Embodied Process Realism and the Bible (4)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

ESSAY FOUR

Embodied Process Realism

and the Bible

Scripture as Lived Encounter within an Unfolding Reality

R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

- Second Corinthians 3:6

The Sabbath was made for humankind,

and not humankind for the Sabbath.

- Gospel of Mark 2:27

Behold, I am doing a new thing.

- Book of Isaiah 43:19

In their appearance and structure:

the wheels were intersecting,

like a wheel within a wheel.

- Book of Ezekiel 1:16

Meaning within meaning,

movement within movement,

reality unfixed - ever turning.

- R.E. Slater

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Introduction

What Kind of Text Is Scripture in a Lived Reality?

If reality is not fixed but lived - that is, it continually folds-and-refolds through relation, tension, rupture, and continuation - then the question of reality in relation to Scripture must be reconsidered accordingly. Usually, the Bible is often treated as a fixed deposit of truth: a completed divine revelation, stabilized in form and meaning, and preserved across time as an authoritative guide to belief and practice.

Yet, i) the very biblical text itself resists such closure even as it ii) parallels the gift of language which acts in kind... as a living and responsive reading testifying to the changing nature of reality. Hence, the usual reading of Scripture is high unusual; doesn't correspond with how either reality works nor how language works; and is artificially fixed in static repository contrary to the very nature of God and God's work in creation. More plainly, how the church insists we should read the bible is exactly how NOT to read the bible.

Thus, within Scripture's "revealed pages" are divine voices that i) do not always agree; ii) narratives that shift in tone and direction; and, iii) differing theological visions of the divine and divine will that develop and are taught across the biblical narratives and their generations. 

Moreover, canonical law gives way to divine prophecy. Wisdom sections question human certainty. Devastating exiles shape-and-reshape personal, communal, societal, and national identity. And even God's emissary, Israel's Messiah-Jesus, willfully and full-throatedly reinterprets sacred Hebrew tradition. And lastly - if not presently - the early church reread its Jesus-inheritance in light of ruptured divine meanings and identities. So no, the bible isn't all one thing but many things across many voices, eras, and divinations.

And so, Scripture, is not one single, continuous voice of divine will - but a multivocal, multifocal, and multilayered - divine witness reflecting lively-lived and evolving experiences between humanity and the "perceived real" arising from God, world, and mankind itself.

Hence, we must ask a far deeper question:

Is the Bible best understood as a static word about God, or as a dynamic record of humanity’s engagement with the divine as it wrestles with the brute conditions of life??

Embodied Process Realism (EPR) suggests the latter.

EPR invites us to read Scripture not as a closed system of abstract, disconnected propositions and beliefs, but as a living field of evolving meaning - where understanding is formed, fractured, reconfigured, transformed, redeemed, lost, and carried forward....

This means that the biblical text does not stand outside reality, describing it from a distance. But experientially participates in reality’s fluid unfolding, bearing witness to moments of clarity, conflict, rupture, and renewal.

To read Scripture in this way is not to diminish its authority, but to relocate it. So-called "Biblical Authority" cannot rest in fixed traditional interpretation alone, but in the linguistic-text’s philological capacity to continually speak within evolving eras of life's movements, tragedies, successes, contexts, harms and joys, across generations.

Text, cultural meaning, ideology, and so forth, only persists in the minds and urgencies of those church organizational bodies wishing to protect and dominate what they believe is true and beautiful.

Yet divine reality does not work in this way. Nor did it ever work in that way. Rather, it transforms from one moment to the next requiring not only a God, but a people, to live redemptively transforming lives themselves.

Consequently, we are to inhabit the same processual spaces as our processual God does --- "As the Creator, so God's people." --- "We live-and-move together, or not at all."

What follows then is an exploration of Scripture through an embodied lens of process realism - not to resolve tensions, but to understand them as integral to reality's nature as set by God above.

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I. The Limits of Static Scripture

If Scripture is approached as a fixed and unchanging deposit of truth, then its role is largely reduced to preservation and meaningless repetition. In this arrangement, meaning is assumed to be settled, interpretation becomes an act of retrieval, and authority is located in maintaining continuity with what has already been established in the past. It leaves no doorways open for the present nor for the future....

Such approaches have offered traditionalized stability to "out-of-touch, out-of-date" faith communities by preserving past traditions, providing shared identities, given theologic structure to beliefs, and provided identifiable religious practices across generations. In this sense, it has served an important role.

Yet this same approach can also narrow the field of engagement.

When meaning is treated as fixed, the text is no longer encountered as something that speaks, but as something that must be defended. Interpretation becomes constrained, not by the depth of the text itself, but by the boundaries placed around what it is permitted to say. Questions are often resolved too quickly, tensions are minimized, and differences within the text are harmonized in ways that obscure their significance.

The result is not always clarity, but containment.

And yet, Scripture does not present itself as a uniform or static voice. Its narratives, laws, poems, and teachings arise from differing contexts; address differing concerns; and reflect varying understandings of God, justice, and human life. To treat these diverse biblical expressions as though they speak with a single, unchanging formulation is to overlook the dynamic character of the biblical text itself.

Consider, for example, how the understanding of covenant develops - from the early narratives of promise, through the giving of the law, into the prophetic critiques of that law, and finally into the reinterpretations found in the life and teachings of Jesus. What appears at first as continuity is, upon closer reading, marked by development, tension, and reconfiguration.

The same may be said of wisdom literature, where confident assertions about order and justice stand alongside voices of doubt, protest, and questioning. Or of the prophets, who challenge not only the surrounding nations, but the very religious structures of their own communities.

These are not peripheral features of Scripture. They are central to it.

A strictly static reading struggles to account for such movement. The classical/traditional approach seeks consistency where the text presents development; and, resolution where the text sustains tension. In doing so, such approaches risk diminishing the very richness they seeks to preserve.

This does not mean that Scripture lacks coherence or direction. Rather, its coherence is not that of a closed system, but of an unfolding witness - one that holds together continuity and change, stability and disruption.

To recognize this type of approach is not to abandon Scripture, but to encounter it more fully.

Consequently, if the biblical text itself bears the marks of lived experience - of faith communities responding to changing conditions; or, of faith experiences expressed through struggle as well as clarity - then it cannot be adequately understood apart from that kind of processual movement.

The limitation, then, is not Scripture itself, but the assumption that it must be read as though it were static.

And it is precisely this assumption that must now be reconsidered.

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II. Scripture as Embodied Process

If the limitations of a static reading arise from treating Scripture as fixed, then an alternative approach must take seriously the movement already present within the text itself. Scripture need not be made dynamic. It already is.

What is required is a way of reading that can recognize and follow this movement.

Embodied Process Realism provides such a lens. It does not impose a foreign structure upon the text, but brings into focus patterns already at work - patterns of meaning, tension, rupture, and continuation that unfold across the biblical witness.

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1. Meaning - Scripture as Shared Understanding

Scripture speaks. It names, describes, and communicates the world as it is encountered by those who lived within it. Laws are given, stories are told, wisdom is offered, and teachings are preserved so that meaning may be shared across generations.

And yet, this meaning is never static.

Words shift in significance. Contexts change. What once seemed clear becomes newly complex. The same passage, read in different times and places, carries different weight. Meaning, therefore, is not simply contained within the text, but arises in the ongoing interaction between text and reader.

Scripture does not lose its meaning through this process -

it is sustained by it.

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2. Fracture - Scripture as Tension

Scripture does not present a seamless account of reality. It includes within itself moments of conflict, contradiction, and unresolved tension.

• Laws that are later questioned
• Promises that appear delayed or broken
• Voices that challenge one another

These are not flaws to be removed, but features to be understood.

The book of Job stands in tension with more straightforward claims about justice and reward. Ecclesiastes questions the reliability of meaning itself. The prophets challenge religious certainty, exposing gaps between belief and practice.

Such tensions do not weaken Scripture.

They deepen it.

They reflect a world in which understanding is not given all at once, but emerges through struggle, questioning, and response. This is what is meant by reading the Scriptures processually.

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3. Event - Scripture as Rupture and Reconfiguration

At key moments, Scripture does not simply continue what has been - it interrupts it too.

The Exodus is not a gradual development, but a decisive break. A people moves from bondage into freedom, and in doing so, redefines its identity.

The prophetic tradition disrupts established structures, calling into question the very systems meant to preserve faith.

And in the life and teachings of Jesus, inherited interpretations are not discarded, but reconfigured:

“You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…”

Here, continuity is not abandoned, but transformed.

Such moments are not anomalies. They are central to the biblical narrative.

They reveal that faith is not sustained through repetition alone, but through the capacity to receive what is new.

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4. Process - Scripture as Ongoing Formation

Despite these ruptures, Scripture does not dissolve into fragmentation. It continues.

Traditions are carried forward. Stories are retold. Teachings are reinterpreted. The early church reads its own experience in light of what came before, reshaping its understanding while remaining connected to its roots.

This movement is neither purely continuous nor purely discontinuous. It is a process of ongoing formation - holding together what has been with what is becoming.

Scripture, in this sense, is not a closed book, but an unfolding witness.

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Summation

Taken together, these several dimensions reveal that Scripture is not best understood as a static repository of fixed meaning, but as a living field in which meaning is formed, tested, disrupted, and carried forward.

To read Scripture in this way is not to impose change upon it, but to recognize the change already present within it.

And it is this recognition that opens the way for a deeper engagement with the text - not as something to be finalized, but as something to be entered and re-experienced.

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III. Narrative Illustrations

If Scripture is indeed a living and unfolding witness, then this must be seen not only in theory, but within its narratives themselves. The movement of meaning, fracture, rupture, and continuation is not abstract—it is embodied within the stories that shape the biblical tradition.

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1. Exodus - Liberation as Rupture

The Exodus stands as one of the defining moments of rupture within Scripture. A people enslaved is brought out of bondage, not through gradual reform, but through decisive interruption.

This event reshapes identity, theology, and community.

God is no longer understood only in terms of ancestral promise, but as one who acts within history - one who liberates, disrupts, and calls forward a new way of being.

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2. Job - The Fracture of Certainty

The book of Job resists easy explanations. It confronts the assumption that suffering can be neatly explained within a framework of reward and punishment.

Job’s friends defend established theology. Job challenges it.

The result is not resolution, but deepened questioning.

Here, Scripture does not eliminate tension.

It gives voice to it.

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3. Jesus - Reinterpretation as Event

In the teachings of Jesus, tradition is neither rejected nor preserved unchanged. It is re-read, intensified, and reoriented.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind…”

“You have heard… but I say…”

These are not minor adjustments. They are reconfigurations.

Meaning is not discarded, but transformed.

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4. Paul - Continuation Through Reinterpretation

The early church, and particularly Paul, continues this movement. In light of the Christ-event, inherited categories are revisited and reinterpreted.

Law, identity, and inclusion are all reexamined.

What emerges is not a break from the past, but a carrying forward - one that reshapes what has been received in light of what has occurred.

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Summation

These narratives do not present a static faith. They reveal a tradition that lives - one that responds, adapts, and continues.

Scripture, in this sense, is not simply about reality.

It participates in it.

The gift of language and communication is that of presence.
When presence is no longer present, language and communication dies.

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IV. Processual Coda

"As the Creator, so God's people. We together move or not at all."

Scripture is not encountered once, nor is it resolved in a single interpretation. It unfolds across generations - read, questioned, reinterpreted, and lived forward within changing conditions.

• What is received is tested.
• What is assumed is challenged.
• What is broken opens new understanding.
• What remains is carried forward.

This is not a weakness of the text - It is its strength.

For Scripture does not stand apart from reality - It moves within it.

To read the Bible is not merely to recover what was once said, but to enter into the ongoing movement through which meaning continues to emerge.

And within this movement, the question of God is not closed.

It is lived.

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Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Isaiah → emergence + novelty:
"Behold, I am doing a new thing."
- Book of Isaiah 43:19

Ezekiel → structure + motion:
"In their appearance and structure:
the wheels were intersecting,
like a wheel within a wheel."
- Book of Ezekiel 1:16

Extrapolation of Verses:

#1 - 
"Meaning within meaning,
movement within movement,
reality unfixed - ever turning."
- R.E. Slater

#2 -

"Process within process
Relation within relation
Movement without final rest
Divine presence ever dynamic."
- R.E. Slater

*please refer to the appendix below the bibliography

where I examine "Wheels Within Wheels: Isaiah,

Ezekiel, and the Living Gospel." Thank you.

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The Living Text
by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT

Scripture was not written once

  - then left to rest,
its words on Divine hold

  - unable to breathe.

Nay, they must pass through fire,
through heavy loss and change,
through cruel exile and return,
e'en hard, questioning hearts.

Yet, as Law became longing,
and Divine promise protest,
loud voices quieted to event,
learning to hear and speak.

And in the telling,
and in the hearing,
in the breaking open
of what was thought complete -

the stony text resurrected,
not as final word -
but as evolving paths
beneath shod and holy feet.

For in the turning,
in scripted lines on lines,
humanity discovers the spoken -

but the unspoken that must speak.

R.E. Slater
March 21, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

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Bibliography

Embodied Process Realism and the Bible

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Primary Text

The Bible
The New Revised Standard Version Bible. New York: National Council of Churches, 1989.

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Biblical Studies and Interpretation

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

———. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

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

Barr, James. The Bible in the Modern World. London: SCM Press, 1973.

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Process Theology and Philosophy

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.

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

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Philosophical Context

Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.

How does God act in a world that is not static?

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Appendix

Wheels Within Wheels:

Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Living Gospel

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Two prophetic images - each separated by context yet united in vision - offer a profound glimpse into the nature of reality as lived, dynamic, and unfolding.

From Book of Isaiah comes the declaration:

“Behold, I am doing a new thing.” (43:19)

And from Book of Ezekiel the vision:

“Their appearance and structure: the wheels were intersecting, like a wheel within a wheel.” (1:16)

At first glance, these passages appear distinct - one announcing divine action in history, the other describing an enigmatic celestial structure. Yet when read together, they reveal a shared insight: reality is neither fixed nor chaotic, but structured in motion - ordered, yet open; coherent, yet unfolding. This then is a description of ongoing processual evolution.

Isaiah speaks into a moment of rupture. Exile has destabilized identity, fractured meaning, and called into question the continuity of God’s promises. Within this context, the announcement of a “new thing” does not point to an escape from history, but to an emergence from within it. The new arises not apart from the world, but through its very conditions of loss and transformation.

"No one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." - Jesus (Gospel of Mark 2:22, Gospel of Matthew 9:17, Gospel of Luke 5:37–38)

Ezekiel, likewise situated within exile, offers a vision not of stability restored, but of motion revealed. The wheels - intersecting, multidirectional, alive with movement - suggest a form of order that does not depend upon stillness. Structure here is not rigid, but relational. Each wheel moves within another, implying depth within depth, relation within relation, motion within motion.

“Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” - Jesus (Gospel of John 7:38)

Together, these images resist a static metaphysic.

They do not describe a world governed from above by an unmoving force, nor one abandoned to disorder. Instead, they point toward a reality in which form and movement are inseparable - where structure enables transformation, and transformation reshapes structure.

In this light, the divine is not best understood as external to the world’s unfolding, nor reducible to it. Rather, God may be discerned within the very movement of reality itself: as the source of novelty within continuity, and as the depth within relational structure.

The prophetic imagination, then, does not present a closed system of meaning. It offers a way of seeing.

A world in which:

Meaning unfolds within meaning,

movement arises within movement,

and reality is never fixed, but ever turning.

Or again:

Process within process,

relation within relation,

movement without final rest -

a divine presence that is ever dynamic.

Such language does not resolve the mystery of reality. It honors it.

For what these visions disclose is not a final explanation, but a pattern - one that continues to be lived, interpreted, and carried forward within the ongoing movement of existence.

Lastly, when comparing the Gospel of Jesus to processual reality, Ezekiel had envisioned life flowing from the temple. However Jesus relocated that flow into the human person.

We might say that what was once structured in the temple life of the Hebrew people becomes embodied in the believing heart of Jesus' followers as well as in the life of the church centered this time around Jesus. Both eras, Israel and the Church, are centralized around participatory life in the divine.

From:

• structure → embodiment
• location → participation
• fixed center → distributed flow 

Here is another quote from Jesus that we can use processually:

“The wind blows where it chooses… you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” - Gospel of John 3:8

the connection? In Ezekiel the Spirit animates, move, lifts; and in Jesus, the Spirit speaks to "uncontainable movement." Hence, in the work of God across each era we see the Spirit's movement from structured encounter in the OT to dynamic flow in the NT.

And though that sentence makes good preaching to a Sunday School class or small group fellowship, in all honesty, this observation was as fully true in the Temple era as it was in Jesus's day. Structures are always embodied by the divine and move towards dynamic participatory action once begun. If not, the Psalms would not have been written nor the epistles testify to communal life in the divine.

One last, we move from exilic rupture to transformation in Ezekiel to personal/spirit rupture in Jesus:

“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you.” - Book of Ezekiel 36:26

“You must be born from above.” - Gospel of John 3:7

Though Isaiah and Ezekiel envisioned divine life flowing from the temple, Jesus relocated that flow into the human heart. And where what was once structured became embodied in Temple life (even as it is today in Jewish worship), what was once centralized became multiplied and anchored into participatory spirit life through Jesus.

• wheels → movement
• spirit → dynamism
• water → life-flow

All are brought into an "embodied, lived, participatory reality" (epr).

Embodied Process Realism and God (3)

Illustration by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT

ESSAY THREE

Embodied Process Realism and God

Toward a Relational and Lived Theology

R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation,

but only in the context of a proposition.

- Gottlob Frege

The real is that which resists symbolization absolutely.

- Jacques Lacan

Truth is not a matter of knowledge but of fidelity.

- Alain Badiou

The many become one, and are increased by one.

- Alfred North Whitehead

The presence we had sought —

is found already there.

- R.E. Slater

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Introduction

The Question of God in a Lived Reality

The question of God has never been merely abstract. It arises not in isolation, but within the lived conditions of human experience - within its moments of uncertainty, suffering, wonder, and transformation. Subsequently, across history, this question has taken many forms: God as creator, as judge, as sustainer, as divine absence, or divine presence. Yet beneath these formulations lies a deeper, more intuitive, tension - somewhere between the kind of world humanity inhabits and the kind of God it has conceived over the eons. Who is the God in relation to what humanity and the world are, and are becoming, from generation to generation?

Classical theology often presented God as fixed, complete, and external to the world: an unmoved mover, a sovereign will, a perfect and unchanging being who governs reality from beyond it. In such accounts, the world is contingent, but God is not; the world changes, but God remains the same. This vision provided stability and order, but it did so at a cost. It rendered the divine distant, often unresponsive, if not uncaring, to the very conditions of lived human and environmental experience... amidst its fracture, loss, and evolving states of becoming more than, or less than, itself.

Modern thought, reacting against this distance, moved in the opposite direction. God became internalized, reduced to symbol, a projection, or a moral ideal. In some cases, the divine was discarded altogether, replaced by human autonomy or scientific explanation. Here, the problem was not divine distance, but divine absence. What was gained in immediacy was often lost in depth.

Both approaches, though opposed, share a common limitation. Each assumes that reality itself is either fixed or reducible - either governed from above or explained from below. But what if reality is neither static nor reducible? What if it is not a finished order, but a lived, unfolding field of relation, tension, rupture, and continuation?

If this is so, then the question of God must be asked differently.

The issue is no longer whether God exists as an object among objects, nor whether God can be dismissed as a projection of human thought. Rather, the question becomes: What kind of divine presence corresponds to a reality that is lived, relational, and continually in formation?

Embodied Process Realism offers a way forward. It begins not with abstraction, but with lived experience - where meaning is formed, allowed to fracture, become transformed, and carried forward towards a new identity of meaning. Within such a framework, God cannot be conceived as external to this movement, nor collapsed entirely into it. Instead, the divine must be understood in relation to it: not as a static being, but as a living depth within the unfolding of reality itself.

What follows is not an attempt to define God in final terms, but to reframe the question along with our approach to God, the world, and ourselves... to consider how the divine might be understood within a world that is not fixed, but lived actually, presently, in its goodness and its harms.

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I. The Limits of Classical and Modern Theism

If the question of God is to be reframed within a lived and unfolding reality, then the dominant inheritances of theology must first be examined - not in exhaustive detail, but in their guiding assumptions.

Classical theism, in its most influential forms, conceived God as the highest being: perfect, immutable, and wholly independent of the world. God was understood as the ultimate cause, the necessary ground of all that exists, yet untouched by the contingencies of creation. This vision secured divine transcendence, but it did so by placing God beyond the very processes that define lived experience - change, relation, and response. In preserving divine perfection, it often rendered the world secondary and the divine distant.

Such a framework provided coherence within a static metaphysic, but it struggles within a world understood as dynamic and relational. If reality is marked by development, tension, and transformation, then a God who neither changes nor is affected appears increasingly removed from the conditions of existence. The result is not simply philosophical tension, but existential distance - a God who governs, perhaps, but does not participate.

Modern thought, reacting against this distance, shifted the center of gravity. Rather than a transcendent and unchanging God, the divine was reinterpreted in terms of human experience - psychological, moral, or symbolic. God became, in various accounts, an expression of human longing, a projection of ethical ideals, or a construct shaped by cultural development. In this move, the divine was brought closer to human life, but often at the cost of ontological depth.

Where classical theism risked distance, modern reduction risks disappearance.

In reducing God to the structures of human thought or feeling, the question of divine reality is further dissolved rather than expansively answered. What remains may retain value - ethical, symbolic, or communal - but it no longer carries the weight of a living presence within the fabric of existence.

Despite their opposition, both approaches share a common limitation. Each theologic or modernistic approach assumes that reality itself can be stabilized - either by anchoring it in an unchanging divine source or by explaining it entirely within human or natural terms. In both cases, the dynamic, relational, and often unstable character of lived reality is insufficiently accounted for... thereby suggesting the need for a more process-oriented approach.

Hence, if reality is not fixed - if it is instead a field of ongoing formation, marked by relation, tension, rupture, and continuation - then neither a distant, unchanging deity nor a reduced, purely human construct can adequately respond to it.

What is required is not a compromise between these positions, but a reorientation.

The question is no longer whether God stands above the world or is contained within it, but whether the divine might be understood as present within the very movement of a dynamically evolving reality - participating in reality's bends and folds, twists and turns and transformations - without reducing either God or reality itself... while also offering the metaphysical and ontological depth required of either category without imposing finality.

Such a reorientation does not resolve the question of God. It deepens it.

And it is from within this deepened question that a different understanding of the divine may begin to emerge.

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II. Reframing God Through Embodied Process Realism

If neither a distant, unchanging deity nor a reduced, purely human construct can adequately respond to a lived and unfolding reality, then a different way of speaking about God becomes necessary. This shift is not a rejection of transcendence nor an embrace of reduction, but a reorientation - one that seeks to understand the divine in relation to the dynamic character of existence itself.

Embodied Process Realism offers such a reorientation. It begins with the recognition that reality is not composed of static substances, but of relational movement - of meaning, tension, rupture, and continuation. Within such a world, the question of God must be asked not in terms of fixed attributes alone, but in terms of presence, participation, and depth.

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1. God as Relational Depth (Whitehead)

Within a process-oriented understanding of reality, God is neither external to the world nor identical with it. Rather, the divine may be understood as the relational depth within which all things arise, interact, and move forward.

This does not collapse God into the world, nor does it place God outside of it. Instead, it suggests that the divine is present with-and-within the very fabric of relational existence (divine immanency) - intimately involved without being reducible (sic, divine panentheism). God is not an object among objects, but the depth dimension through which reality holds together and continues to unfold.

To speak of God in this way is to move beyond the language of distant causation and toward the language of immanent participation - a presence that does not override the world, but accompanies it.

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2. God as Generative Lure (Whitehead)

If reality is marked by development and transformation, then the divine may also be understood in terms of divine (teleological) direction - not as coercive force, but as generative invitation.

God, in this sense, is not the controller of outcomes, but the source of possibilities - the lure toward value, toward beauty, toward greater coherence within the unfolding of experience. Each moment is not determined in advance, but is shaped through response: to what has been (processual past), and to what might yet be (processual future; sic, refer to essay one and essay two in the cosmology series).

This understanding reframes divine power. It is not the power to dominate, but the power to invite, to call forward, to open possibilities that might otherwise remain unrealized.

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3. God and Fracture (Lacan)

A process-relational understanding of God must also take seriously the fractured character of lived experience. Reality is not seamless. It is marked by loss, misalignment, and unresolved tension.

Within such a world, God cannot be adequately understood as the guarantor of order alone. The divine must also be encountered within the places where order breaks down - where meaning falters and coherence is strained.

This does not imply divine absence, but a different mode of presence. God is not only found in harmony - but within the very conditions of disharmonious fractures and ruptures - within the very earthy struggles of nature and mankind to make sense, to endure, and to respond.

*As an aside, this also is the process-based idea of an evolving evolution which bears within it a teleology of generative value born in the bones of the kind of (an embodied processual) reality and universe humanity lives and moves within. - res

The hiddenness of God, long treated as a problem, may instead reflect the depth at which the divine is engaged - not as spectacle, but as quiet participation within the tensions of existence.

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4. God and Event (Badiou)

There are moments within experience that do not follow from what came before - moments of rupture, reconfiguration, and new beginning. These are not merely anomalies, but integral to the unfolding of reality.

Within such moments, the divine may be encountered not as continuity alone, but as transformative emergence - as that which makes possible what was not previously imaginable....

Many might call these moments miraculous, but within a process system, such transformational (Badiou'n) moments come from WITHIN a naturalistically generative reality as they can become possible - without necessitating an external breakage from without by divine intervention. That is, God is always working his will from within his creation rather than interrupting it from without. Hence the idea of divine panentheistic immanency.... - res

What has traditionally been called revelation may be understood in this light - not as the imposition of truth from beyond, but as the emergence of new possibility within the flow of experience.

These moments do not negate what has come before, but they reframe it and co-merge to expand future possibilities towards new realities which open new directions for thoughtfulness and life-giving meaning.

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5. God and Meaning (Frege)

Finally, any account of God must reckon with the role of meaning. Human beings do not encounter the world without interpretation; we name, describe, and communicate what we experience.

Language about God is neither arbitrary nor final. It is real, but partial - shared, but always in development. The divine is not exhausted by any single formulation or linguistic ally described belief, yet neither is it beyond all human expression either.

To speak of God is to participate in an ongoing effort to render the depth of reality intelligible, even as that depth exceeds complete articulation. This has been the experience of the historic church in its uncessing labors to describe the divine and what it means to live in the life of the divine.

Moreover, in this metamodern era of the church - within its maga-level/trumpian failures and horrific people-policies - comes alongside processual restatements of God-and-world, values-and-futures, rising in opposition to popular church beliefs that might pause cruelty for a better expression of life, meaning, and identity. - res

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🔷 Summation

Taken together, these dimensions suggest that God is not best understood as a fixed entity standing apart from the world, nor as a concept reducible to human construction. Rather, the divine may be understood as the living depth of a relational and unfolding reality - present within its movements, responsive to its tensions, and active within its possibilities.

Such a view does not eliminate mystery (such as the miraculous). It situates it.

And it is within this situated mystery - within a world that is lived rather than merely observed - that the question of God continues, not as a problem to be solved, but as a reality to be engaged.

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III. The Embodied Turn

If God is to be understood not as distant from reality, nor reducible to it, but as present within its unfolding depth, then such an understanding must ultimately be tested within lived experience.

Theology cannot remain conceptual alone. It must become embodied - encountered, enacted, and carried forward within the actual conditions of life.

For it is within lived experience that reality discloses its character most clearly - not as abstraction, but as participation.

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1. Encounter in the Conditions of Life

Human experience is not uniform. It is marked by decision, uncertainty, loss, and renewal. It unfolds across moments that are often unresolved, where meaning is not given in advance but must be formed in response to what occurs.

Within such conditions, the question of God does not arise as a detached inquiry. It emerges within the very acts of living - within the need to respond, to endure, and to make sense of what is encountered.

If the divine is present within the unfolding of reality, then it is here - in these lived conditions - that divine presence must be found-and-sought.

Not above life, but within it...

Not outside experience, but through it.

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2. Participation Rather Than Observation

Embodied Process Realism challenges the assumption that reality can be approached from a neutral distance. We are not observers standing apart from the world, but participants within it - implicated in its movements and affected by its outcomes.

The same must be said of God.

The divine is not encountered as an object to be examined, but as a presence within which we already participate. This participation is not always recognized, nor is it always named, but it is nonetheless operative within the structures of experience itself.

To live is to be involved.

To be involved is to be responsive.

And within this responsiveness, the question of God becomes less about proof and more about orientation - about how one inhabits the conditions of existence.

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3. The Weight of Decision

Every moment of experience carries with it a degree of openness. What has been given does not determine entirely what will follow. There remains the necessity of response - of choosing how to carry forward what has been received.

Within this space, the question of God is not abstract, but practical.

• In moments of fracture, does one turn toward restoration or resignation?
• In moments of uncertainty, toward trust or withdrawal?
• In moments of possibility, toward creation or indifference?

These are not merely ethical choices. They are participatory acts within the ongoing formation of reality.

If God is understood as the generative depth within this process, then such decisions are not made in isolation. They occur within a field of relational participation - one that invites, but does not compel (hence, the divine lure).

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4. Suffering, Fracture, and Presence

No account of lived reality is complete without acknowledging its fractures. Loss, disorientation, and suffering are not peripheral - they are integral to the human condition.

Within classical frameworks, such realities often posed a problem for belief. If God is all-powerful and wholly good, why does suffering persist?

Embodied Process Realism reframes this question.

Rather than locating God outside of suffering as its controller or preventer, the divine may be understood as present within it - as that which does not eliminate fracture, but participates in the response to it.

God is not the author of suffering.

Nor is God absent from it.

Instead, the divine is encountered in the movement through rupture and suffering - in the persistence of meaning, in the possibility of restoration, and in the capacity to continue.

This does not resolve suffering.

It situates it within a relational depth that does not abandon the world to itself.

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5. Living Forward

To speak of an embodied realism is to recognize that reality is not given all at once, nor understood in final terms. It is lived forward - carried through decisions, relationships, and responses that shape what comes next.

The same is true of the question of God.

God is not encountered once and for all, but across the ongoing movement of life - within its continuity and its disruption, its clarity and its confusion. The divine is not exhausted in a single moment of insight, but unfolds across the lived trajectory of experience.

To live, then, is not merely to exist within reality, but to participate in its divine, or divinely sacred, formation.

And within that participation, the question of God remains open - not as a deficiency, but as an invitation.

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🔷 Summation

Embodied Process Realism does not offer a final definition of God, nor a complete resolution of theological questions. What it offers is a shift in posture across the theodicies of life - the questions of God's presence in evil or the meaning of harm and suffering...

... In the processual reframing of the presumed distance from God and nearness of evil translate to dynamic human struggle with lived reality - where our participating within the reality is not as an abstraction, but is the very kind of reality we were born into to experience, engage, contend within, and perhaps, where possible, succeed in restoring...

... But not alone. But armed with God's abiding presence in all things...

... And alongside the generative being-ness of an evolving universe itself.

God-and-world, in this light, is not simply to be believed in or denied, but encountered - within the unfolding conditions of existence itself.

And it is here, within this lived and relational horizon, that theology becomes not only a matter of thought, but a way of being.

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IV. Coda

Reality is not encountered once, nor resolved in a single movement. It unfolds across cycles of understanding, disruption, transformation, and continuation. What we come to know is tested, what appears stable gives way, what breaks opens new possibility, and what remains must be taken up and lived forward.

This is not an abstract pattern. It is the rhythm of lived experience itself.

Within such a rhythm, the question of God does not stand outside the movement of life, nor does it arrive as a final answer imposed upon it. It emerges within the ongoing formation of reality—within its tensions, its openings, and its continuities. God is not encountered apart from this movement, but within it: not as a fixed conclusion, but as a living depth that accompanies, invites, and sustains.

What follows in life, then, is never a final resolution, but a way of being—of participation within a reality that is still unfolding. To live is to move within this unfolding: to interpret, to endure, to respond, and to carry forward what has been given into what may yet become.

If this is so, then theology is not the completion of thought, but its continuation within life.

God is not the end of the question.

God is present within its asking.

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Within the Cry
by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT

Neither above the spinning world,

nor sealed beyond its cosmic reach,

the depth we name Creator-God

hearkens across reality's deeps.

Whether fractured, or forming,

in loss, break, or resurrection,

    some things never leave us -

    though nothing stays the same.

We ask, and are not answered,

as problems twist and turn —

opening pathways unexpected,

across the living strides of time.

Yet ever in the asking,

within searches large and wide,

abides each soul a presence

crying, "PEACE, I AM HERE."

R.E. Slater

March 24, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

*The title page illustration was designed to capture

the fullness of essay three:

• the figure → embodied participation
• the river → process / continuity
• the light vortex → depth / divine lure
• the pathway → lived movement forward

It’s basically the entire essay… in one image.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Embodied Process Realism and God

 

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Primary Philosophical Sources

Gottlob Frege
Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Edited by Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

———. “On Sense and Reference.” In Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black, 56–78. Oxford: Blackwell, 1952.

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Jacques Lacan
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

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Alain Badiou
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005.

———. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.

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

———. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.

———. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967.

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Process Theology and Interpretive Works

Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.

Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

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Authorial Context

Slater, R. E. Relevancy22 Blog Essays. 2009–present. https://relevancy22.blogspot.com/