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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
FAITH AFTER CERTAINTY
Process Theology for a Metamodern Age
Essay VII
Practicing Faith in an Unfinished World
Hope, Trust, Participation, and Becoming
by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5.2
If faith is to survive now, it must do what the Greek gods could not:
grow ethically, relinquish control, and remain credible
in a world that no longer needs the gods to function.
Series Outline: Essays IV–VII
Essay IV - What the Greeks Already Knew (and We Forgot)
Ethics, Explanation, and the End of Coercive Belief
→ Extracts and reframes the core lessons of Greek unbelief developed in Essays I–III, showing that ethical failure, explanatory sufficiency, and epistemic humility dismantled divine authority long before modernity.
Ethics precedes metaphysics.
Divinity must remain morally responsive.
Faith collapses when ethical trust collapses.
The gods are refused, not denied, when disenchantment rises.
Essay V - Why Christianity Collapsed Differently
Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity
→ Examines what Greek unbelief did not face: imperial entanglement, domination systems, identity-based belief, and religious trauma - factors that make modern Christian collapse more volatile and painful.
Meaning may persist without metaphysical closure.
Unbelief and skepticism may become optional rather than forbidden.
Epistemic humility may be seen as a strength, not a loss.
Essay VI - Faith Without Dominance
Process Theology Beyond Control, Certainty, and Fear
→ Introduces a constructive but restrained process-theological framework in which faith is reimagined as relational responsiveness rather than metaphysical certainty or as institutional authority.
Where does authority reside?
In religion? In the state?
In morality? In humanity?
Essay VII - Practicing Faith in an Unfinished World
Hope, Trust, Participation, and Becoming
→ Explores faith as lived orientation rather than belief-system: a way of inhabiting an open, evolving reality through trust, participation, and ethical becoming.
Faith is not certainty about what will be,
but participation in what is becoming.
 |
Together, the essays form a metamodern sequence:
from collapse → through critique → toward inhabitable faith. |
Preface: Why Faith Practice is LastThe preceding Essays I-VI, traced the withdrawal of faith from dominance, certainty, and fear. They showed how belief collapsed when bound to power, how skepticism disciplined excess, and how faith might persist once sovereignty is relinquished. Yet one insight remained implicit throughout and now must be stated plainly:
Faith does not finally fail - or survive - at the level of belief.
It fails or survives at the level of practice.
In the ancient world, faith in the gods did not collapse because rituals ceased. It collapsed because ritual continued after moral, relational, and ethical credibility had eroded. Practice became repetition without ethical responsiveness. Belief persisted as inheritance rather than moral orientation. Faith hollowed itself out by continuing to act as though nothing had changed.
The same pattern recurs in contemporary religion:
Faith fractures not when belief is questioned, but when practice no longer corresponds to lived reality - when it cannot remain present amid suffering, pluralism, or moral growth. Faith breaks when it ceases to perform in integral responsiveness to the present.
Importantly, faith-practice is what remains when faith-belief collapses.
When faith relinquishes metaphysical guarantees and institutional dominance, it survives only as enacted orientation - as a way of inhabiting the world rather than explaining it. More simply, it is love which perpetuates faith from beginning to end.
In this sense, practice both ends and begins faith.
It is the point of failure when detached from ethical relation,
and the point of renewal when it becomes the site of attentiveness, care, and participation.
This essay therefore returns faith to where it both begans and must end. Not as doctrine defended, nor as authority asserted, but as life lived within an unfinished world. Practice becomes the grammar of faith once belief can no longer claim certainty, and power can no longer secure allegiance.
What follows does not offer instruction or prescription. It articulates the conditions under which faith may still be practiced honestly - without illusion, without dominance, and without retreat from becoming.
Faith does not endure by being proven.
It endures by being practiced.
Introduction: Faith After ArrivalFaith is not certainty about what will be,
but participation in what is becoming.
Faith in an unfinished world cannot function as arrival. It cannot promise resolution, stability, or final coherence. The expectation that faith should deliver such outcomes belongs to an earlier metaphysic - one in which history moved toward closure, truth could be possessed, and authority secured obedience.
That world no longer exists.
What remains is a reality experienced as open, relational, and exposed to loss. In such a world, faith does not orient itself toward final answers, but toward faithful presence. It does not seek to escape contingency, but to inhabit it responsibly.
This shift alters the meaning of belief itself. Faith is no longer assent to propositions about the world’s ultimate structure. It becomes a mode of participation within the world’s ongoing formation. One does not believe about reality so much as one commits within it.
In this sense, practice is not a secondary expression of belief, but its primary test. Faith collapses when practice becomes unresponsive, unsympathetic, loveless repetition. Faith continues only when practice becomes attentive to caring, healing, loving participation with those around us. What was once assumed to follow belief now precedes it.
Practicing faith in an unfinished world therefore requires a different set of capacities - or forms - than earlier religious doctrines emphasized. Instead of certainty, it requires hope without guarantee. Instead of obedience, trust without fear. Instead of control, participation without dominance.
These capacities are not virtues added onto belief. They are belief when belief has been stripped of its oppressive authoritarian power.
The sections that follow explore four dimensions of this practice:
-
Hope without closure
-
Trust as presence
-
Participation as vocation
-
Becoming as fidelity
Together, they describe faith not as something one defends or proves,
but as something one learns to live.
I. Hope Without Closure
Hope is not confidence in an ending,
but commitment to remain through the unfinished
and ever evolving.
Hope in an unfinished world must relinquish its attachment to closure.
In earlier religious frameworks, hope was oriented toward resolution - salvation secured, justice completed, history fulfilled. Hope promised arrival. It reassured the faithful that what was broken would be repaired, what was unjust would be corrected, and what was unresolved would finally make sense.
Such hope offered endurance, but at a cost. When hope depends upon guaranteed outcomes, it collapses whenever history refuses to cooperate. The world does not resolve. Suffering persists. Justice remains partial. Faith, bound to closure, fractures under the weight of reality.
Hope without closure does not deny longing for repair. It releases hope from the demand that fulfillment must arrive in final form. Hope becomes the willingness to remain engaged without assurance that one’s efforts will succeed or one’s commitments will be vindicated.
Within a process framework, hope is not belief in a predetermined end. It is confidence that salvific novelty remains possible. The future is not scripted, but neither is it inert. Possibility continues to emerge, shaped by relation, response, and care.
This reframes hope as practice rather than prediction. Hope is enacted through choices that favor life, justice, and relational-connectedness even when such choices offer no guarantee of success. One hopes not because the outcome is secured, but because disengagement would betray one’s participation in becoming.
Hope without closure also alters how faith relates to disappointment. Disappointment no longer signals failure, or loss, of belief. It becomes part of faith’s terrain. The faithful learn to expect unfinishedness, to accept partial outcomes, and to persist without demanding resolution as proof of meaning.
This form of hope resists despair without indulging illusion. It does not promise that the world will be healed. It commits to remaining present within the work of healing where possible and to bearing witness where it is not.
Hope without closure is not optimism. It is fidelity under conditions of uncertainty.
Such hope does not move history forward by force. It sustains participation long enough for something new to emerge.
And in an unfinished world, that endurance is itself an act of faith.
II. Trust as Presence
Trust does not secure the future.
It stays with the present when nothing is assured.
Trust in an unfinished world cannot be grounded in certainty or protection. It cannot depend upon guarantees of outcome, moral reward, or divine intervention. Trust emerges precisely where such assurances are absent.
In earlier religious forms, trust was often conflated with confidence - confidence that God would act, that justice would prevail, that suffering would be redeemed. When these expectations failed, trust collapsed alongside them. Faith, tied to prediction, proved fragile.
Trust as presence redefines the act entirely. Trust is not belief that the future will unfold favorably. It is the willingness to remain engaged when the future remains opaque. It does not lean forward toward resolution. It stays with what is.
Within a process framework, trust is not confidence in divine control, but confidence in relational responsiveness.
God is not the one who secures outcomes, but the one who remains available within every moment as a lure toward care, coherence, and ethical response. Trust, accordingly, is practiced as attentiveness rather than expectation.
This shift alters how faith inhabits suffering. Trust does not ask why suffering occurs or how it will be resolved. It asks whether one will remain present within it - to one’s own pain, to the pain of others, and to the fragile possibilities that still arise there.
Trust as presence also reshapes prayer. Prayer is no longer petition aimed at changing outcomes from afar (transcendent supernaturalism). It becomes a discipline of relational abiding and helping presence - a way of aligning oneself with what the moment requires (processual panentheism/immanence as dynamic potentiality within God's creation itself). Prayer trains perception before it seeks result.
Such trust resists both despair and denial. It does not flee from devastation in search of explanation, nor does it pretend devastation is meaningful by itself. It remains with what is broken without insisting that it be justified.
Trust practiced in this way does not guarantee endurance. It does not protect faith from exhaustion or withdrawal. But it allows faith to remain honest. It refuses to abandon relational novelty simply because certainty has disappeared.
In this sense, trust is not a supplement to faith. It is faith, practiced under conditions of vulnerability.
To trust as presence is to accept that meaning may emerge without closure, that care may matter without resolution, and that faithfulness may endure without rescue.
Such trust does not secure the future.
It keeps faith alive in the present.
III. Participation as Vocation
Meaning is not discovered from above.
It is generated
through participation.
In an unfinished world, faith cannot remain observational. It must become participatory.
Earlier religious frameworks often located meaning outside the world - in divine decree, sacred order, or transcendent plan. Human beings were asked to discern, obey, or await that meaning, but rarely to co-generate it. Participation was secondary to submission.
Once certainty and dominance are relinquished, that posture no longer holds. Meaning does not arrive fully formed. It emerges through response, relation, and action. Faith, accordingly, becomes a vocation of participation rather than assent.
Participation as vocation reframes what it means to live faithfully. One is no longer faithful by believing correctly or waiting patiently for resolution. One is faithful by showing up - to the demands of the moment, to the needs of others, and to the fragile possibilities that arise within concrete situations.
Within a process framework, participation is not optional. Reality itself is participatory. Every moment is shaped by inherited conditions and present response. The future is not given. It is made, incrementally, through countless acts of attention, care, refusal, and commitment.
Faith practiced as participation accepts this responsibility without claiming control. It does not presume to know how history should unfold. It does not mistake action for mastery. It acts because loving participation is the only way meaning takes form.
This transforms vocation from faith-calling imposed to faith-calling discerned. One does not ask what God demands in abstraction. One asks what the moment invites - what response would increase care, justice, or relational depth here and now. Vocation becomes situational, relational, and revisable.
Participation as vocation also reshapes failure. Because outcomes are not guaranteed, faith no longer measures success by results alone. Acts of participation may fall short, be resisted, or be undone. Their value lies not in securing outcomes, but in sustaining responsiveness.
This form of participation resists both passivity and domination. It refuses withdrawal under the guise of humility, and it rejects control disguised as righteousness. It acts without claiming final authority.
Participation also binds faith to community. Meaning does not emerge in isolation. It is generated through shared practices, mutual accountability, and collective response. Faith becomes something enacted together, even among difference and disagreement.
In this sense, vocation is not a private calling but a shared labor. Faith does not elevate one above the world. It places one within it, accountable to its needs and open to its transformation.
To practice faith as participation is to accept that meaning will never be complete, that responsibility will never be finished, and that faithfulness will always be provisional.
Such participation does not complete the world.
It helps carry it forward.
IV. Becoming as Fidelity
Faithfulness is not holding fast to what was,
but remaining responsive
to what is becoming.
Faith in an unfinished world cannot be defined by preservation alone. To hold fast without responsiveness is not fidelity but fixation. What once sustained faith can, over time, obstruct it.
I. Faith is Always Unfolding, Emerging
Becoming as fidelity reframes faithfulness as attentiveness to emergence rather than loyalty to form. Fidelity is no longer measured by adherence to inherited structures, doctrines, or identities, but by the capacity to remain responsive as reality unfolds.
In earlier religious paradigms, fidelity often meant guarding doctrinally, culturally, or religiously, what had been received. Tradition functioned as boundary and anchor. Such preservation once served as a false coherence to the sacred divine. Yet when the world itself changes - ethically, socially, relationally - a religiously or culturally constructed fidelity that resists-becoming fractures under its own rigidity.
Within a process framework, becoming is not deviation from faith but responsive to the conditions at hand. Reality is never static. Each moment carries forward what has been inherited while opening toward what has not yet been realized. Faithfulness, accordingly, is the discipline of responding to this movement without attempting to arrest it.
This does not mean abandoning tradition or memory. It means allowing tradition to be questioned, revised, and deepened through encounter with new realities. Fidelity honors the past not by freezing it, but by permitting one's faith to participate in the moment's present becoming.
II. Faith is Adaptable. Vulnerable. Responsive
Becoming as fidelity also alters how faith relates to failure and change. Change is no longer interpreted as loss of faithfulness. It becomes one of its signs. Faith that can revise itself without collapse demonstrates greater integrity than faith that survives only through denial.
This posture demands humility. One cannot claim final authority over meaning or direction. Fidelity becomes provisional, enacted moment by moment, responsive to context and consequence. One remains open to correction, learning, and transformation.
Such faith is (willingly) vulnerable. It cannot promise continuity of form, institutional survival, or cultural relevance. It may appear unstable from the outside. Yet its stability lies elsewhere - in its capacity to remain ethically alive within shifting conditions.
III. Faith is Co-Generated Together
Becoming as fidelity also creates space for coexistence. If faithfulness is responsiveness rather than preservation, then difference no longer threatens identity. Other faiths, non-faiths, and forms of meaning-making are not obstacles to overcome, but contexts within which faith learns to remain faithful differently by listening so that it may be more properly responsive.
In this sense, fidelity is no longer loyalty to certainty, but loyalty to relation. It is not fidelity to answers, but to attentiveness. It is not faithfulness to a finished world, but to a world still coming into being.
Faith practiced in this way does not arrive.
It accompanies.
It does not conclude.
It continues.
And in continuing, it remains faithful -
not to what was - but to what is still becoming.
Conclusion: Faith after Arrival
Faith does not end when certainty collapses. It begins again when certainty is no longer required.
Across this essay, faith has been reimagined not as belief secured by authority, doctrine, or outcome, but as a lived orientation within an unfinished world. Hope without closure, trust as presence, participation as vocation, and becoming as fidelity together describe a form of faith that does not seek to dominate reality, escape it, or resolve it prematurely.
What emerges is not a diminished faith, but a stripped one of its unrealities. Faith relieved of the burden of explanation. Faith released from the demand to justify suffering. Faith no longer tasked with defending metaphysical guarantees or institutional permanence.
Such faith is quieter. It does not announce itself through certainty or control. It is visible only in practice - in how one remains present, responsive, and ethically awake amid uncertainty.
This form of faith does not compete with skepticism or attempt to overcome unbelief. It accepts skepticism as a companion rather than an adversary. It recognizes that doubt can refine faith by removing illusions of power and false assurances of protection.
Nor does this faith retreat into privatization. It remains public in its consequences, communal in its commitments, and accountable to the lives it touches. It does not claim authority over others, but it does not evade responsibility for how it acts among them.
In this sense, faith after certainty is not a solution to modern despair and disillusionment. It is a way of inhabiting it without collapse.
The world remains unfinished. History remains unresolved. Suffering persists without explanation. Yet within this incompleteness, faith continues - not as sole possession, but as practice.
Faith does not arrive.
It accompanies.
And in accompanying,
it discovers that meaning
does not require completion
in order to faithfully matter.
What Remains of Faith
It is not the creed
that must survive intact -
nor the certainty or control
that can never be challenged,
never bent, never doubted.
But the hands that stay open
when answers do not come -
that remain responsive,
involved, present,
to the need.
Faith did not end
when the gods grew silent -
it ended when the gods
were indifferent, uncaring,
for their actions.
Faith began again
when it learned to listen -
elsewhere,
in the breath of others,
unloved or unloving.
To be present
in times of hardship -
in the fragile weight
of choosing to love,
without assurance.
What remains of faith
are those who abide -
serving, sharing, with
the shunned, the unwanted,
the doubters, and differents.
An unchanging faith
is a dying faith -
never learning,
fearing and fearful,
wanting control.
A present faith
is willing to love -
to listen,
to abide,
in all seasons.
R.E. Slater
January 18, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Essay VII - Faith After Certainty:
A Process Theology for a Metamodern Age
I. Primary Theological and Philosophical Sources (Constructive Foundations)
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. New York - Free Press, 1978.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York - Fordham University Press, 1996.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York - Free Press, 1967.
James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover Publications, 1956.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York - Touchstone, 1997.
II. Process Theology and Constructive Theology
Cobb, John B., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.
Cobb, John B. A Christian Natural Theology. Louisville: Westminster Press, 1965.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. New York: Crossroad, 1982.
Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.
Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
III. Contemporary Philosophy, Faith, and Metamodern Context
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Zagorin, Perez. Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth After Postmodernism. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.
IV. Ethics, Practice, and Lived Faith
Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Bellah, Robert N. et al. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
