Homebrewed Christianity - Walking with Soren Kierkegaard, Part 5 - Session 1

Homebrewed Christianity - 

Walking with Soren Kierkegaard,

Part 5 - Session 1

* * * * * * * *

Kierkegaard: 3 Stages of Life (Path to the True Self)

Nov 24, 2019

Join George and John as they discuss and debate different Philosophical ideas. Today they will be looking into the works of Soren Kierkegaard and his ideas around the 3 Stages of Life.

6 Feature Sessons:

Course Outline and Readings

Week 1 (11/9): Biography and Early Writings (pp. 3-12)

In this first week, we will cover Kierkegaard’s life and general socio-cultural and philosophical contexts. Then, we will look at some of his early journal entries in which he lays out some of the main concerns that will show up across his authorship: subjectivity, decision, passion, and faithful existence.

Week 2 (11/16): Either/Or (pp. 37-83)

This week, we will look to Kierkegaard’s first major text in his official authorship. In the two parts of Either/Or, he outlines the first to modes of living: aesthetics and ethics. We will consider each and pay attention to the ways in which they are not just chronological steps, but persistent temptations for how to take ourselves up in the world.

Week 3 (11/23): Four Upbuilding Discourses (pp. 84-92) and Fear and Trembling (pp. 93-101)

Here we will consider what is arguably Kierkegaard most famous book, and yet one of the most complicated. In Fear and Trembling, he looks to the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac in order to consider how Abraham could rightly be considered the “father of faith,” rather than simply a murderer. In order to set up Fear and Trembling, we will look to an Upbuilding Discourse that helps to situate the text in terms of “religious” existence as the utmost possibility for human life.

Week 4 (11/30): Concluding Unscientific Postscript (pp. 187-229; 242-246)

Turning from philosophy of religion to questions of epistemology, the Postscript is Kierkegaard at his most existentialist. During this week we will consider his famous claim that “subjectivity is truth” and see why he places the religious emphasis on “how” we worship, rather than simply “what” we believe.

Week 5 (12/7): Works of Love (pp. 277-311)

Although Kierkegaard is often charged with not having a developed ethics, in Works of Love we see a profound attempt at thinking through what it means to enact neighbor-love as a command from God.

Week 6 (12/14): Practice in Christianity (pp. 372-384), Two Discourses at Friday Communion (pp. 385-392), For Self-Examination (pp. 393-403), Judge for Yourself! (pp. 404-410), “My Task” (pp. 445-448), Simmons “Militant Liturgies” (link to be provided)

For this last week, we will continue in the vein of Kierkegaard late upbuilding work that was directly critical of “Christendom” in the name of “Christianity.” We will pay particular attention to his critique of Christian nationalism and how we can apply his texts to our contemporary cultural contexts.

Walking with Kierkegaard: Session One

Nov 9, 2021

Wendell Berry: The Cranky Farmer, Poet and Essayist You Just Can't Ignore

Wendell Berry reads one of his poems from at the 2014 Festival of Faiths. (Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Wendell Berry: the cranky farmer, poet

and essayist you just can’t ignore

article link

by James T. Keane

December 07, 2021

A writing project for America’s Advent reflection series last week gave me occasion to revisit a favorite poem (“IX”) by an author who knows more than most about seasons, both liturgical and agricultural: Wendell Berry. Now 87 years old, this man of many labels (Is he a farmer? A novelist? An environmental activist? An essayist? A poet? A cultural critic? A cranky old professor? A Christian prophet?) has been a voice of practical reason and concise cultural commentary in his more than 80 books published over six decades.

My own first encounter with Wendell Berry’s writings was not through his poetry, but his essays. It came in college, when a philosophy professor (now retired, he recently ran for governor of California; philosophy professors rule) assigned Another Turn of the Crank, Berry’s book of five essays on the global economy, health care, forest preservation, private property and wealth and ecology. In a 1995 review for America, Patrick Samway, S.J., wrote that “all of these essays address the mind and heart with the same forcefulness and clarity as the writings of Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau or Wallace Stegner.” To that august list I think I would add distributists like Peter Maurin and G. K. Chesterton and early Garry Wills (included here mostly so I could write “early Garry Wills”), but at the time my college-student reaction was a simple one: Did Wendell Berry just leap off the page and hit me over the head with a fencepost?

"My reaction was a simple one: Did Wendell Berry just leap off the page and hit me over the head with a fencepost?"

The writing was lyrical but commonsensical and practical. Berry, who had returned decades before to the farming life of his childhood and was an advocate for time-tested agrarian living, drove home the point that the United States had been built on certain principles - 

respect for the land, shared small communities and economies, the handing down of tried and true traditions and lifestyles, an assumption that a life of faith was a natural one, a management of resources that allowed for seasonal cycles

- that were all being abandoned, sacrificed to the gods of technological innovation, individualism, commercialism and unfettered capitalism.

I argued in my final paper for the class that Berry was right, but his solution was wrong: The only solution was Christian Marxism. (Can it be there was only one year I was 21? It must have been a long one then.) In sharp, practical prose reminiscent of Berry himself, the professor tore my essay apart. But I still remember the book well.

If you ask Berry’s many fans, that slim volume isn’t usually among their favorites. Berry first made his bones with his poetic works of the 1960s and 1970s, like The Broken Ground (1964), and many environmentalists and distributists hold dear his 1977 collection of essays, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. His novels—the first, Nathan Coulter, was published in 1960—have their own fans, and you can usually find them gravitating toward his “Port William novels” like Hannah Coulter (2004) or Jayber Crow (2000). (Keep your ears peeled next time you’re at the farmer’s market—one chance in 12 that guy selling you homemade mead named his son Jayber.)

"Keep your ears peeled next time you’re at the farmer’s market—one chance in 12 that guy selling you homemade mead named his son Jayber."

In a 2019 review for America of What I Stand On, a husky two-volume anthology of Berry’s writing edited by Jack Shoemaker, Jon Sweeney identified exactly when he became a Wendell Berry enthusiast: at the age of 16. The owner of a bookstore in the suburbs of Chicago that Sweeney haunted as a teenager gave him two of Berry’s books, The Wheel (a book of poems) and Recollected Essays, and said “I think you should get to know this author.” Sweeney did her one better, becoming so obsessed with Berry’s writings that he decided a few years later to undertake an impromptu pilgrimage to Berry’s farm in Port Royal, Ky. Alas, Berry wasn’t home, but it didn’t dampen Sweeney’s enthusiasm for his writings.

  

“There is always movement in Wendell Berry’s sentences. He writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know. The natural world is his primary teacher: its rhythms, its largesse, its mysteries,” Sweeney wrote:

“And in the essays, the natural world often reflects how change in humans is also natural, inexplicable and possible. I think this is what many who love his writing appreciate most about Berry, whether they realize it or not. For his Christian readers, this becomes an expansion of what we understand as conversion.”

The focus on conversion can seem a bit ironic in Berry’s case, because at first glance he doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of change in general. “He frequently questions society’s attempts to improve things, modernize or make ways of living more efficient. Those words—improve, modernize, efficient—might as well be in quotation marks whenever they appear in a Berry essay. He doubts them consistently,” Sweeney continued.

There were moments in the anthology where Berry made Sweeney’s hackles rise: “He is not always right. Any essayist worth reading will anger and annoy you from time to time. Berry can be cranky.” On the other hand, “his wisdom, and his call to better habits, is too essential. To ignore Wendell Berry is like trying to ignore your grandmother: You just can’t.”

“There is always movement in Wendell Berry’s sentences. He writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know."

Two years before Sweeney’s review, Anna Keating wrote a review for America on Laura Dunn’s new documentary, “Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.” In the film, an 83-year-old Berry “reads his essays in a Southern drawl over images of his working farm, the land he and his family have cultivated in Kentucky for five generations. He and his wife returned to this land after graduate school, in search of home and sense of place or, as William Faulkner once called it, ‘significant soil,’” Keating wrote.

The filmmakers never interview Berry on camera; rather, they try to take viewers into Berry’s world: “You hear the sound of footsteps as an unseen person walks through the hills or around the farm. You get to know some of the people Berry loves: his wife and collaborator, Tanya, his daughter, Mary, and his fellow farmers, both industrial, subsistence and organic.”

Berry, Keating wrote, “is an advocate of small farms, rural communities and Judeo-Christian values like kindness, all of which have been harmed by ‘get big or get out’ industrial agriculture. His life and work bear witness to the fact that it is never Christian to say, ‘I can do whatever I want with my own land’ or ‘my own body.’ We are stewards, not owners. What’s more, the attitude of ‘I can do whatever I want’ is toxic to earth and water, family and community.”

Keating owns a small business with her husband, and has a particular interest both in Catholic social teaching and in distributist writers, including the aforementioned Chesterton and Maurin but also Hilaire Belloc and Dorothy Day. She defined distributism as a way of thinking that “seeks to unite what has been separated, labor and capital, through the ownership of small businesses and farms or through the ownership of tools and a trade or through participation in a guild, so that wealth is not consolidated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals (capitalism) or in the hands of the state (socialism).” She found that the life Wendell Berry has created and the views he espouses “both are in line with this vision and can prove helpful to Catholics, serving as an antidote to the many ills of our time.”

There’s plenty more in the America archives on Wendell Berry, including this 2009 appreciation by fellow writer-farmer Kyle T. Kramer and this 2017 interview by Sean Salai of Berry’s daughter Mary, the executive director of the Berry Center in New Castle, Ky., a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the legacy of her father.

"His life and work bear witness to the fact that it is never Christian to say, ‘I can do whatever I want with my own land’ or ‘my own body.’ We are stewards, not owners."

 - James T. Keane, Senior Editor at America

The Seer: A Portrait of Wendell Berry - Movie Clip

May 25, 2016

#MSPIFF: Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

Mar 30, 2017

The Berry Center:

A Present Day Iteration of the Producer's Program

Sep 27, 2016

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2335444/

A Timbered Choir

by Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake

of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned

at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories

where the machines were made that would drive ever forward

toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw

the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;

I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.

I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered

footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments

of those who had died in pursuit of the objective

and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according

to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget

that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective

as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.

the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free

to sell themselves to the highest bidder

and to enter the best paying prisons

in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,

which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,

which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,

to the completed sale, to the signature

on the contract, which was to clear the way

to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home

would ever get there now, for every remembered place

had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love

unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant

to make way for the passage of the crowd

of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless

with their many eyes opened toward the objective

which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,

having never known where they were going,

having never known where they came from.

Wendell Berry

Process Theology Says God Gives AND Receives Love Contra Anselm & Aquinas

The University of Notre Dame: Anselm and Aquinas

Site references provided by R.E. Slater

The Ontological Argument by Atheist.org

The Theo-Logic of Love

(and why Aquinas and Anselm are wrong)

article link

by Thomas J. Oord

September 12th, 2017

God’s love involves both giving and receiving. That’s part of the theo-logic of love. But some great theologians erroneously thought God’s love only gives and never receives.

In my previous blogs, I’ve argued that the Bible, Jesus, and our common experience tell us that God is relational/passible. And God’s love involves giving to and receiving from others.

We might call this overall argument “the theo-logic of love.” The love described in Scripture, in Jesus, and in our own best experiences indicates that expressions of love are partly shaped by responses to others.

An entirely unrelated, unresponsive, and isolated person – if such a being existed – could not love. Love requires relationships of giving-and-receiving influence.

God's Love Both Gives AND Receives

One of the biggest errors committed by Christian theologians of yesteryear was in thinking God’s love involves only outgoing benevolence with no receptive relationality. In other words, they wrongly thought God’s love only gives and never receives. Let me offer a few examples of this erroneous thinking.

The Error of Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas thought God acted benevolently toward creatures but was not affected by creaturely love. “A relation of God to creatures is not a reality in God,” he writes. God knows creatures as ideas without being causally affected by them.[1]

Influencing relations with creation “are not really in Him,” Aquinas says, and “are ascribed to him only in our understanding.”[2] In other words, we only imagine God gives and receives in loving relationship. But in reality, God does not.

If Aquinas is right, biblical statements about God’s compassion are fictional. Creatures cannot bless God. And God never responds to sin by offering forgiveness.

The Error of Anselm

Anselm made the same error. “How are you compassionate, and, at the same time, passionless?” Anselm asks rhetorically of God. “For if you are passionless, you do not feel sympathy; and if you do not feel sympathy, your heart is not wretched from sympathy for the wretched; but this it is to be compassionate.”

In response to his own question, Anselm offers the same answer we saw in Aquinas: “When you behold us in our wretchedness, we experience the effect of compassion, but you do not experience the feeling. Therefore, you are both compassionate, because you do save the wretched, and spare those who sin against you; and not compassionate, because you are affected by no sympathy for wretchedness.”[3]

In other words, according to Anselm we think God is compassionate when God is actually not.

God’s Giving-and-Receiving Love

In contrast to Aquinas and Anselm, I think God’s love involves more than outgoing benevolence. God’s love also involves incoming empathy, receiving, and sometimes suffering.

I stand with many other theologians who affirm divine passibility. I list some in this footnote.[4] According to us, God’s love requires both giving and receiving. And we think the Bible, the witness of Jesus, and commonsense stand with us on this issue. And they stand against Aquinas and Anselm.

Leading theologians erroneously thought God’s love only gives and never receives.

Notes

[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I (Wesminster, Md: Christian Classics, 1981), q. 6, a.2, ad 1.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 13-14.

[3] St. Anselm, Proslogium, tr. Sidney Norton Deane (La Salle, IL, 1951), pp. 13-14.

[4] Among the many theologians who argue that God is passible, see especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1949), Gregory A. Boyd, Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), John B. Cobb, Jr., God and the World (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), Isaak August Dorner, “The History of the Doctrine of the Immutability of God,” in Divine Immutability, trans. Robert R. Williams and Claude Welch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 82–130. Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God, 5th ed. (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1965), Jung Young Lee, God Suffers for Us (Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1974), Bruce McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy: Implications for Karl Barth’s Later Christology for Debates over Impassibility,” Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, eds. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009); Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1974, 2001), Thomas Jay Oord, The Nature of Love: A Theology (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2010), Clark Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), Pinnock, et. al., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understand of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity, 1994), Jeff Pool, God’s Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering. Vol I Divine Vulnerability and Creation (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke and Co., 2009), John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Academic, 2007); T.F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God (New York: Continuum, 1996), Daniel Day Williams, “Suffering and Being in Empirical Theology,” in B. L. Meland ed., The Future of Empirical Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 175-94, Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Suffering Love,” in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, Thomas V. Morris, ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).

A History of Philosophy - Hugh Timeline Charts!

A History of Philosophy

https://superscholar.org/history-of-philosophy/

https://merlinccc.org/category/visual-library/  <-- RECOMMENDED

Philosophy has been around since the dawn of western civilization. The golden age of Greek philosophy took place in Athens in the 5th century BC. The works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle informed thousands of years of thought, becoming central to thought in the Roman world, the Middle Ages, and then resurfacing in the renaissance and later.

Starting at the height of the Roman republic, Christian thought was central to philosophy at least until the enlightenment. In the 18th century, questions of how we come to know what we believe we know (epistemology), and new ethical schools began to form. By the late 1800’s, questions of language, logic, and meaning took center stage, and the 20th century played host to one of the largest bursts of philosophical work ever seen. Today philosophical thought is applied to almost every component of life, from science to warfare, politics to artificial intelligence.

A History of Western Philosophy Chart

Merlin CCC   |   October 29, 2015   |   Visual Library

This awesome chart from superscholar.org provides an abbreviated, easy to follow, and informative overview of the general flow of thought in Western Philosophy. Although missing several influential scholars, it does a great job at capturing the nuts-and-bolts of things and is very well thought-out. We hope you enjoy this visual as much as we do and find it helpful! Click on the link below to view!

Both Western & Eastern Charts Together

https://merlinccc.org/visual-library/a-history-of-western-philosophy-chart/

Chart - History of Western Philosophy

analytic philosophy, ancient philosophy, aristotelianism, atomists, averroism, contemporary philosophy, continental philosophy, critical thinking, eclecticism, eleatics, empiricists, epicureanism, existentialism, german idealism, hellenistic, hellenistic philosophy, history, humanism, ionians, logic, modern philosophy, natural philosophy, neoplatonism, ordinarly language philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy, platonism, political philosophy, post-structuralists, postanalytic philosophy, pragmatism, presocratics, pythagoreanism, pythagorreans, rationalists, reason, roman philosophy, scholasticism, skepticism, sophists, stoicism, western philosophy.

A History of Eastern Philosophy

https://superscholar.org/eastern-philosophy/

Eastern Philosophy is expansive, beginning as far back as 5,000 years ago. Eastern philosophies are also some of the most intricate and popular on the planet, with many adherents to religious philosophies thousands of years old.

Far from being isolated, many philosophies began in small sections of the Asia and spread for thousands of miles. As early as the Ancient Greeks, there was interplay between eastern and western thought, and Islamic thought–in particular– laid the foundation for the enlightenment in the west.

Though many of the schools of thought on our graphic are religious in some form, their philosophical importance can’t be underestimated, with many religious thinkers contributing substantially to the development of logic, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology.

Both Western & Eastern Charts Together

https://merlinccc.org/visual-library/a-history-of-eastern-philosophy-chart/

Chart - History of Eastern Philosophy

Abheda, Achintya-Bheda-Abheda, Ajivika, Asharism, Athari, averroism, Avicennism, Bahai, Bahusrutiya, Bhedabheda, Buddhism, Caitika, Carvaka, Chanakya, Confucianism, Daoism, Dharmaguptaka, Dvaita, Dvaitadvaita, east-asian philosophies, Illuminationism, Indian Philosophy, Iranian Philosophies, Islamic Philosophy, Jainism, Kasyapiya, Legalism, Lokottaravada, Mahasamghika, Mahisasaka, Manichaeism, Maoism, Maturidi, Mazdakism, Mimamsa, Mutazilah, naturalists, Neo-Vedanta, philosophy, Prajnaptivada, Samkhya, Sarvastivada, School of Naturalists, Shia, Shinto, Shuddadvaita, Sramana, Sthavira Nikaya, Sufism, Sunni, Theravada, Transcendent Theosophy, Vaisheshika, vedanta, Vedics, Vibhajyavada, Vishishtadvaita, yoga, Zoroastrianism, Zurvanism

Process Theology 101: Reflections of Classical Theology in a Process World

Process Theology 101

By SCM on 15 May 2020, 11:52

Written by Ellen Lesser

[with commentary by myself, re slater]

EXPLORING THEOLOGY

Ellen Lesser is a postgraduate researcher of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter. She is an Anglican (though identifies as more spiritual than strictly religious) and has been involved with SCM since 2016 when she became the General Secretary for the University of Exeter’s Methodist and Anglican Society.

In the 1920s, Alfred North Whitehead developed a new metaphysical system of thought called process philosophy. Across a series of lectures, which have since been published under the single title, Process and Reality, Whitehead described a reality where everything is made up of occasions – metaphysical ‘particles’ which have their own desires and experiences.

Whitehead’s student, Charles Hartshorne, took Whitehead’s metaphysics – which, while peppered liberally with explicit references to God, was by no means a work of confessional Christianity – and developed it further using the tools of more specifically Christian philosophy. Hartshorne did not turn Whitehead’s philosophy into a Christian theology himself but laid the groundwork for many thinkers who came after to do so – these thinkers are now known as process theologians.

A deeply philosophical and metaphysical theology, process theology looks very different from traditional Western Christian theologies. Following Whitehead’s description, the God of process theology is ‘dipolar’, consisting of two ‘parts’. Whitehead described these two parts as the Consequent Nature and the Primordial Nature. Whitehead described the latter as eternal and unchanging, and thus the Primordial Nature on its own much resembles the God of Classical Theism which can often be found in Christian philosophy of religion.

• The Primordial Nature is also the ‘source of all novelty’, that is the Creator of all which is not itself God. Again, this Primordial Nature is a recognisable figure for many familiar with Christian religious philosophy. This was not, however, enough for Whitehead, and so the Consequent Nature is paired with the Primordial Nature.

• The Consequent Nature is immanent and changing; it is shaped by the world as the world itself changes. Later process theologians attribute co-suffering to the Consequent Nature as Whitehead describes it, thus painting an image of a God who not only rejoices with God’s creation but also suffers with it as well.

Criticism 1

This view of God has not gone without criticism. A common criticism of the process God is that it, being dipolar, is inherently not Trinitarian and thus undoes much of the work of early Christian theologians who worked hard to retain a Trinitarian theology. Process theologians have attempted to rebut this criticism, most notably in the book Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God, edited by Joseph Bracken and Marjorie Suchocki.

Criticism 2

Yet another criticism of the process God is that of the power of God. Process theologians John B Cobb Jr and David Ray Griffin explicitly deny God’s omnipotence. This is, in part, a response to the problem of evil.

• Process theologians hold that not only does God not coerce any aspect of reality into following God’s divine aims, but that God cannot coerce any aspect of reality into following God’s divine aims.

• The process God is persuasive and not coercive, and everything in reality is free to ignore and/or actively defy the persuasive influence of God. A coercive God, say process theologians, is not compatible with a truly free creation.

• [Hence, classical theology must address the problem of evil, known as theodicy. Contemporary process theology addresses the same by stating it in terms of freewill aka, the theology of Arminianism (modern day Wesleyanism/Methodism). Whereas its opposite, Calvinism, makes God accountable for sin and evil, Arminianism does not. Process Theology lines up with the latter and has lately redescribed Theodicy by the subject of "Open and Relational (Arminian/Process) Theology". - re slater]

Criticism 3

Such a God has been described as a philosophical God rather than the Christian God because, among other things, such a non-coercive God could not perform the miracles attributed to the Christian God, including raising Jesus from the dead. Indeed, the biggest criticism to process theology – in my view, at least – is that which deems the process God to be a different entity from the Christian God. Whitehead was not specifically interested in relating the God he described in Process and Reality to the Christian God, but the process theologians who have used his metaphysical framework as a basis for their own theologies are.

Much debate has been and continued to be had about whether process theologians have been successful in identifying their process God as the Christian God, or whether the process God is nothing more than a philosophical thought experiment which has no place in true Christian theology. As it stands, this remains to be seen.

Comment by R.E. Slater

Of especial importance to process metaphysicians is that of the influence of Platonism upon Christianity over the years. Earlier Semitic cultures were not as influenced by Greek thought as were later Intertestamental and New Testament authors and thinkers.

Like Isaac Newton's earlier world of mechanism and reductionism where science and math described nature as a clock-like mechanical structure, today's newer evolutionary and quantum sciences are actively removing such ingrained ideas. 

Process Theologians are doing the same by describing real-world processes not as substances or by dipolar ideas as mind v matter, but on the organic level of relationality and open-ended processes.

So when addressing the Westernization of ancient biblical cultures process ideation is getting back to seeing the world in flow and rhythm, wholeness of parts and the parts of wholeness. All more generally described as a series connecting spacetime events forming consequential possibilities.

Further, process theology sees:

(i) the Creator-God in terms of the First Order of all processes from which all succeeding processes have subtended;

Or, (ii) sees consciousness as arising from the "consciousness innately birthed into" the very organic (on inorganic) nature of creation to which man shares in his relationality backwards by inheritance of creation's innateness;

Or, (iii) in Jesus' redemption having made salvifically possible a freewilled creation's return to an empowered Imago Dei which it was birthed with (and never lost) upon the very first breath of God.

Process theology is substantially different and yet, Westernized Christianity may find many, many connecting points to the older ideations of classic theism - as well as many, if not all, world religions, through the talking points of wellbeing; connection with one another and nature; the inherent value of all things through words and acts of love, kindness, goodness, respect, equality, social justice of people and environment, etc.

It is hoped that process theology may assist dogmatic Christianity in rethinking its mission and outreach to a world which it has distanced itself from through its former institutionalized creeds and religions which have displayed division, exclusion, vengeance, the lack of love and respect for others, and so forth. 

R.E. Slater

December 6, 2021

PS - I found this a healthy review which pointed out the succinct differences between a non-processed view of Christianity vs. the process view of Christ and Christianity.

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John B. Cobb Jr. – Environmental “Evangelist”

John B. Cobb Jr. – Environmental “Evangelist”

article link

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

September 14, 2017

John Cobb with his great grandchildren – Photo: JC

No ivory tower has ever been able to contain Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. Even at 92, the premier “eco-theologian” of our times is a man on a mission. He urgently wants to convert us. But not in the conventional sense. He wants us all – regardless of our religious orientation, our racial, national, and cultural origins – to “evangelize” for an “ecological civilization” whose guiding principle recognizes that we are all on one planet and that the care and preservation of our planet is a shared responsibility.

Born in 1925 to Methodist missionary parents in Japan, he self-identifies today as a liberal Protestant. John’s earliest memories were formed in an interfaith context. The primarily Buddhist culture he encountered, as well as a Canadian missionary school he attended in Kobe, had a profound impact on him. Japan’s culture and religion were substantially different from his own, but that never phased him. “Throughout my career, I have emphasized differences. I’m not one of those people who thinks that all religions are very similar. On the contrary, I think it’s wonderful that they are different. But difference doesn’t mean one is better than the other,” he underscores.

Thus, at age 15, Cobb was utterly perplexed by and unprepared for the racism he encountered when he returned with his parents to the U.S. in 1940. During World War II he watched incredulously as the American government created internment camps for Japanese-Americans and labeled them as “enemies of the country.” It flew in the face of his personal experience living in Japan. America’s actions were an affront to his moral conscience and subsequently informed not only his world view, but also his view of interfaith.

“My view is different from that of many people who have been involved in interfaith because I want to emphasize how different Christianity and Buddhism are and how wonderful it is that they are different,” he repeats. “It’s because they’re so different that we can both learn from each another.”

Throughout his life, Cobb’s criticism of the dominant view in churches, media, universities, and government has earned him the label of a counter-cultural rebel. His philosophical “run-ins” with church doctrine and practice have also characterized his work. Yet it would be hard to deduce that just by observing the unassuming, soft-spoken professor who still speaks with a slight Southern twang. In spite of his gentility, Cobb can readily assume a prophetic voice – deep, passionate and resonant – when holding forth on the urgency of his mission to change people’s ways in order to save our planet.

The Influence of Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard in 1936 – Photo: Wikipedia, Richard Carver Woods

To understand Cobb’s contribution and the ecological civilization he promotes, one needs to know about Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead, a distinguished English mathematician, who was a senior lecturer at Trinity College Cambridge for 25 years, became deeply involved in the history of science at the University of London, and at age 63 crossed the Atlantic to accept a chair in philosophy at Harvard University. Over the next 23 years he wrote books on science, education, religion, and, most importantly, philosophy.

Process and Reality (1929) became the foundational text in process philosophy. As one scholar notes, in Whitehead’s process philosophy “there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.” Before process philosophy became a school of thought, it was called the philosophy of organism, or what Whitehead called “world loyalty.”

Process philosophy served as both catalyst and groundwork for John Cobb and powered his deep dive into interfaith dialogue, ecological civilization, and environmental ethics. Professor Cobb has written or edited more than 50 books, including Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition with D. R. Griffin (1976); Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1995), and Sustaining the Common Good (1994). Along the way, he co-founded the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, where he remains co-director.

In explaining how process thought underscores his drive to save the planet, Cobb highlights the importance of Rene Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher/scientist/theologian who has been called “the father of Western philosophy.” “Descartes, for the first time in human history, really created a metaphysical dualism of the most drastic sort between the mind and matter,” Cobb notes.

The Journey Beyond Dualism

Rene Descartes – Photo: Wikipedia

“Following Descartes’ pronouncements, philosophers scrambled,  including the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The most sophisticated philosophers were the ones who dealt the least with the natural world. In popular piety people still thought the whole of creation was God’s, but sadly the preachers were taught not to teach that in the seminaries,” Cobb laments.

“The idea that something is either mental or else material still has an enormous effect on the way that people think. Descartes thought that our bodies were material and our minds were, of course, mental. That dualistic perspective was the dominant result of Descartes’s work and influence until the evolutionary understanding that human beings are also a part of nature. If nature is just matter in motion, then it means that human beings are also matter in motion.

“The influence of dualistic philosophy on theology at that time has been enormous. But there were some people who said ‘No, if human beings are part of nature, then nature is not simply material. We have got to rethink the notion of nature.’” This is what John Cobb learned studying at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. “We called it neo-naturalism, but of course, that still means you have to rethink a lot of what science does and how science is formulated, and it’s not an easy matter to just change your view. I think the one who did the most thorough job in transforming his view was Alfred Whitehead. As I see it, the modern world has unfortunately by-passed the thinking of this new view of nature. In universities, today, you don’t find it very much, but nevertheless it is still what we desperately need.”

Cobb believes that science which has not given up the Cartesian view renders itself unable to deal with a great many facts. “One of these is that the things that we do, psychologically or spiritually, effects what happens physically. According to mainstream scientific teaching, stemming back to Descartes, this is impossible. One of the problems facing science today is that many things that happen, science insists can’t happen. If science would accept the need to rethink nature and give up its strictly materialistic view, then these facts are just as important scientific facts as any others.

“We have to think historically, because the controversy between science and religion grew out of a very specific kind of science and a very specific kind of religion ... Many forms of religion are not in conflict with any form of science; and there are forms of religion that are in total conflict with science. Take Zen Buddhism, for example, among the most thorough-going of the Buddhist groups. Zen Buddhism is very different from science, but it is not in conflict with science. And it doesn’t get into any conflict with science in the way the Abrahamic religions do.”

Rethinking the notion of nature and science and humankind’s role in protecting the planet has been at the fulcrum of Cobb’s academic career and environmental activism. In 2015, at age 90, he conceived and organized a ground-breaking conference at Pomona College in Claremont called Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization, where some 2000 people attended including more than 200 from China. (Read TIO’s report on it here.)

John Cobb (middle in red) with at Chinese delegation at the Seizing an Alternative conference – Photo: JC

He says there were virtually no eco-theologians until the 1960s. Theologians before then were almost entirely – and he includes himself – anthropocentric, dealing only with human relationships. “But in the late '60s we were awakened to the fact that ignoring the natural world meant that we were not only ignoring it; we were destroying it.

“We need to think not in mechanical terms but in organic terms. And there’s lots of evidence that that’s a good, sound way of thinking about nature. We really need to shift our view so that other things – besides human beings – have value in and of themselves. We need to respect all things in nature and not treat them simply as resources for our use. Then there would be a chance of having what we are calling for: an ‘ecological civilization.’ And that’s what I’m committed to. It’s still a civilization. It’s got science. It’s got technology. But it subordinates the use of things to the appreciation of all things.”

John B. Cobb Jr. speaks softly, but he carries a big mandate for humanity: to move into a new phase of consciousness, an organic phase of consciousness, one that will allow us to create the ecological civilization we urgently need.The impact of Cobb’s environmental evangelism shows up in the work of Pando Populus, an organization he founded two years ago to ensure his ideas would not be seen as ivory tower theory but would actually take practical form and shape. Recently he spent a morning with members and supporters of Pando to bring the resources of many different organizations to bear on local needs in a specific part of L.A.

“We had an event in Death Alley, the section in L.A. that has the most murders year after year, a section that is very far removed from an ecological civilization. People there wanted to take advantage of the availability of a little piece of land to help build community out of the existing less-than-communitarian situation. The people who showed up that day represented about 20 different organizations that are all interested in improving what happens there. Pando’s role was to bring together people who live there with people from the outside.

“We also work with large institutions. UCLA and the whole University of California system want to have zero waste. Of all the universities, UCLA is furthest along. Yet they throw away a billion dollars of waste every year and have come to the realization that it’s possible to avoid being so wasteful. In the near future, we will be bringing people together from all over the state to celebrate their achievements.”

Cobb is encouraged now that the concept of an ecological civilization is finally taking root in our society.

“Obviously the movement didn’t develop around that term. But from my point of view the most important part of the movement is not its own special teaching, but rather its potential to change the world.”