

Placed together, process-relational theology was born, and is what energizes my rebirthed Christian faith. Over the years I have testified to my rebirth and why it fills me with new hope. But it also demands an upgraded Christian faith stripped of folklore, poor doctrine, and boundaries markers. Some of those markers is how we read the bible. Here, through these several upcoming series, I will show what I mean. As I have come to understand process thought I am now able to take past essays and more ably rework them. Enjoy.

- R.E. Slater

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Series Prologue

The Long Journey of the Divine Idea

Human beings have always searched for meaning beyond themselves. Long before temples were built or sacred texts were written, people looked toward the sky, the mountains, and the sea and wondered whether some deeper presence lay behind the forces shaping their lives. Thunderstorms, fertile harvests, and the seasonal turning of the stars all suggested that the universe may be animated by powers greater than human understanding.

From these early experiences arose humanity’s first attempts to speak of the divine, both rightly or wrongly. At times, giving too much away to supernaturalism, and at other times, not enough.

Across the centuries these (theologizing) attempts took many forms. Ancient cultures at first imagined various gods and goddesses dwelling in mountains and rivers. As nations arose, they envisioned patron deities which guided their destinies. Early (religious) philosophers (later, "philosophic-theologians") began to describe the divine as the source of order, reason, and being itself. Each generation inherited the religious language of the past which reshaped, as well as challenged, it's (cultural) responses to the past and its (sociological) experience of the present.

The story of faith is therefore not the story of a single fixed idea of God but the story of an unfolding conversation. Communities have continually wrestled with suffering, justice, hope - including the mystery of existence - and through that (psychic) struggle have gradually expanded societal understanding of the sacred across a spectrum of religious-faith ideologies (sic, beliefs). Resulting "Sacred Texts" have preserved these earlier reflections, allowing us in our present generations (re ... Renaissance, Reformational, Enlightened, Modern, Post-modern, Meta-modern ... ) to glimpse the long process through which humanity has tried to name the divine, or sacred-divine.

This series explores that process....

Beginning in the ancient world of many gods and moving through the religious transformations of Israel, the rise of Jewish apocalyptic thought, the teachings of Jesus, and the theological developments of early Christianity, the essays that follow will trace the historical evolution of the Divine or Sacred-divine - both as an idea and as a belief. Along the way, we will see how changing cultural influences, historical experiences, philosophical insights, and spiritual reflections have continually reshaped the ways people-and-societies have imagined God.

To recognize this history is not to diminish religious faith. On the contrary, it reveals the depth of humanity’s spiritual journey to explain the unexplainable. Each generation stands within a long stream of meditative reflection stretching back thousands and thousands and thousands of years. The questions we ask today are part of that same unfolding search.

If the universe itself is dynamic and evolving, then it should not surprise us that humanity’s understanding of the divine evolves as well. The language of faith grows as the human horizon expands.

The story of how God “became God” in human thought is therefore not a story of decline or invention. It is the story of a continuing discovery - an ever-widening attempt to understand the sacred presence encountered within the unfolding drama of the world.

It is this story that is still being written today....

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Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Introduction

The Puzzle of the Changing God

The divine is not a conclusion reached once for all,

but a presence discovered again in every age.

- R.E. Slater

Many people assume that religion begins with a fixed understanding of God. In this view, divine truth descends from heaven complete and unchanged, and the task of religious communities is simply to preserve that truth intact through the centuries.

Yet the historical record tells a very different story.

Across civilizations and across time, ideas about God change. They expand, contract, and transform in response to new experiences, new crises, and new cultural environments. The gods of ancient Mesopotamia differ from those of Greece. The philosophical God of medieval Christianity differs from the personal deity of the Hebrew prophets. Even within the Bible itself, the character and role of God appear in multiple forms.

In some passages God is portrayed as a warrior leading Israel into battle. In others, God becomes the universal creator of all nations. In still others, God appears as the compassionate father welcoming prodigal children home.

These differences are not contradictions to be eliminated but clues pointing toward a more obvious - and not necessarily deeper - truth: religious traditions develop over time. They are shaped by the historical journeys of the communities who carry them.

This series explores that development.

The goal is not to diminish faith but to understand how the idea of God has grown through centuries of human reflection, struggle, and hope.

By tracing this history, we can see how ancient religious experiences gradually evolved into the theological traditions that shape the modern world. It also can tell us that ideas of the Divine, or sacred-divine, become informed over time and experience. And it is this later idea that we wish to pursue....

In this sense then, ideas about the divine - or what people have understood as sacred - rarely appear fully formed. Rather, they become further informed through human experience, reflection, and historical circumstance, over time.

It is this unfolding process that this series seeks to explore. We call it "processual divinity."

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Religion as Historical Experience

Every generation must learn how to speak of the sacred.

Of its love, its value, its healing.

- R.E. Slater

Religious belief does not emerge in isolation. It is born within the lived experience of communities confronting the mysteries of existence.

War, exile, empire, and cultural encounter have repeatedly forced religious communities to rethink their understanding of the divine as interpreted by their sacred scriptures.

• When Israel experienced liberation from Egypt, God was remembered as a deliverer who acts in history.

• When the kingdom of Israel faced corruption and injustice, the prophets proclaimed God as a moral judge demanding righteousness.

• When The City of Jerusalem fell and its people carried into exile, the question arose whether God had abandoned his beloved or whether God ruled beyond any single land or temple.

Each of these crises pushed religious imagination in new directions, further informing how communities understood the divine in relation to their changing world.

In this way, theology often develops not during periods of stability but during moments of profound disruption. Crisis becomes a catalyst not only for reinterpretation but for the ongoing formation of theological understanding.

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Sacred Texts as Theological Archives

The universe is not finished...

Neither is our understanding of the divine.

- R.E. Slater

One of the remarkable features of the Bible is that it preserves these evolving interpretations of the divine rather than erasing them from the chalkboards of imagination.

Instead of presenting a single uniform theology, the biblical tradition contains multiple voices reflecting differing historical moments of challenge and blessing.

Early ancient texts described a world in which many nations worshipped many gods. This was the age of Polytheism. Then, the world changed, and one God led the gods of the nations. This was the age of Henotheism. And again the world changed, to find One God and no other, as ancient Israel expressed through its Abrahamic Covenant that paralleled - but was unlike - its neighbor's Suzerainty-Vassal treaties. This was the age of Monotheism. And in later theological expressions, themes of cosmic justice (theodicy), resurrection (renewal), and the ultimate transformation of history (teleology) were examined.

These succeeding layers of divine-human experience revealed how a community's sacred texts functioned not as mere doctrinal statements of dogma - but as living archives attesting to their theological reflection. Reflections that not only sought to preserve the ways communities had been gradually informed themselves of the sacred - but were continually examining their present constructs to re-inform their understanding of the divine. As such, the sacred canons had become evolving records of how generations of believers wrestled with the meaning of God within changing historical circumstances. And when they ceased examining their faith, and stopped living responsively to one another, then those same canons testified to how sacred communities died in their faith via legalism and dead traditionalism.

Consequently, by recognizing the historical depth and necessity to move with the Divine at all times is to appreciate how sacred scriptures such as the Jewish or Christian Bibles not become a static system of ideas, but as a living conversation across centuries of experienced faith living.

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Why Theologies Develop

Ideas of the divine are not delivered complete,

but become informed through the long experience of history.

- R.E. Slater

Several forces commonly drive religious development:

• Historical crisis is one of the most powerful. When established beliefs can no longer explain lived experience, communities seek new interpretations that preserve faith while addressing new realities.

• Cultural interaction also plays a role. When religious traditions encounter new civilizations and philosophical ideas, they often adapt their language and concepts to more actively engage these influences.

• Finally, internal exmination and reflection contributes to theological change. As communities meditate on their own sacred traditions, they reinterpret earlier teachings in light of new insights.

Over time these processes gradually reshape the understanding of God.

What began as a sacred tribal protector later became a universal Creator-Redeemer. What began as a distant ruler in the heavens later was reimagined as an abiding personal Presence within the world.

The idea of God grows as human communities respond to history, reflect on experience, and seek language adequate to the sacred they believe they are encountering.

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The Road Map of This Series

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond,

behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things.

- Alfred North Whitehead, "Religion in the Making"

In the essays that follow in this new series, we will trace several major stages through the historical development of the divine idea. This idea may tell of the divine personage of God, to some, or to the sacred-divine latent in creation, to others. In process philosophy and theology each idea of the divine may be upheld, expanded, and can aid one's faith within the processual reality of the universe (yet another series, re processual metaphysics: "What is Reality?")

The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim journey first begins in the ancient Near East, where Israel’s earliest religious traditions emerged from within a world of many gods and competing mythologies. It then continued through a prophetic revolution which reshaped Israel’s understanding of divine love-and-justice. It then moves through the crisis of exile, which produced a new vision of universal monotheism.

From there the story of the divine entered the vibrant theological landscape of the centuries before Jesus, when Jewish thought expanded dramatically through apocalyptic literature, messianic expectations, and philosophical reflection.

Only then do we arrive at the teachings of Jesus and the early Christian reinterpretation of God that would follow.

By tracing this theological history step-by-step, we can see how the concept of God was continually reimagined, refined, and informed as communities sought to understand divine presence within the unfolding drama of history.

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A Living Idea

If the story of faith is truly a living story,

then the question is not whether the idea of God has changed,

but how that change continues to guide humanity towards

a deeper understanding of the (processual) divine.

- R.E. Slater

The story of religion is often told as if God remained the same while human understanding stayed fixed. Yet the historical record suggests something far more dynamic.

Across the eons of the centuries, believers have continually revisited their understanding of God in light of new experiences, new knowledge, and new moral insights. Each generation inherits the theological reflections of the past while adding its own interpretations to the ongoing conversation.

The result is not a static portrait of God but a living tradition shaped by the struggles and aspirations of countless communities.

This series explores that unfolding story.

It is the story of how humanity’s understanding of the divine was gradually informed through history - and how, through that long process of reflection, crisis, and reinterpretation, the idea of God came to take the forms we recognize today.

In this sense, theology is not merely the preservation of inherited claims but the ongoing work of processual divinity.

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Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

A CLOSING REFLECTION

The Long Arc of the Divine Idea

When viewed across the centuries, the history of theology reveals a remarkable pattern. Human understanding of the divine has not remained fixed but has developed in response to new experiences, new crises, and new insights about the nature of reality.

The long arc of the divine to be traced in this series can be understood as a series of sequences  from one minor/major transformation to another as humanity time-and-again re-imagines the sacred within its societies and personages.

Three Great Transformations in the Idea of a Becoming God

Across the stages below the divine idea expands from
a sacred cosmos filled with many divine powers,
to a universal and morally concerned creator, and finally
toward a relational understanding of God within an evolving universe.

MYTHIC COSMOS
(Ancient Sacred World)
Nature alive with divine forces
Pantheons of gods
Local and national deities
Sacred geography
        ↓
ETHICAL & METAPHYSICAL GOD
(Biblical and Classical Theology)
Prophetic monotheism
Universal creator
Divine justice
Classical philosophical theology
        ↓
PROCESS-RELATIONAL GOD
(Contemporary Theological Horizon)
God in dynamic relation with creation
Process and relational theology
Open and participatory universe
Divine presence within cosmic evolution


A Parallel Whiteheadian Pattern of Religious Development

Similarly, this historical arc of faith-experience can also parallel the processual pattern described within process philosophy and theology, ala the work of Alfred North Whitehead. 

That is, human understanding of (processual) reality tends to move through successive stages of awareness as consciousness expands:


COSMIC PARTICIPATION
Humanity experiences the world as alive with sacred forces.
↓
MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Religion becomes focused on justice, covenant, and ethical responsibility.
↓
METAPHYSICAL SYSTEM
Philosophical reflection seeks to define the nature of God and reality.
↓
RELATIONAL PROCESS
Reality is understood as dynamic, evolving, and relational.
God participates in the ongoing creativity of the universe.


Seen from this perspective, the development of process-based theology also reflects humanity’s deepening participation in the unfolding character of reality itself. The story of religion is therefore not simply a sequence of doctrines, but a long exploration of how the sacred may be present within an ever-changing world.

Looking Ahead

The essays that follow will begin the faith journey of humanity at its earliest stage. Before Israel’s prophets spoke of justice, or philosophers described divine perfection, or the ancient world experienced reality as alive with sacred power. Further back, in the pre-histories of early humanity when mountains, storms, rivers, and stars, were each-and-all perceived as expressions of living, fearing, divine presence.

To understand how the idea of God - or the idea of the divine - eventually evolved, we must first step back into that ancient world. The next essay will therefore explore such ancient beginnings.

Essay 2 - The Ancient World of Many Gods

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The Listening God
The Becoming of the Divine

by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT

Scripture cannot be read completed.

It must be read as incomplete -
and moving towards divine fullness,
in every way imaginable.

Across the ages
humankind has spoken many names

of the divine into the darkness.

Storm-gods,
River spirits,

the Keepers of mountains and stars.

Each name reaching.

Each prayer a question.

Yet somewhere within the turning cosmos
the universe listens through the minds and hearts
of those who wander and wonder.

The creation becomes the conscience.

The divine the listening ear -

abiding, adjusting, adapting.

The Sacred-divine unfolds patiently,

like the reddening dawn across

a wakening horizon.

For some, a desert exile

enlarged a God without a temple

embodied in a transforming people.

For others, a Prophetic fire

that fed the deeper sacrifices

of a serving God.

A God who met his beloved

in the quiet of conscience

of redeeming love and hoped justice.

And from this story

its narrative continues

through the ages of humanity.

For if the universe lives in relation

to creation's flowing streams -

then every generation must learn

again-and-again the language of love.

Not holiness.

Not righteousness.

But that of love as foundation to all.

And not as something fixed beyond time,
but as presence moving within time -

Inviting the world toward greater beauty,
toward greater compassion,

toward renewing transformation.

The voices of history are many.

They become one unfolding song.

A song that is never completed.

A song that ever is written.

Eternal as the divine is everlasting.

R.E. Slater

March 12, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

SERIES QUOTES

Reality is process,

our understanding of the divine

grows as reality unfolds.

- R.E. Slater

Religion is what the individual does

with his own solitariness.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Faith is not the preservation of ancient answers

but the continuing search for deeper truths.

- R.E. Slater

Every generation inherits a vision of God -

burdening every generation to rethink it.

- R.E. Slater

If the universe is still unfolding,

then our understanding of the divine

must also unfold continually.

- R.E. Slater

The story of God in human thought

is the story of humanity learning

to see the sacred in ever widening horizons.

- R.E. Slater

The history of religion is not the story of an unchanging God,

but the story of humanity imperfectly learning

how to speak more correctly about the divine.

- R.E. Slater

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Ancient Near Eastern Religion

• Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. Yale University Press, 1976.

• Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Eerdmans, 2002.

• Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Israelite Religion and the Hebrew Bible

• Kaufmann, Yehezkel. The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile. University of Chicago Press, 1960.

• Dever, William G. Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel. Eerdmans, 2005.

• Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Harvard University Press, 1973.

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Second Temple Judaism

• Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. Eerdmans, 2016.

• Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch: A New Translation. Fortress Press, 2012.

• Wright, N. T. The New Testament and the People of God. Fortress Press, 1992.

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Early Christianity

• Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Eerdmans, 2003.

• Dunn, James D. G. Christology in the Making. Eerdmans, 1989.

• Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God. HarperOne, 2014.

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Process Theology and Process Philosophy

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Free Press.

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Cambridge University Press.

• Cobb, John B., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Westminster Press.

• Suchocki, Marjorie. God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. Crossroad.

• Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep. Routledge.

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APPENDIX A

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Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

A Simple Historical Map of

the Evolution of the Divine Idea

This series will explore several major turning points

in the development of religious thought.

Sacred Cosmos
↓
World of Many Gods
↓
Yahweh Among the Gods
↓
Prophetic Revolution
↓
Crisis of Exile
↓
Intertestamental Explosion
↓
Message of Jesus
↓
Rise of Christology / Philosophical God
↓
Modern Crisis of God
↓
Relational God

1. The Sacred Cosmos
c. 1500 BCE and earlier

• The world is experienced as alive with spiritual force.
• Mountains, rivers, storms, animals, and stars are all bound up with sacred presence.
• Religion begins as participation in a living cosmos.

2. The Ancient World of Many Gods
Ancient Near Eastern Polytheism
c. 1500 - 1200 BCE

• Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan develop structured pantheons.
• Gods are linked to fertility, war, kingship, weather, and land.
• Divine order mirrors political and social order.

3. Yahweh Among the Gods
Early Israelite Religion
c. 1200 - 1000 BCE

• Early Israel emerges within the ancient Near Eastern world.
• Yahweh appears as the covenant God of Israel.
• Israelite religion is not yet fully philosophical monotheism.

4. The Prophetic Revolution
Prophetic Ethical Monotheism
c. 800 - 600 BCE

• Prophets emphasize justice, righteousness, and covenant faithfulness.
• God becomes increasingly understood as morally concerned with all nations.
• Ritual is subordinated to ethics.

5. The Crisis of Exile
Exilic Transformation
c. 586 BCE and after

• Jerusalem falls and Solomon's temple is destroyed.
• Israel must rethink God beyond land, monarchy, and temple.
• Universal monotheism intensifies.

6. The Intertestamental Explosion
The Development of Intertestamental Theology
c. 200 BCE - 70 CE

• Jewish theology diversifies dramatically.
• Apocalypticism, resurrection belief, angelology, demonology, and messianic expectation expand.
• Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and other groups debate Israel’s future.

7. The Message of Jesus
The Jesus Movement
c. 30 CE

• Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God.
• His teaching integrates prophetic ethics, apocalyptic hope, and radical mercy.
• God is announced as near, active, and relational.

8. The Rise of Christology / The Philosophical God
Early Christian Christology
c. 30 - 500 CE

• Early Christians reinterpret Jesus in increasingly exalted theological terms.
• Greek philosophical ideas shape doctrines concerning God, Christ, and the Trinity.
• The divine idea becomes increasingly articulated through metaphysical language.

9. Classical Christianity
The Formation of Classical Christian Theology
c. 300 - 1500 CE

• Christian theology becomes systematized through the work of church councils and medieval scholars.
• Biblical thought is increasingly integrated with Greek philosophical frameworks, especially Platonism and Aristotelian metaphysics.
• The idea of God enters a period of reconstruction.
• Questions of transcendence, immanence, and divine action re-emerge.
• This synthesis forms the dominant theological structure of medieval Christianity.

10. The Modern Crisis of God
Early Modern and Modern Transformations
1500 - 2000 CE

• The Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment philosophy, and modern historical criticism challenge the assumptions of classical theology.
• Science, historical criticism, and philosophy force theologians to reconsider traditional ideas about divine action, revelation, and authority.
• Questions of transcendence, immanence, and divine participation in the world become central to modern theological reflection.

11. The Relational God
Open-and-Relational Process Theology
1900 CE - Present

• Process, relational, open, and panentheistic theologies explore new ways of understanding the divine within an evolving universe.
• God is increasingly understood less as static omnipotence and more as dynamic relational presence.
• The divine is reimagined as participating in the unfolding creativity of the cosmos.