Faith After Certainty: A Process Theology for a Metamodern Age (5)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

FAITH AFTER CERTAINTY

Process Theology for a Metamodern Age

Essay V

Why Christianity Collapsed Differently

Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity

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.

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Preface: Why This Collapse Is Not Ancient, but Our Own

The collapse of religious authority in contemporary Christianity is often narrated as a singular modern event - the inevitable result of scientific progress, secularization, or cultural decline. Such accounts are historically thin and analytically insufficient. As the preceding essays have shown, the fundamental dynamics now destabilizing Christian belief were already operative in antiquity. Ethical disillusionment, explanatory sufficiency, and epistemic humility did not originate with modernity; they were articulated with remarkable clarity in ancient Greece.

Yet Christianity’s present crisis differs in both structure and consequence.

Where Greek unbelief unfolded gradually and non-traumatically, Christianity’s loss of authority has proven volatile, defensive, and deeply injurious to both believers and non-believers alike. The reason is not theological error alone, but historical entanglement. Christianity did not merely function as a religious imagination; it became an apparatus of empire, identity, and moral governance. Belief was fused to power, certainty to salvation, and dissent to threat.

This essay therefore marks a transition in the series. We no longer ask how belief erodes in general. We ask why this faith tradition, here, now, in Christian America, has collapsed the way it did - and why its aftermath feels uniquely painful, polarizing, and destabilizing in contemporary American life.

The task here is diagnostic rather than polemical. This essay does not aim to indict Christianity wholesale, nor to defend it reflexively. Instead, it examines the historical conditions under which Christian faith became structurally incapable of accommodating the same ethical growth and epistemic humility that Greek religion eventually absorbed.

Process theology enters not as a solution imposed from outside, but as a conceptual lens capable of explaining why this collapse occurred - and what might still remain viable beyond it.

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Introduction: Collapse Under Power, Not Doubt

Faith fails when it claims more certainty, power, or authority than reality itself allows.

Faith endures when it learns how to belong to becoming rather than rule over it.

Christianity did not collapse because it was disproven.

It collapsed because it became unlivable.

Contemporary skepticism toward Christianity - especially within and around evangelical traditions - is frequently misdiagnosed as disbelief driven by intellectual rebellion or moral laxity. In reality, it bears striking resemblance to ancient Greek skepticism: a withdrawal of ethical trust, a recognition of explanatory independence, and a refusal to grant certainty where none is warranted.

The difference lies not in the skepticism itself, but in what Christianity had become by the time skepticism arrived.

By the fourth century CE, Christianity had undergone a decisive transformation. What began as a marginal, persecuted movement oriented around communal care and moral witness became, under imperial patronage, a system of authority. God was increasingly imagined as sovereign ruler, lawgiver, and judge. Belief became a marker of loyalty. Doubt became deviance. Faith fused with identity, and identity fused with power. It is a characteristic which has marked history again and again and again for the past 1500+ years.

Under these conditions, disbelief could no longer remain gentle.

Greek religion could be outgrown.

Christian faith, bound to empire and identity, had to be escaped.

This essay traces that difference. It examines how Christianity’s entanglement with domination (empire) systems altered the experience of skepticism itself - transforming what might have been ethical maturation into trauma, what might have been humility into fear, and what might have been revision into collapse.

Process theology does not deny this history. It helps explain it.

By reframing divinity as relational rather than coercive, and faith as participatory rather than propositional, process thought offers a way to understand why Christianity’s collapse has been uniquely destabilizing - and why any future faith, Christian, non-Christian, or otherwise, must disentangle itself from power if it is to remain credible in any age, including our current metamodern age.

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I. Greek Disenchantment and Christian Collapse Compared
Why Skepticism Felt Gentle Then and Traumatic Now

“The gods were not abandoned because they were false,
but because they no longer bore the weight of trust.”

The skepticism confronting contemporary Christianity is not historically novel. What is novel is its psychological intensity, social volatility, and moral fallout. To understand this difference, one must move beyond questions of belief and disbelief and examine the structures within which belief was embedded.

Greek religion and Christianity did not fail under the same conditions. Consequently, they did not collapse in the same way. Time, culture, era separates these events by some 2500+ years.

Disenchantment Without Domination

Greek religion was never a centralized system of doctrinal enforcement:

• It lacked a unified creed,
• an institutional hierarchy governing belief, and
• a salvific narrative binding metaphysical assent to eternal destiny.

Participation in Greek religion was civic and ritual rather than confessional. Belief was assumed, but rarely policed.

As a result, when ethical trust eroded and explanatory sufficiency emerged, disbelief could take the form of withdrawal rather than rebellion. Skepticism did not threaten social belonging. Doubt did not sever identity. One could question the gods without questioning one’s place in the world.

Greek unbelief was therefore non-traumatic. It unfolded gradually, unevenly, and without existential panic. The gods faded from necessity, but the social fabric remained intact.

Christianity as a System of Meaning, Power, and Identity

Christianity developed under radically different historical pressures.

From the fourth century onward, Christianity became entwined with imperial governance, moral regulation, and collective identity. Belief was no longer merely an inherited worldview; it became a condition of belonging. Doctrine carried legal, social, and salvific weight. God was no longer simply revered; God governed - and he did this through human rulers and institutions.

This transformation altered the nature of faith itself. Christianity increasingly functioned not only as a spiritual orientation, but as a total meaning-system - explaining the cosmos, regulating morality, securing salvation, and legitimizing authority.

Under these conditions, doubt could no longer remain gentle.

To question Christian belief was not merely to revise metaphysics. It was to risk:

• moral condemnation,
• social exclusion,
• existential terror,
• and the loss of ultimate meaning.

Skepticism became dangerous because belief had become structural and institutional.

Why Modern Skepticism Feels Like Escape

Contemporary skepticism - especially within evangelical Christianity - often appears angry, urgent, or absolutist. This is frequently misinterpreted as hostility toward faith itself. In reality, it reflects the conditions under which belief was imposed.

• When belief is fused with identity, doubt feels like betrayal.
• When salvation is tied to certainty, uncertainty feels lethal.
• When God is imagined as sovereign controller, disbelief feels like chaos.

Unlike Greek religion, Christianity trained adherents to depend on belief not merely for meaning, but for safety. When that belief collapses, the result is not quiet withdrawal, but rupture (cf. social theory).

This explains why modern deconversion narratives are frequently marked by grief, rage, and relief simultaneously. The exit is not simply intellectual; it is existential across many levels.

Process-Theological Observation
Skepticism as Structural Response

From a process-theological perspective, this difference is not accidental.

Process thought understands belief systems as embedded within relational, historical, and institutional processes. Faith collapses not only when ideas fail, but when structures exceed the capacity of persons to inhabit them ethically and psychologically.

Greek religion allowed ethical growth because it was not bound to domination. Christianity resisted ethical revision because it was bound to authority. The result was not greater faithfulness, but fragility.

In process terms, skepticism functions here not as negation, but as adaptive response. It is an attempt by individuals and communities to restore relational integrity when inherited frameworks have become coercive, rigid, or morally misaligned.

Seen this way, contemporary skepticism is not an enemy of faith. It is a signal that faith has been asked to carry more certainty, power, and finality than reality itself can sustain. At this point, faith has become a human construction rather than a processual flow with the Divine.

This insight will guide the remainder of the essay.

The next section examines the decisive historical catalyst that transformed Christianity from a vulnerable movement into a system of control - and in doing so, altered the experience of doubt itself.

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II. Empire and the Mutation of God

When Faith Learned to Rule

“When divinity is modeled on empire,
authority replaces persuasion,
and certainty replaces relationship.”

Christianity did not merely survive imperial power. It was reshaped by it.

The decisive difference between Greek religion and Christianity lies not in belief itself, but in the moment when Christianity became politically consequential. With imperial adoption in the fourth century CE, Christianity underwent a transformation that altered not only its institutional form, but its conception of God, truth, and authority.

Skepticism encountered this transformed faith very differently than it had encountered Greek religion.

From Marginal Movement to Imperial Logic

Prior to Constantine, Christianity functioned as a minority movement marked by ethical seriousness, communal care, and eschatological hope. Authority was largely relational. Belief was persuasive rather than enforced. Moral credibility rested on witness rather than power.

Imperial patronage reversed this orientation.

Once Christianity became aligned with the Roman state, it absorbed the logic of empire - hierarchy, control, law, and enforcement. Theology followed structure. God was increasingly imagined not merely as creator or redeemer, but as sovereign ruler, cosmic judge, and final arbiter of truth.

This shift was not merely rhetorical. It altered how faith functioned psychologically and socially.

• Truth became singular and exclusive.
• Dissent became error.
• Error became threat.

Where Greek religion tolerated plurality and revision, imperial Christianity demanded orthodoxy.

Theological Centralization and Moral Inflexibility

As doctrine crystallized, belief ceased to be a living orientation and became a boundary marker. Councils defined truth. Creeds fixed meaning. Theological certainty was treated as a moral virtue.

This had lasting consequences.

Once God was imagined as omnipotent sovereign exercising unilateral control, ethical questioning became dangerous. To critique divine action was to challenge authority itself. Moral protest, so central to Greek tragedy, was increasingly reframed as rebellion rather than fidelity.

Faith ceased to be responsive. It became defensive.

Evangelical Christianity as Heir to Empire

Contemporary evangelical Christianity inherits this imperial logic even where it denies historical continuity.

Despite cultural marginalization, evangelicalism often retains:

• authoritarian conceptions of God,
• absolutist claims to truth,
• identity-bound belief,
• and fear-based moral enforcement.

The persistence of these structures explains why skepticism today feels existentially threatening. Doubt does not merely revise belief; it destabilizes an entire architecture of meaning.

This is why appeals to humility, dialogue, or gradual revision often fail within such systems. The structure itself resists adaptation.

Process-Theological Observation
Power Freezes Becoming

From a process-theological perspective, empire performs a specific metaphysical distortion.

Process thought insists that reality unfolds through relational becoming rather than unilateral control. When divinity is modeled on empire, God becomes static, final, and unresponsive. Ethical development is arrested. Relationship is subordinated to command.

Power freezes becoming.

Once this happens, faith loses its capacity to grow. It must either dominate or collapse. Adaptation appears as betrayal. Revision feels like dissolution.

Greek religion never faced this dilemma because it never fused divinity with total authority. Christianity did - and therefore experiences skepticism not as maturation, but as threat.

Process theology does not deny Christianity’s history. It explains its fragility.

A faith that learned to rule could not easily learn to listen.

The next section examines the human cost of this distortion - how fear, trauma, and defensive belief became stabilizing mechanisms, and why their failure produces such profound disorientation today.

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III. Trauma, Fear, and Defensive Faith

When Belief Becomes a Survival Mechanism

“Fear does not protect faith.

It reveals where faith has already failed.”

When Christianity absorbed imperial authority, belief did not merely gain power - it acquired risk. Over time, this risk reshaped the psychology of faith itself.

In systems where belief is bound to salvation, morality, identity, and social belonging, doubt ceases to be an intellectual posture. It becomes an existential threat.

Fear as a Stabilizing Technology

Christian theology gradually developed mechanisms to stabilize belief under conditions of uncertainty. These mechanisms were not accidental. They functioned as technologies of survival within a framework that could not tolerate epistemic openness.

Among the most consequential were:

• eternal punishment as deterrence,
• doctrinal certainty as moral proof,
• binary moral classification,
• and identity-based belonging.

All of which American Christianity is guilty of today even as it has been over the millennia.

Within such systems, fear performs a structural role. It secures loyalty when trust erodes. It enforces cohesion when relational credibility weakens.

This dynamic is especially visible in evangelical Christianity, where salvation is often framed as precarious, belief as decisive, and doubt as spiritually dangerous. Under these conditions, faith becomes less a response to reality than a defense against loss.

Religious Trauma as Structural Outcome

What is often described today as religious trauma is not merely the result of individual abuse or isolated authoritarian leadership. It is a systemic consequence of belief structures that equate uncertainty with danger.

When questioning threatens eternal destiny, the psyche adapts accordingly:

• curiosity narrows,
• moral imagination contracts,
• fear displaces trust, and
• enforcement becomes absolute.

Leaving such systems rarely feels like intellectual liberation alone. It often involves grief, anger, guilt, and a profound sense of disorientation. The collapse of belief carries emotional weight because belief was asked to carry too much.

Greek unbelief did not produce this trauma because Greek religion did not demand existential submission.

Christianity did.

Why Defensive Faith Cannot Adapt

Defensive faith is inherently brittle.

Because it relies on fear to maintain coherence, it cannot revise itself without destabilization. Ethical critique feels like attack. Historical awareness feels corrosive. Skepticism feels fatal.

As a result, defensive faith often intensifies its claims precisely when they are least credible. Certainty hardens. Boundaries tighten. Complexity is rejected.

This escalation is not evidence of conviction, but conditions of fragility.

Process-Theological Observation
Fear Signals Relational Failure

From a process-theological perspective, fear is not a moral flaw but a diagnostic signal.

• When relational systems lose credibility, they compensate with control.
• When trust collapses, coercion emerges.
• Fear functions as a substitute for relational depth.

Process thought rejects the idea that faith must be protected from uncertainty. If reality itself is open, evolving, and relational, then faith grounded in fear is already misaligned with the nature of things, the nature of reality, the nature of the Divine.

A divinity that requires terror to sustain allegiance is not persuasive presence but imposed authority.

• Greek religion faded because it lost necessity.
• Christianity fractures because it lost trust.

This distinction matters.

It suggests that the path forward does not lie in restoring certainty or authority, but in relinquishing them. Faith must be disentangled from fear if it is to remain livable in a world that no longer confuses control with meaning.

The final section of this essay examines why, under these conditions, personal and social exit from Christianity often involves profound loss - and why belief became impossible to revise without rupture.

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IV. Why Exit Became Impossible Without Loss

Belief as Identity, Doubt as Betrayal

“When belief becomes identity,

leaving does not feel like revision,

but like erasure.”

When belief becomes inseparable from identity, leaving does not feel like revision. It feels like self-erasure.

This is the final and most consequential difference between Greek unbelief and contemporary Christian skepticism. Greek religion permitted disengagement without demanding existential severance. Christianity, especially in its evangelical forms, frequently does not.

Belief as Total Orientation

Over centuries, Christianity increasingly fused belief with:

• moral worth,
• communal belonging,
• eternal destiny,
• and personal identity.

Faith ceased to function as a posture toward reality and became a comprehensive self-description. To believe was not merely to assent to claims, but to know who one was, where one belonged, and what one could hope for.

Within such systems, doubt is not neutral. It is interpreted as:

• moral failure,
• spiritual danger,
• betrayal of community,
• or capitulation to evil.

This is why modern de-conversion narratives are so often marked by grief and rage rather than calm detachment. One does not simply leave a worldview. One loses a world that was participated within.

Exit as Social and Moral Dislocation

For many contemporary Christians, especially those raised in evangelical subcultures, exiting faith involves cascading losses:

• rupture with family or community,
• loss of moral vocabulary,
• collapse of existential meaning,
• and fear of irreversible error.

These losses are not incidental. They are structural.

Christianity’s historical insistence on exclusive truth and salvific finality ensured that belief could not be revised incrementally. One was either inside or outside. Faith was binary. Exit was total.

Greek religion never produced such dislocation because it never demanded such totality.

Process-Theological Observation
Identity Must Remain Revisable

From a process-theological perspective, identity is not static possession but ongoing formation. Any faith that freezes identity at the level of belief violates the nature of becoming.

Process thought affirms that persons grow through relational responsiveness, not doctrinal completion. When belief systems demand finality, they force identity into rigidity. Growth becomes betrayal. Revision becomes loss....

*As a personal story, in my collegiate years I felt I had to study the bible more intensely and minister more completely in my life. I left the college I was attending, joined a small bible school, and picked up many ministries through my church. Decades later, having gone the route of orthodox evangelicalism, I felt relationality with the Divine had become too defined, safe, too codified, too protected. Eventually both my mind and heart disengaged and I am presently arguing for a new kind of engagement with God, people, and the world.

The truth of these statements which I have been making through these many essays comes from my own personal experiences. It has broken from my past, but I hope, in a good way, having taken to heart the main Christian teaching to place Jesus, or the Love (of God), at the center of one's life. In this case, in the center of my new processual faith. So that to recover faith is to reteach a processual spirituality which holds love and the value-of-all-things at its center.

Realizedly, many faith walkers cannot be so dramatic as I have become in my life. But in the small ways we can - and must - change from defensive, creedal enforcement to a more open liberality of mind and heart. (Divine) reality and religious spirituality isn't what I had supposed in my youth. I now see it as Processual. Relational. Value-based. So whether by faith, or by unbelief, those seekers of purpose, meaning - perhaps even a Sacred reality - may emphasize qualities closer to the processual Divine than merely loveless religion, or valueless skepticism, for personal belief and expression. - re slater

... Thus and thus, the trauma of a faith-exit signals - not personal failure - but structural misalignment between faith and the processual nature of human becoming.

Faith fails when it cannot remain credible in the presence of devastation:

Faith does not fail because the world is broken.

It fails when it refuses to remain

with what is broken and still becoming.

This means that faith is not tested or defeated by suffering, loss, or disorder, but by its response to these elements. A telic faith that requires resolution, certainty, or unreal restoration in a broken present will eventually collapse when the world proves irreparable or unfinished. By contrast, a mature faith is one that can stay relationally, ethically, and attentively engaged amid devastation, without retreating into denial, domination, or false consolation. In process terms, faith endures not by fixing what is broken, but by participating responsibly in a world that is still becoming.

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Conclusion: When Collapse Becomes Inevitable

The movement traced in this essay does not culminate in denial, but in displacement.

Christianity did not collapse because it was disproven. It fractured because it became structurally incapable of accommodating ethical growth, epistemic humility, and relational trust without fear. Where belief once functioned as orientation, it hardened into enforcement. Where faith once shaped communal meaning, it became bound to power.

Unlike the religious world of ancient Greece, Christian belief could not simply be outgrown. Greek skepticism emerged within a pluralistic religious ecology where disbelief could mature gradually into cultural equilibrium. Christianity developed differently. It bound faith to imperial authority, fused theology with political sovereignty, and internalized belief as salvific identity. To doubt was no longer merely to question the gods, but to risk exclusion (shunning, excommunication), condemnation (membership removal and community withdrawal), or eternal loss (divine disfavor and/or hell).

As a result, skepticism within Christianity could not remain gentle. It became traumatic. Once belief is tied to coercion, identity, and ultimate destiny, uncertainty threatens the self itself.

The pressure to maintain certainty produces absolutism. The inability to tolerate pluralism generates polarization. Faith becomes brittle, defensive, and increasingly incapable of responding ethically to those outside its boundaries.

This failure has had real consequences. Christianity in contemporary America does not experience itself as dead. It experiences itself as embattled. Yet in that posture, it often inflicts harm - particularly upon non-Christians, racial minorities, women, LGBTQ persons, and those who refuse its moral or political alignments. The issue is not belief per se, but belief that cannot relinquish dominance.

The result is the present moment: a culture saturated with Christian memory yet increasingly unable to inhabit inherited faith without damage. Religious language persists, institutions remain powerful, and theological claims continue to circulate. What has eroded is trust - ethical trust, relational trust, and trust in faith’s capacity to coexist without control.

This transformation unfolded unevenly across many, many centuries, beginning all the way back to the 4th century CE under Constantine's acceptance of the Christian faith as his empire's imperial center... but its contours are now unmistakable. Where Essay I documented the ethical withdrawal of trust, and Essay II traced the explanatory and epistemic withdrawal of necessity, Essay V shows why Christianity’s crisis is experienced not as maturation, but as rupture. It is not the quiet fading of gods, but the breaking of a system that could not evolve beyond its own power centers and teachings.

What follows must therefore be approached with care. The task ahead is not to pronounce faith obsolete, nor to restore it by force, but to ask whether belief can be disentangled from domination, certainty, and fear. Only then might faith become something other than a threat to those it claims to serve.

The gods of antiquity faded.

The God of empire is fracturing.

Where now does Christian turn -

back to power,

or back to love?

What disappears in this process is not meaning, but necessity. Belief is no longer required to explain the world, ground morality, or secure belonging. Faith persists only where it can justify itself relationally rather than coercively.

This marks a decisive threshold.

Christianity now faces the same question once faced by Greek religion - but under far more demanding conditions:

Can faith remain credible without domination, certainty, or fear?

Process-Theological Coda
After Collapse, What Remains Possible

From a process-theological perspective, the collapse of coercive Christianity is not a loss of the sacred, but a secular-divine clearing of conceptual ground.

Greek disenchantment eliminated interventionist divinity and exposed the limits of certainty. Christianity’s collapse exposes the limits of domination, fear, and identity-bound belief. Both perform necessary work.

Process thought affirms the coherence of a world that does not require supernatural interruption:

How? Through divine immanence rather than external control. In a panentheistic frame, the divine does not act by suspending natural processes but by inhabiting them immanently - luring, persuading, and intensifying relational possibilities from within an evolving reality.

It affirms skepticism as epistemic discipline rather than moral failure:

Why? Because unchecked certainty deforms faith into domination. When skepticism is suppressed, Christianity becomes most vulnerable to the very temptations it narrates in its own myths: power over matter, certainty through spectacle, and allegiance enforced through empire.

Skepticism, rightly held, protects faith from collapsing into coercion while allowing for openness, doubt, and uncertainty, so that it's faith might adapt and grow (this site here is an example of adaptation and growth of the Christian faith rather than shunning it altogether).

It affirms ethical growth as prior to metaphysical allegiance:

Why? Because moral responsiveness is the first test of credibility. Any conception of God that cannot grow ethically with human awareness forfeits trust before it places itself in the position to be ever doubted metaphysically. Any spiritualized allegiance which takes precedence over morality and ethics produces obedience without conscience. Conversely, ethics that precede allegiance allow faith to remain relational, corrigible, and worthy of commitment.

What Greek thought lacked was a metaphysics capable of articulating value, meaning, and relational depth as intrinsic to process itself. Christianity possesses such resources (e.g., via its value-based ethics: i) the best of the OT and, ii) in Jesus and the early church) but has buried them beneath power.

Process theology enters at this unresolved intersection.

• It does not restore certainty - but allows doubt and uncertainty
• It does not reassert control - pursues various forms of consensus/togetherness agreement
• It does not reverse disenchantment - it allows the Sacred Divine to be explored

Instead, it reframes divinity as persuasive presence rather than sovereign domination, and faith as participatory trust rather than propositional assent. God is not external ruler but sacred relational depth within becoming itself.

• persuasive presence
• participatory trust
• sacred relational depth

In this light, contemporary skepticism is not the enemy of faith but its condition of possibility. It removes images of divinity that cannot grow, suffer, or respond. (cf. The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power, Part V, Essay 13; and, Messiah: From Anointed Saviour to Suffering Sacred, Part V, Essay 14).

What remains is not atheism as negation, but a sharpened question:

If reality is process all the way down,

can faith become a way of participating in that process

rather than escaping it to create its own unreality?

That question now presses forward.

Essay VI turns from diagnosis to construction - asking how faith might be reimagined beyond control, certainty, and fear, without abandoning depth, meaning, or hope.

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After Dominion

Faith did not fall
because the world grew darker,
but because it grew wider, absorbing more.

Faith walls were then built for safety,
for containment, for protection,
for identity and enforcement.

The Divine voice that once persuaded faith

became command through its institutions,
and forget how to listen, how to explore.

Belief became armor.
Doubt became dangerous.
Love was narrowed to the defensible.

So people left faith's toxic containment fields

not from meaning, but from enforced identity,
to breathe the free airs of exploration again.

What remained was not absence of faith,
but renewed existential grounds of being,

cleared of fear and enforced certainty.

If faith is to return to the Sacred Divine,
it will not arrive crowned by imperialism,

but by being unfinished, unarmed, and open.

To accept uncertainty and doubt,

to refuse ruling power structures,

to build towards what is loving and good.

R.E. Slater
January 16, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Essay V - Faith After Certainty:

A Process Theology for a Metamodern Age

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I. Primary Ancient and Late Antique Sources (in Translation)

Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine. Translated by Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford - Oxford University Press, 1999.

Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London - Penguin Classics, 2003.

Tertullian. Apology. Translated by T. R. Glover. Cambridge - Harvard University Press (Loeb), 1931.

Origen. Against Celsus. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge - Cambridge University Press, 1980.

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II. Core Historical and Theological Scholarship (Graduate Level)

Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 2nd ed. Oxford - Blackwell, 2003.

MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven - Yale University Press, 1997.

Wilken, Robert Louis. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. New Haven - Yale University Press, 2003.

Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York - Vintage, 1996.

Casey, Maurice. Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account. London - T & T Clark, 2010.

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III. Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity (Religion and Society)

Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford - Stanford University Press, 2010.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge - Harvard University Press, 2007.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular. Stanford - Stanford University Press, 2003.

Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston - Beacon Press, 1973.

Griffith, R. Marie. Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. New York - Basic Books, 2017.

Exline, Julie J., et al. Theology and Mental Health. Philadelphia - Templeton Press, 2019.

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IV. Evangelicalism, Deconversion, and Religious Trauma

Barr, James. Fundamentalism. Philadelphia - Westminster Press, 1977.

Winell, Marlene. Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. Oakland - New Harbinger Publications, 1993.

Fisher, Jeffrey. Spiritual Abuse. New York - Oxford University Press, 2018.

Dehlin, John, et al. “Religious Trauma Syndrome.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, vol. 19, no. 4, 2018.

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V. Process Theology and Constructive Alternatives

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York - Fordham University Press, 1996.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. New York - Free Press, 1978.

Cobb, John B. Transforming Christianity and the World. Maryknoll - Orbis Books, 1999.

Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The End of Evil. Albany - SUNY Press, 1988.

Keller, Catherine. Political Theology of the Earth. New York - Columbia University Press, 2018.

Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil. Louisville - Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

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VI. Orientation for Public and General Readers

Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York - Knopf, 2014.

Butler Bass, Diana. Christianity After Religion. New York - HarperOne, 2012.

Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ. New York - Convergent, 2019.

Enns, Peter. The Sin of Certainty. New York - HarperOne, 2016.

Faith After Certainty: A Process Theology for a Metamodern Age (4)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

FAITH AFTER CERTAINTY

Process Theology for a Metamodern Age

Essay IV

What the Greeks Already Knew (and We Forgot)
Ethics, Explanation, and the End of Coercive Belief

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.

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Preface

 Why Begin Here - Again?

Every age imagines its crisis of belief to be unprecedented. Ours is no exception. The decline of religious authority in contemporary America is often attributed to modern science, digital culture, political polarization, or moral relativism. While each of these factors matters, they obscure a more unsettling truth: the core dynamics driving today’s loss of faith were already visible more than two millennia ago.

The ancient Greeks were not modern secularists. They did not possess contemporary science, democratic pluralism, or post-Enlightenment skepticism. Yet they encountered - and articulated with remarkable clarity - many of the same pressures now confronting religious belief:

• moral disillusionment with the gods,
• explanatory sufficiency of nature without need for divine intervention,
• epistemic humility regarding ultimate claims, and
• the gradual realization that religion itself could be understood as a human (socio-economic-politic) construction.

This essay does not rehearse Greek atheism for antiquarian interest. That work has already been completed in the preceding Essays I, II, III. Instead, Essay IV performs a different task: it gathers the processual lessons implicit in those historical developments and brings them forward into the present. That is, what did the ancient Greeks already grasp about belief, authority, and meaning - insights that modern faith communities have too often ignored or forgotten?

The aim here is not to defend atheism, nor to rescue religion. It is to recover an older wisdom about the conditions under which belief remains credible - and the conditions under which faith collapses. This recovery is essential if faith is to be reimagined without coercion, certainty, or domination, in a world that no longer requires faith to function.

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Introduction

Ethics Before Metaphysics

The collapse of religious authority rarely begins with metaphysical doubt.
It begins with moral fracture.

In ancient Greece, belief in the gods did not erode because the gods were disproven, but because they were outgrown. Poets, tragedians, and philosophers subjected divine power to ethical scrutiny and found it wanting. The gods were arbitrary, violent, indifferent to suffering, and often morally inferior to the humans who worshiped them. When ethical trust collapsed, belief followed - not as rebellion, but as refusal.

I. This sequence matters. Ethics precedes metaphysics. Human beings do not abandon gods first because they doubt their existence, but because they no longer trust their character. Disenchantment rises not as denial, but as withdrawal: withdrawal of reverence, reliance, and moral confidence. The gods were refused before they were rejected morally.

II. As Greek thought matured, this ethical refusal was joined by a second pressure: naturalistic explanation. The world increasingly made sense without divine interruption. Nature displayed coherence. Knowledge advanced through observation, reason, and method. The appeal to divine causation became unnecessary, then implausible. Once explanation no longer required intervention, the gods lost their functional role in understanding reality.

III. A third pressure followed: epistemic humility. Greek skepticism did not destroy belief by argument alone; it disciplined belief by exposing the limits of certainty. When knowledge itself was recognized as provisional, belief could no longer claim absolute authority. Faith became optional rather than forbidden. Meaning persisted, but metaphysical closure dissolved.

By the Hellenistic period, Greek culture had reached a stable equilibrium. The gods remained as symbols and traditions, but no longer as governing realities. This was not nihilism. Ethics endured. Art flourished. Life continued. The absence of divine authority proved survivable - and even ordinary.

What the Greeks lacked was not honesty or courage, but a metaphysical grammar capable of articulating value, meaning, and relational depth as intrinsic to an unfinished reality. They cleared the ground but did not yet know how to inhabit what remained.

This essay revisits that clearing.

In doing so, it challenges a common assumption in contemporary religious discourse: that faith collapses primarily because of science, secularism, or cultural decadence. The Greek experience suggests otherwise.

Faith collapses when:

• it cannot grow ethically, 
• it cannot relinquish control, or
• remain credible in a world that no longer needs it to function.

The question before us is not whether belief can be restored,

but whether it can be reimagined - without certainty,

without coercion, and without retreat into supernaturalism.

Process theology offers one possible grammar for such reimagining, not as a solution imposed from above, but as a way of describing reality as it is encountered: evolving, relational, morally demanding, and unfinished.

Essay IV therefore asks a deceptively simple question, whose implications are anything but:

What did the Greeks already know about belief that we, in our certainty and power, forgot?

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Methodological Interlude

What “Process” Means in This Series

... Before proceeding, a clarification is necessary....

Throughout this series, the word process does not function as a metaphor for change, uncertainty, or cultural flux. It names a specific metaphysical orientation - one with long philosophical roots and serious implications for how reality, value, and divinity are understood.

At its most basic level, process thought begins from the claim that reality is not composed of static substances, but of events, relations, and becoming. Things do not merely exist; they occur. Identity is not fixed essence but ongoing formation. Stability is real, but it is (processually) achieved rather than given.

This view stands in contrast to classical metaphysical frameworks - both religious and secular - that presume:

• fixed substances underlying change,
• completed forms governing becoming,
• or sovereign control standing outside the world.

Process does not deny structure, order, or intelligibility. It denies finality. Reality is coherent but unfinished.

Process Is Not Relativism

Process thought is often misunderstood as a philosophical permission slip for “anything goes.” This is precisely backwards. If reality is relational and becoming, then actions have consequences, relations matter, and ethical responsiveness becomes unavoidable.

In a process framework:

• Truth is not arbitrary, but situated.
• Knowledge is not illusory, but partial.
• Meaning is not invented at will, but emerges through relation.

Epistemic humility here is not weakness; it is fidelity to the nature of reality itself.

Process Is Not Liberal Theology in Disguise

Nor should process theology be confused with a softened version of classical theism. It does not simply reduce God to metaphor, moral ideal, or cultural symbol. It challenges a more fundamental, but false, assumption: that divinity must be conceived as omnipotent control, completed omniscience, or transcendent intervention from outside the world.

Within a process framework, divinity - if it is to be spoken of at all - is understood as relational participation rather than sovereign domination. Divine action is persuasive rather than coercive, responsive rather than unilateral, immanent rather than interruptive.

This does not weaken divinity; it relocates it.

Why Process Matters for Unbelief

Process language is uniquely suited to the terrain opened by Greek unbelief and its modern descendants. It does not attempt to undo disenchantment by resurrecting interventionist gods. It accepts the ethical, explanatory, and epistemic critiques that dismantled classical divine authority - and asks what might remain credible afterward.

Process theology therefore does not oppose atheism or agnosticism as enemies. It treats them as historically intelligible responses to metaphysical frameworks that could not survive moral scrutiny or epistemic honesty.

The question it poses is not:

“How can we restore belief?”

But rather:

“If reality is genuinely relational, unfinished, and value-laden, how might divinity be reimagined without coercion, certainty, or denial?”

This question will not be answered all at once. It will be approached gradually throughout these essays, through historical analysis, ethical reflection, and constructive restraint.

With this grammar in place, we can now return to ancient Greece - not to repeat its conclusions, but to extract the lessons it left unresolved.

With this understanding of process in view, we can now examine the first and most decisive fracture in ancient belief: the moral failure of the gods themselves.

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I. Ethical Failure as the First Fracture

When the Gods Could No Longer Be Trusted

“Ethics precedes metaphysics.”

The erosion of divine authority in ancient Greece did not begin with cosmology or skepticism. It began with moral outrage.

Long before philosophers questioned the existence of the gods, poets and tragedians questioned their character. Homeric and Hesiodic mythology presented gods who were powerful but unreliable, immortal but ethically unstable. Zeus ruled through force and deception. Hera acted from jealousy. Apollo inflicted plagues without explanation. Justice, when it appeared, was inconsistent and often indistinguishable from vengeance.

For early Greek culture, this posed no immediate crisis. Myth did not require moral coherence; it functioned narratively and ritually. But as ethical reflection deepened - particularly through tragedy - this tolerance eroded. The gods increasingly appeared not merely capricious, but morally inferior to the humans who suffered under them.

Tragedy as Moral Interrogation

Greek tragedy marks the first sustained ethical audit of divinity in Western history.

In the fifth century BCE, playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides staged divine power before a morally awakened audience. Their dramas did not deny the gods’ existence; they exposed their inadequacy. The question was no longer whether the gods were real, but whether they were worthy of trust.

Euripides is especially revealing. In play after play, divine action appears arbitrary, cruel, or incoherent. In Heracles, Zeus fails to protect his own son from madness and ruin. In Hippolytus, Aphrodite destroys a virtuous man to satisfy wounded pride. In fragments of Bellerophon, a character famously declares:

“Is there anyone who thinks there are gods above?

There are not - no, there are not.

Let no fool, led by the old false tale, deceive you.”

This is not philosophical atheism. It is ethical refusal. The gods are rejected because they no longer align with emerging human standards of justice, responsibility, and compassion.

Sophocles’ Antigone deepens this fracture. Antigone defies royal authority in the name of unwritten moral law, implicitly challenging both human and divine governance. Justice is no longer secured by power - divine or political - but by ethical fidelity that transcends decree.

From Reverence to Withdrawal

What emerges across tragedy is a subtle but decisive shift: reverence gives way to moral distance.

The gods are still named. Rituals persist. Festivals continue. But belief changes its character. Divine authority is no longer assumed to be ethically normative. Trust withdraws before belief collapses. This is the first stage of disenchantment.

Importantly, this withdrawal is not nihilistic. It does not abolish meaning or ethics. On the contrary, it intensifies moral seriousness. Human beings begin to recognize themselves as ethically responsible in a world where divine power no longer guarantees justice.

This marks a profound inversion: humans judge the gods, rather than the gods judging humans.

Philosophical Amplification

Philosophers soon give conceptual voice to what tragedy dramatized.

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–475 BCE) famously criticizes anthropomorphic gods, noting that humans fashion divinities in their own image. His critique is not atheistic, but ethical and epistemic. Gods who mirror human vice cannot ground moral truth.

Later thinkers - such as Diagoras of Melos, Prodicus, and Critias - push further, questioning whether the gods function primarily as moral enforcers rather than moral exemplars. In the Sisyphus fragment (often attributed to Critias), religion is explicitly described as a human invention designed to regulate behavior when civil law cannot that same function.

Again, the issue is not existence, but credibility.

Process-Theological Coda
Ethics as the Condition of Divinity

Process theology recognizes this Greek moment with unusual clarity.

From a process perspective, divinity cannot be insulated from ethical development. Any conception of God that remains morally static while human ethical awareness grows will eventually collapse. This is not a failure of faith, but a failure of theology to remain responsive to lived moral experience.

Process thought therefore affirms the Greek intuition that ethical trust is the precondition of belief. Divinity must be capable of growth, responsiveness, and suffering with the world it influences. A God who cannot be ethically questioned cannot remain relationally credible.

What the Greeks refused was not transcendence itself, but unaccountable power. They rejected gods who ruled without responsibility, acted without justification, and inflicted suffering without solidarity.

Process theology takes this refusal seriously. It does not attempt to rehabilitate morally compromised divinities. It begins instead from the insight Greek tragedy left unresolved:

If reality is relational and evolving,

then divinity - if it exists - must evolve in moral responsiveness as well.

The gods of myth failed not because they were imagined, but because they could not change.

That failure sets the stage for the next fracture: when explanation itself no longer requires divine intervention.

If the gods lost moral credibility through ethical failure, they soon lost explanatory necessity through intellectual success. The second fracture follows naturally.

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II. Explanation Without Intervention

 How the Gods Became Unnecessary

“The world did not stop working when the gods stopped explaining it.”

If ethical failure fractured divine authority, explanatory sufficiency completed the break.

In archaic religion, gods did not merely rule the world - they explained it. Storms signaled divine anger. Plagues expressed punishment. Fertility followed favor. To understand reality was to interpret divine intention. Causation was personal between the gods and humanity before it was naturally explained.

This explanatory regime did not collapse all at once. It eroded gradually, beginning not in atheism, but in curiosity.

Ionia and the Birth of Natural Explanation

The earliest decisive shift occurred in Ionia (western Asia Minor) during the sixth century BCE. Thinkers such as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes did something unprecedented: they sought explanations of the cosmos that did not appeal to divine personality or causation at all.

Their proposals now appear statedly naïve - water, air, or the apeiron as primordial principle - but the significance lies elsewhere. For the first time, nature was treated as self-organizing, governed by intelligible patterns rather than divine whim.

Lightning no longer required Zeus. Earthquakes no longer required Poseidon. Phenomena could be explained by internal relations among elements.

This was not anti-religious. The early natural philosophers did not preach unbelief. But they quietly rendered divine intervention explanatorily redundant.

Once natural causes proved sufficient, appeals to divine causation became excess rather than necessity.

From Sufficiency to Irrelevance

Over time, explanatory success compounded.

By the fifth century BCE, medical writers such as Hippocrates explicitly rejected divine explanations for disease, insisting instead on natural causes and observable regularities. His treatise On the Sacred Disease famously argues that epilepsy is no more divine than any other illness.

The implication is devastating for traditional religion:

if nature explains itself, the gods lose their function.

This does not immediately produce disbelief. Rituals persist. Language lingers. Cultural memory remains powerful. But belief changes its role. The gods no longer do anything thought to be necessary.

They become decorative.

Philosophical Clarification

Atomism sharpens this shift decisively.

Leucippus and Democritus propose a universe composed entirely of atoms and void - self-moving, eternal, and governed by necessity rather than intention. Even the soul is material. Even the gods, if they exist, are atomic and non-intervening.

Here the displacement becomes explicit:

the world does not need a creator, sustainer, or governor to function.

Epicurus later radicalizes this insight by insisting that fear of divine intervention is not only false but harmful. Gods may exist, but they neither reward nor punish. Nature operates independently. Therefore, ethics must be grounded elsewhere.

This is not militant atheism. It is functional atheism: belief without necessity.

The Quiet Consequence

What follows is subtle but decisive.

Once divine intervention is no longer required for explanation:

• Prayer loses causal urgency.
• Worship becomes symbolic.
• Belief becomes optional rather than compelled.

Religion survives - but as heritage, not governance.

Greek unbelief deepens not through rebellion, but through coherence. The world works. Knowledge advances. Life continues. The gods are not disproven; they are outpaced.

Process-Theological Coda
Coherence Without Interruption

Process theology affirms this Greek achievement rather than resisting it.

A coherent, intelligible universe does not threaten the sacred. What collapses here is not divinity itself, but a specific image of divinity: the interventionist God who interrupts natural processes to secure meaning or control outcomes.

Process thought insists that coherence is not the enemy of transcendence. If reality is genuinely processual - relational, evolving, internally dynamic - then divine interruption would be metaphysically incoherent. Meaning must arise within process, not antithetical to it.

In this light, Greek naturalism performs a necessary purification. It eliminates a theology of gaps, crises, and arbitrary interference. What remains is an open question:

Can divinity be understood as persuasive presence rather than causal override?

The Greeks did not yet possess the metaphysical language to answer this. They could say what God was not - not necessary, not explanatory, not intervening - but not yet what divinity might be within a self-organizing world.

Process theology enters precisely at this point. It gives metaphysical grammar to a theology of deficit. It does not deny natural causation; it radicalizes it. Divine action is no longer conceived as competing with natural processes, but as luring natural processes towards value, complexity, and relational depth.

Greek naturalistic explanation without divine intervention removes false gods.

It leaves open whether a different vision of the sacred could remain.

That opening leads to the next fracture - one more unsettling still:

the recognition that even knowledge itself cannot secure certainty.

Once explanation became sufficient without divine action, belief faced a new challenge: the limits of knowing itself.

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III. Epistemic Humility and the Optional God

When Belief Lost Its Compulsion

“Meaning persisted, but certainty dissolved.”

If ethical trust withdrew first, and explanatory necessity faded next, the final destabilization of divine authority came through a more unsettling realization: knowledge itself could not secure certainty.

Greek unbelief does not culminate in denial. It culminates in epistemic suspension.

From Socratic Irony to Institutional Skepticism

The seeds of epistemic humility are already present in Socrates, whose relentless questioning exposed the fragility of assumed knowledge. His famous claim - “I know that I do not know” - was not anti-intellectual, but ethically serious. It signaled a refusal to ground authority in unexamined certainty, including theological certainty.

After Plato’s death (347 BCE), this posture hardened into method.

Under Arcesilaus (c. 315 - 240 BCE), the Academy abandoned claims to knowledge altogether. This was not nihilism but discipline. If certainty could not be achieved, assent must be withheld. Theology was not singled out; it simply could not escape the broader verdict which must also include itself.

Later, Carneades (c. 214 - 129 BCE) sharpened this approach. During a diplomatic mission to Rome, he famously delivered two consecutive speeches - one defending justice, the other refuting it - demonstrating that persuasive arguments could be constructed on both sides of any claim, including those about the gods.

The result was not disbelief, but equipollence: a balance of reasons so evenly matched that conviction became unwarranted.

*Equipollence means the state or quality of being equal in force, power, meaning, or effect, often used in logic, mathematics, or geometry to describe concepts that are equivalent or deducible from each other, even if expressed differently. It signifies sameness in significance or result, such as two propositions having the same meaning or two line segments having the same length and direction. 

Sextus Empiricus and the Systematization of Doubt

By the second century CE, Sextus Empiricus formalized this stance. In Against the Mathematicians and Outlines of Pyrrhonism, he applies skepticism directly to theology, arguing that claims for and against divine existence are equally unprovable.

His conclusion is strikingly modern:

Since the arguments on either side are of equal strength,

the gods exist no more than they do not.

This is not militant atheism. It is epistemic restraint.

Belief becomes psychologically optional. The gods neither command assent nor demand rejection. Worship may persist as custom, habit, or cultural inheritance - but it no longer carries rational or epistemic urgency.

The Religious Consequence

The consequence of this shift is profound and easily misunderstood.

Greek skepticism does not abolish religion. It neutralizes its authority.

The consequences of belief when it can no longer claim epistemic dominance thereby creates the following socio-theological conditions:

• faith cannot coerce,
• doctrine cannot compel,
• certainty cannot legitimize power.

Religion survives - but thinned of urgency. Conviction becomes preference. Participation becomes tradition rather than necessity.

This is not despair. Greek culture continues to generate ethics, art, philosophy, and civic life. The absence of certainty proves survivable. What disappears is not meaning, but obligation.

Belief is no longer forbidden - but neither is it required.

Process-Theological Coda
Faith Without Certainty

Process theology diverges here from skepticism without rejecting its insight.

It agrees that certainty cannot ground faith. Any belief system that requires metaphysical closure, exhaustive knowledge, or unassailable proof is already unstable and unuseful in a processual world. But, if (processual) reality itself is unfinished, then knowledge can be provisional, situated, and relational. And what, in the 21st century isn't duplicative of these circumstances? Nearly everything!

However, where skepticism stops, process theology continues.

Greek skepticism dissolves coercive belief - but leaves open the question of trust without certainty. It clears the ground but does not explore what might grow there.

Process theology reframes faith not as assent to propositions, but as responsive participation in ongoing becoming. Commitment is no longer anchored in proof, but in value, relation, and ethical responsiveness. Faith becomes a posture rather than a conclusion.

This does not negate agnosticism or atheism. It honors them as historically intelligible responses to metaphysical-theological systems that overreach. But it also refuses the assumption that disbelief exhausts the options.

In a processual frame:

• skepticism guards against domination,
• epistemic humility preserves honesty,
• (divine) trust becomes possible without closure.

Greek skepticism closed one door - the door of certainty.

Yet it unintentionally opened another.

What remained unresolved was not whether gods exist, but whether divinity could be reconceived as relational presence rather than metaphysical object.

That unresolved question settles into cultural life during the Hellenistic period, producing a final stabilization - neither belief nor despair, but disenchantment as equilibrium.

When certainty dissolves without collapse, unbelief no longer feels like crisis. It becomes ordinary.

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IV. Disenchantment as Cultural Equilibrium Without Nihilism

Life After the Gods Still Worked

Hellenistic Mediterranean, c. 300–100 BCE

“The gods faded, but the world did not collapse.”

By the Hellenistic period, Greek culture had settled into a world largely disenchanted - but not emptied of meaning, though no longer governed by divine authority.

The decisive shifts had already occurred. Ethical trust in the gods had eroded. Natural explanation had proven sufficient without intervention. Skepticism had disciplined belief by exposing the limits of certainty. What followed was not crisis, but adjustment.

The gods remained - but as cultural survivals rather than governing realities.

A God-Optional World

Across the Hellenistic Mediterranean, religion continued as ritual, poetry, and inherited form. Temples stood. Festivals persisted. Names of gods circulated freely. But their role had changed.

Divinity no longer functioned as:

• an explanatory necessity,
• a moral guarantor,
• or an epistemic authority.

Nature operated autonomously. Knowledge advanced through method rather than revelation. Ethics endured without divine command. Political order depended on institutions, not oracles.

This was not disbelief in the modern sense. It was displacement.

The world worked without gods. That realization proved culturally stabilizing rather than destructive.

Philosophical Schools and Practical Life

The major Hellenistic schools illustrate this equilibrium clearly.

• Epicureans rejected divine intervention entirely, arguing that fear of the gods was the root of human anxiety. Gods, if they existed, were irrelevant to human affairs.

• Stoics retained divine language but redefined it as rational order immanent within nature rather than personal governance.

• Skeptics suspended judgment altogether, participating in religious custom without metaphysical commitment.

• Cynics openly mocked religious pretension, exposing the social function of belief rather than its truth.

Despite their differences, these schools shared a common assumption: life does not require divine supervision to remain meaningful.

Ethics became grounded in virtue, tranquility, or rational harmony. Meaning arose through practice rather than revelation. Human responsibility intensified rather than diminished.

Disenchantment Without Despair

This equilibrium is often mischaracterized as nihilistic. It was not, and is not.

Greek culture did not descend into chaos once divine authority receded. On the contrary:

• Philosophy flourished.
• Art evolved.
• Science advanced.
• Ethics matured.
• Civic life continued.

What disappeared was not value, but necessity. Belief was no longer required to explain the world, ground morality, or secure knowledge.

Disenchantment here is best understood not as collapse, but as normalization: a reorientation of humanity’s relationship to reality after divine intervention proved unnecessary.

The gods were not overthrown. They were outpaced, outgrown, unneeded. Humanity was doing the heavy lifting which the Greek gods had never done.

Process-Theological Coda

The Incomplete Achievement of Disenchantment

From a process-theological perspective, this Hellenistic stabilization is not a mistake - but it nonetheless is incomplete in itself. It had no metaphysical completeness.

Greek thought successfully eliminated static, interventionist divinity. It dismantled coercive belief, exposed the limits of certainty, and affirmed a coherent, self-organizing reality. These are genuine achievements that any credible theology must absorb rather than resist.

Where Greek thought fell short was not in disbelief, but in imagination.

Having removed the gods from causation, explanation, and necessity, Greek philosophy lacked a metaphysical grammar capable of articulating value intrinsic to process itself. Meaning persisted, but it floated - untethered from any account of why creativity, novelty, or moral responsiveness should matter beyond human preference.

Process theology enters precisely at this unresolved point.

It does not reintroduce intervention. It does not restore certainty. It does not revive the gods of myth. Instead, it asks whether relational value can be understood as woven into the fabric of becoming itself.

In a processual frame:

• creativity is not accidental,
• moral responsiveness is not arbitrary,
• meaning is not imposed from outside.

Divinity - if it is to be spoken of - becomes the depth-dimension of relational becoming rather than an external ruler over it.

Greek disenchantment cleared the ground brilliantly.

It did not yet know how to inhabit what remained.

That unresolved tension - between a world that works and a longing for value that exceeds utility - marks the threshold of the next inquiry.

Disenchantment stabilized the world, but it did not answer why becoming itself should matter.

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Conclusion - When Explanation Replaced Intervention

Here, in Essay IV, Greek unbelief deepens not through rebellion, but through coherence.

As the ancient world became intelligible without divine interruption, the gods did not vanish - they receded. Ethical scrutiny exposed their moral inadequacy. Natural explanation rendered their intervention unnecessary. Skepticism disciplined belief by revealing the limits of certainty. By the Hellenistic period, these pressures had settled into a durable cultural equilibrium in which life continued, meaning endured, and the absence of divine governance proved survivable.

The gods were not refuted.

They were outgrown.

This displacement unfolded unevenly across centuries and regions. In Ionia, explanation migrated from myth to nature. In Athens, ethical and epistemic authority fractured divine credibility. In the Academy, doubt was formalized, and belief became provisional. Across the Hellenistic Mediterranean, disenchantment stabilized into ordinary life.

Crucially, this stabilization did not produce nihilism. Greek culture continued to generate ethics, philosophy, art, and civic order without divine supervision. Institutions endured. Responsibility intensified. What disappeared was not meaning, but necessity.

Belief was no longer required to explain the world, ground morality, or secure knowledge.

The gods persisted as names, symbols, and inherited forms - but not as agents upon whom life depended. Disenchantment, in this sense, was not collapse but normalization: a recalibration of the human relationship to reality after divine intervention lost credibility.

Where Essay I documented the ethical withdrawal of trust, Essay II traced the explanatory withdrawal of need, and Essay III examined the epistemic withdrawal of certainty, Essay IV gathers these threads into a single recognition:

Faith collapses when it cannot grow ethically, relinquish control, or remain credible in a world that no longer needs it to function.

This recognition is not modern. It is ancient. With very modern antecedents!

What the Greeks lacked was not honesty or courage, but a metaphysical grammar capable of articulating value intrinsic to an unfinished reality. They cleared the ground thoroughly - but did not yet know how to inhabit what remained. This task becomes that of process philosophy and theology, for the 21st century.

That unfinished task now returns.

Process-Theological Coda

Disenchantment as Precondition, Not Defeat

From a process-theological perspective, Greek disenchantment must be taken seriously rather than resisted.

The elimination of interventionist divinity, epistemic certainty, and coercive belief represents not the loss of the sacred, but a necessary purification of religious imagination. Any theology that cannot survive this clearing is not merely challenged by modernity - it was already undone by antiquity.

Process thought affirms the Greek insight that reality is coherent, continuous, and intelligible without supernatural interruption. It affirms the skeptical recognition that certainty cannot ground faith. It affirms the ethical realization that morality cannot depend on arbitrary power.

Where Greek thought stops is precisely where process theology begins.

Having removed the gods from causation, explanation, and necessity, Greek philosophy lacked a way to articulate why becoming itself should matter - why creativity, moral responsiveness, and relational depth possess more than instrumental value.

Process theology does not reverse disenchantment.

It radicalizes it.

Pay attention:

Divine action is no longer conceived as intervention from outside the world, but as persuasive presence within becoming. Nor is God the exception to processual reality, but its deepest instance and foundation for it: the lure toward relational intensity, ethical responsiveness, and aesthetic depth within an evolving universe.

In this light, Greek unbelief is not the enemy of faith but its precondition. It removes images of divinity that cannot grow, suffer, or respond. What remains is not atheism as negation, but a sharpened question newly fit for a metamodern age:

If reality is process all the way down,

the Sacred must be understood as participating in that process

all the way up... rather than ruling over it!

That question now presses forward.

Essay V will confront what Greek unbelief did not face: empire, domination systems, trauma, and identity-bound belief - forces that have made Christianity’s collapse more volatile and painful than anything the ancient world encountered.

Essay VI will explore whether faith can exist without dominance, certainty, or fear.

Essay VII will ask whether faith can still be practiced - not as belief about the world, but as participation in its becoming.

The gods have not vanished.

They have been outpaced.

What comes next is not restoration - but re-imagining.

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After the Gods Stepped Aside

They did not fall in fire or argument.
  No thunder struck their names from stone.
They simply stood too still too long
  while justice was learning to stride.

The world kept running without necessary prayers -
  Humanity's seeds grew without permission.
  Nature's storms followed no one’s mood.
  Human suffering was asking better questions
      than the heavens above could answer.

Human trust was the first to withdraw -
  quietly, without signs or slogans.
Then human need loosened its grip
  as certainty thinned into admitted honesty.

Nothing collapsed -
  The markets opened.
  Children were born.
  Songs were written.
  The dead were buried
      all without the need for divine explanation.

Only this changed:
  meaning no longer arrived from above.
  It had to be carried by humanity from below.

Now the Sacred waits
  not as ruler,
  not as proof,
  but as invitation -

as a feeling moving to sacred care,
as a lure moving to sacred depth,
as a whisper forming inside sacred becoming.

Asking -

If the world is unfinished,
will we help grow it sacredly?

R.E. Slater
January 14, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Essay IV - Faith After Certainty:

A Process Theology for a Metamodern Age

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I. Primary Ancient Sources (in Translation)

Epic and Archaic Poetry

Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

• Alternative translation: Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1990.

Odyssey. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Perennial, 1967.

• Alternative translation: Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.

Theogony. Translated by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Greek Tragedy

Oresteia. Translated by E. B. Browning. New York: HarperCollins, 1978.

• Alternative translation: Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984.

Oedipus the King. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Heracles. Translated by James Morwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Trojan Women. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021.

Bacchae. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023.

Euripides Fragments. Translated by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

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Comedy and Satire

Clouds. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Knights. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Thesmophoriazusae. Translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Dialogues of the Gods. Translated by A. M. Harmon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913.

Zeus Refuted. Translated by A. M. Harmon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915.

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Philosophical Texts

Apology. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002.

Republic. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. London: Penguin Classics, 2004.

Metaphysics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Physics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Letter to Menoeceus. In The Epicurus Reader, edited by Brad Inwood. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994.

De Rerum Natura. Translated by A. E. Stallings. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.

• Alternative translation: W. H. D. Rouse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924.

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Skepticism

Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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II. Core Secondary Scholarship (Graduate Level)

Guthrie, W. K. C. The Greeks and Their Gods. London: Methuen, 1950.

Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Translated by John Raffan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Parker, Robert. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Vlastos, Gregory. Socratic Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Sedley, David. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Long, A. A. Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

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III. Advanced & Scholarly Works (Post-Graduate / Research)

Bremmer, Jan N. Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible, and the Ancient Near East. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

Henrichs, Albert. “What Is a Greek God?” In Greek Mythology and Poetics, edited by Gregory Nagy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Mikalson, Jon D. Ancient Greek Religion. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Versnel, H. S. Coping with the Gods. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Osborne, Robin. The Transformation of Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin Classics, 1987.

Frede, Michael. Essays in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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IV. Works Bridging Toward Process Theology and Constructive Metaphysics

(Foundational and Transitional Texts)

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1982.

Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.

Clayton, Philip. The Problem of God in Modern Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.

McDaniel, Jay. With Roots and Wings: Christianity in an Age of Ecology and Dialogue. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995.

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V. Orientation for Public and General Readers

(Historical, Philosophical, and Interpretive Introductions)

Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.

Ferry, Luc. The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life. Translated by Theo Cuffe. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

Grayling, A. C. The History of Philosophy. New York: Penguin Books, 2019.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1967.

Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.