Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

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 [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Friday, October 6, 2017

Robert B. Mellert - What Is Process Theology: Chapters 3 & 4



What Is Process Theology?


Dr. Mellert is an assistant professor in the department of theological studies at the University of Dayton.

Published by Paulist Press, New York, Paramus, Toronto, 1975. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Summary

(ENTIRE BOOK) Dr. Meller writes about Whiteheadian thought, without the jargon and technical intricacies, so that the lay person might have better understanding of the thinking of the founder of process philosophy.

Chapters

Few libraries had any books on Whiteheadian thought in 1947 when he died. Today libraries of all sorts have shelves laden with books trying to explain, interpret and apply his thinking, but these authors are inclined to talk to each other. The author attempts to make process thought understandable to the rest of us.

The core of process thought: Rather than a “substance theology” based on static, spatial models, process thought “switches gears” to a concern with spatial-temporal models such as change in God, Christ becoming divine and the on-going process of revelation.

Some basic Whiteheadian concepts: becoming, actual occasions, eternal objects, prehensions.

The author contrasts Whitehead’s thought with traditional religions which start with proof of God. Whitehead inverts the process, starting with the experience of religion and grasping the truth that there is more at issue in the world than the world itself.

God is constantly changing as he includes more and more reality in his consequent nature. What we do on earth makes a difference in the very reality of God.

Dr. Mellert discusses the relations both of God to the world and the world to God.

Process thought is being compatible with the presumptions of Christian faith and is friendly with Christian ideas regarding body and soul.

Jesus is unique because in his humanity he presents a more perfect model of ideal humanity than has ever existed, or will ever exist. He is divine because of the realization of that divinity within him.

The Church is a process whereby individuals come to believe in Jesus and add the weight of their belief to the furtherance of the process that is the Church. The Church is not a stable, immutable institution that has existed since the time of Jesus.

In the process perspective, each sacramental action is both created by the community and creative of the community. Concrete experiences of the past contribute positively to the present and are immanently incorporated in what the present is becoming.

The new and the old morality are both inadequate. Process thought can make important contributions to the old and new because it is both metaphysical and flexible.

Process theology as a provider of a solid philosophical framework for a great diversity of human experience and belief. It therefore is helpful in synthesizing the diversity of interpretations of immortality.

The notion of relativity that process theology employs is discussed. All reality is inter-related in space and time, and no single real entity has a prior absoluteness that stands outside the process of reality as a whole.

* * * * * * * * * *



Chapter 3: Religion

A few years ago, when a variety of liturgical changes were being introduced in their Church, many Roman Catholics suffered a severe crisis of faith. The Church as they knew it — with its Latin Mass and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament — had changed beyond their recognition, and the readjustment to the “new Church” — with its guitar Masses and handshakes of peace — was very traumatic. There is something to be said for their appreciation of the old liturgy. It provided a sense of the mysterious and mystical that has been lost in the reforms. Hearing priests mumble a strange language and seeing the Eucharist in a gold casing surrounded by candles and flowers created an atmosphere that often generated profound religious feelings.

The new liturgy does not recapture that kind of experience, nor does it try. Sacraments are better instruments for evoking communitarian feelings than private feelings. Thus, the new liturgy attempts to create a new kind of religious experience, that of a community of Jesus’ followers living and loving together in his name. The spirit of fellowship manifested at a liturgy which is prepared and executed with this purpose in mind becomes the sign of Christian charity and the motivating cause to carry it beyond the liturgical community to the world at large.

Both the mystical and the communitarian are authentic religious experiences and genuine forms of Christian prayer. The fact that today’s liturgies emphasize the latter in no way minimizes the importance of the former. It merely indicates that the religious life of man requires more than simply participating at liturgies. The solitary figure bent in prayer in a quiet, darkened chapel, no less than the happy, youthful faces sharing a dialogue homily, inspires us to an appreciation of what the religious spirit in man is.

Numerous other kinds of experiences can also be appropriately called religious. These likewise emerge from time to time in private prayer and public worship. Theologians, psychologists and philosophers have all tried to catalogue these experiences. Examples include the experiences of transcendence, awe, insignificance, gratitude, acceptance by God, reverence, guilt, sense of obligation, and inner shame. Sometimes the experience is less obviously religious, such as that of wholeness. simplicity, and the unity of reality: of uniqueness, individuality, and power: of the fittingness and appropriateness of things: or of the moving together, transformation, and harmonization of particulars.1 The number and kinds of religious experiences are almost infinite, probably because they are so unique and particular to those who have experienced them. Their degree of intensity likewise varies, from full-blown visions to fleeting moments of private recollection.

Whitehead’s own appraisal is that religious experiences begin with personal occasions of solitude and extend to the universal. He writes that religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.2 This solitariness includes even the experience of feeling forsaken by God. From religion one learns to cope with himself and to take upon himself the burden of his own life. But this is only the negative side. The religious man also learns to appreciate reality and to be sensitive to it in a personal way. This is because religion deals with particular emotions and personalized purposes. There is a certain aesthetic character to its feeling for the world. Things have a certain value or worth beyond what they actually are, because they reveal mystery, beauty and meaning that can be understood in no other way. A man is thus taken beyond himself and provided with a way of prehending the universe.

What religion ultimately grasps, according to Whitehead. is this truth: “That the order of the world, the depth of reality of the world, the value of the world in its whole and in its parts: the beauty of the world, the zest of life, the peace of life, and the mastery of evil, are all bound together.”3 This occurs not accidentally, but as a result of the creativity, the freedom, and the infinite possibilities that the universe manifests.

Because this statement of Whitehead is central to his idea of religion, and because some of the words carry a connotation peculiar to his thought, a few reflections may clarify his meaning. Order is not the same for Whitehead as it is for politicians. It is the refusal of the deadening influence of conformity and the tendency toward new forms and ordered novelty. Depth is the result of cumulative achievements of the world that make enrichment possible. Value, as particularized in every occasion of reality, reveals itself in continual interaction, promoting depth and destruction. Beauty is a central concept in Whiteheadian thought, because it defines “the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying.”4 and toward which the universe constantly strives. But the mere repetition of beauty can become dull and uninteresting without adventure and the zest of life urging it to new and exciting harmonies and contrasts. Finally, peace is the “harmony of harmonies which calms destructive turbulence and completes civilization.”5 While not religious in themselves, these insights into reality arise from the religious sensitivities of man and add an appreciation to the universe that only religion can provide.

The basic religious insight, then, is that we can know more than can be formulated in the abstract schema of science and philosophy.6 This “extra knowledge” comes from religion’s intuition about the aims and purposes of things that are revealed in the wisdom of nature itself. It is not new factual data, but a new feeling, or prehension of the old data. Thus, religion is always saying more than science or philosophy about man and his world, even though it is not privy to special information. Its “saying more” is not something that can be proved or demonstrated; it can merely be pointed to, felt, and appreciated. This is the sense in which one might repeat with the Scholastic theologians that there is a knowledge that comes from faith. It is a knowledge that goes beyond the reasons of the mind to the sensitivities of the soul.

The desire of the religious man to preserve these experiences has led to his repeated attempts to set down his inspiration for the edification of others. This is the origin of creeds and dogmas. They are testimony to what religious experience can inspire in man’s intuition, and they reveal in retrospect the power and intensity of religion in the history of man. The danger is that when a man has no religious experiences of his own, he tends to repeat those that have been handed down from others in their creedal and dogmatic formulations. Religion that finds itself constantly relying upon these secondary sources has lost its original vitality and creativity. Dogmas that are merely repeated become rigid, abstract concepts that fail to inspire. They result in a narrowing of perspective and a sheltering of religion from its necessary commerce with the world, where new insights and inspirations are occasioned, and where new dogmas and creeds tentatively emerge.

Ideally, therefore, the solitariness that inspires religion in man extends beyond the individual to the universal. The values that are intuited in the formation of character in the private feelings of a man are not isolated from a more general picture of the world. Character requires that one’s individuality merge with the universe. Ultimately, says Whitehead, “religion is world-loyalty.”7

From what has been said above, it is readily apparent that the religious spirit is very important to Whitehead and to his way of thinking. Its importance is not in any unique claim to truth, but in its contributions to rationality as a whole. Its chief contribution is its familiarity with the particular, and in this way it is the essential complement to philosophy. Philosophy by itself is always speculative and general, and as such is always plagued with the suspicion of inapplicability. Religion frees philosophy from this suspicion because it is “the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts. particular emotions, and particular purposes.”8 At the same time, religion is itself always interested in the universal, because the generalities of philosophy give some coherence to the particularities of emotion and feeling that belong to the data of religion. There is, then, a mutual enrichment. Philosophy needs the data of religious experience in order to remain sensitive to the particular, and religion needs philosophy to modify it, rationalize it, and fit it into a wider context.

Science is the third corner of this triangle, and it, too, helps to support rationality as a whole. Like religion, science also contributes something to philosophical speculation. Its contribution is data — not necessarily a different set of data from that available to religion, but a different way of looking at that data. Science is concerned with what is perceived, and how these perceived things can be integrated with rational thought in a harmonious way. Religion is concerned with achieving some kind of harmony between rationality and the sensitive reactions of the perceiver to what is perceived. Religious considerations always deal with the particular feelings that data evoke. When certain sciences, such as psychology, study particular feelings, they do their work in an objective fashion, i.e., with other people’s emotions. not their own. How particular feelings transform the experiencing subject, and how they ultimately transform the world according to their visions of the ideal are the fundamental issues of religious concern.

At the level of man no description of process is possible without a description of religion. Process occurs because prehensions of data are given new focus in new actual occasions, creating novelty and interest. These prehensions are inseparable from the sensitivities of emotion and feeling that are experienced at every unique moment of life. Particularity is the basis for generality, just as individual moments of experience are the basis for man, and man is the basis for a civilized epoch. Thus, religious experiences, which are prehensions of data with a particular nuance or coloration, go to the very core of process itself.

Whitehead’s philosophy, although thoroughly secular, is likewise thoroughly religious. Religion is not simply an activity of man, or even a dimension of his personality. It is a description of the very process of reality at the human level, where sensitivities, feelings and emotions from the world, evoking an appreciation and a reverence for the world, contribute their particularity to process. What is happening in the world because of man takes place because of the religions of man. This is, of course, a very wide sense of religion, but it contains its grain of truth. What a man understands and believes about himself and how he prehends the world are the bases both for his morality and for his liturgy. He acts and celebrates according to the way he has shaped himself, and according to the way he wishes to shape the world. For its part, the world is the richer, or the poorer, because of it.

Whitehead thus inverts the way in which traditional theology understands religion. In the latter, one starts with a proof for the existence of God. Then one argues that man must acknowledge his supremacy. Religion is the way in which man establishes his relationship with God. It includes both the way in which he lives and the manner in which he worships, and it requires that man “practice his religion” both individually and socially. For Whitehead, one starts with religion. not with God. It is because of the experience of the religious along with the secular that one begins to grasp the truth that there is more at issue in the world than the world itself. The reality of God is thus intuited from reality as a whole. Man is thus religious first, and a believer second. Religion is not a consequence of his believing, but a condition for it.

What about God in Whitehead’s religion? So far there has been scant mention of God at all. And yet, he has not been far from the discussion. In talking about the world, we have been implicitly talking about God. For the world that man experiences is inseparable from the very nature of God. If man can intuit “extra knowledge” from that world and grasp a certain meaning and depth that go beyond its raw data, this is simply a manifestation of the divine context in which he has found that data. The “something more” that man discovers about his world, and the respect and reverence that this evokes from him, is perhaps the best and only description one can give of the living God this side of speculation.

In one of Whitehead’s more often quoted statements, he writes, “The power of God is the worship he inspires.”9 In other words, we are back to liturgy and prayer. What man does with his experiences is the ultimate determinate of the future. The cultivation of religious sensibilities, the sensitivity to the feelings and emotions that arise out of the nature of things, and a reverence and respect for the world as the ultimate source of what can be realized in God is, in the final analysis, the most profound worship that man can hope to offer.


Notes:

1. For an excellent discussion of this issue, cf. Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences (New York: Viking Press. 1964).

2. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1960), p. 16.

3. Ibid., p. 115.

4. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan Company, Free Press Paperback edition. 1967), p. 266.

5. Ibid., p. 285.

6. Religion in the Making. op. cit., p. 137.

7. Ibid., p. 59.

8. Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 19.

9. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, Free Press Paperback edition, 1967), p. 192.


* * * * * * * * * *



Chapter 4: God

Nearly a decade has passed since God made the cover of Time magazine when it asked rhetorically, “Is God Dead?” Although it did not pretend to give an answer to that question, it did shed much light on a discussion that was being carried on by some of America’s leading theologians. Today the subject is just about as dead as God was purported to be. But in its wake we have become much more conscious of how little we can truly say about God, and how careful we must be in saying it.

The “death of God” controversy was not a new phenomenon that suddenly arose in our generation. It was the result of a gradual realization that the way in which we thought and spoke about God was no longer appropriate for expressing those concepts in a particular culture. Indeed, it is an unanswerable question because no human concept or language is ever adequate for divine things. Nevertheless, we must say something about God, because a God about whom we say nothing is a rather useless deity for the religious needs of man.

Even an appeal to the Bible as a source of information about God is not the solution, because the writers of Scripture faced the same problem as secular thinkers when it came to putting on paper the way in which the deity manifested itself to them. They, too, had to resort to human language in the context of a particular human civilization. As a result, the biblical tradition itself raises some problems regarding its representations of God.

On the one hand, we read in the Bible about the Lord who takes sides in history, rewarding the Israelites for their fidelity and punishing their lapses into idolatry. He loves his people, suffers for them, and repeatedly extends to them his mercy and forgiveness. He provides for their needs in the desert, gives them a new land, and defends them from their enemies. He sends prophets to them to remind them of his covenant with them, and despite their hardness of heart, he sends his Son to redeem men from sin and restore them to divine favor. It is a story of God’s activity in history, his constant care and concern for his people, and his continual attempts to persuade them to turn from the allurements of the Evil One and to place their trust in his love.

On the other hand, though, the Bible also suggests an image of God as the Eternal One far removed from the petty conflicts of earth. He is Yahweh, “I am who am.” His ways are inscrutable, and man has no control over the workings of his divine plan, because he is both unchanging and unchangeable. This side of the biblical God is unseen, unworldly and unknowable. Even his name is shrouded in mystery. Fidelity to him is purely a matter of faith. He is so unrepresentable that alien tribes could ask, “Where is their God?” To those with graven images and large molten idols, the Israelites surely appeared to be the atheists of their time. Before the early Christian Church could address itself to the problem of finding some theologically acceptable way of representing the biblical God, its rapid movement to the West occasioned its confrontation with a new set of ideas in Greek philosophy. Probably because they were intellectually unimpressed with the myths and deities of their own people, Greek thinkers reasoned to a kind of philosophical deity that was much more a God of eternity than a God of history, much more compatible with the biblical image of Yahweh than with the image of Lord. He was the unmoved mover, the first cause, and an existence unto himself. He was not a God of emotions and feelings, but of transcendence and ultimacy.

The attempt of the Fathers of the Church to reconcile Greek thought with the biblical tradition resulted in the choice of Yahweh over Lord, and this choice has shaped the Christian mind ever since. As a result, God is really not an intrinsic part of history, but one who intervenes from his position in eternity. Time is not real to God, because he knows every event — past, present and future — in a single all-knowing act. Furthermore, he is in his essence devoid of emotions and feelings. He permits evil, even though he does not cause it, and he is not personally engaged in the moment-by-moment struggle against it. He is the complete, self-contained God, fully perfect and without needs. Nothing in the world, or done by the world, can contribute to his intrinsic glory.

Even today much theological opinion prefers the God of philosophy to the God of history. Emotions, feelings and activities are considered accidental to what God is in himself and extrinsic to his divine nature. When applied to God in human discourse, they are simply anthropomorphic representations of him, necessary in order that man have a way of thinking and speaking about the deity. However, these modes of speaking do not tell us anything about the deity itself.

The difficulty is that this very intellectual representation of God never seems quite adequate for religious purposes. Prayer, for example, generally presumes that there is someone who hears and can act upon the merits of a request. God’s love for man is not very inspiring when it is stripped of its concreteness and raised to the abstract level of his divine will that all men be saved. The abstract God of the philosopher is not sufficiently consoling to the man of religion. He seeks a more concrete God who can be persuaded, who is personally concerned, and with whom he can talk as one man to another. Christian tradition has always recognized this kind of God, even though Christian thinkers have been loathe to theorize about him. The problem is to find a way to reconcile him with the exigencies of reason.

Is there a way to reconcile the concrete God of religion with the abstract God of philosophy? Can God have feelings and emotions and still be the unchangeable ground of all reality? If he changes, can he still be perfect? Is it possible for him to be a part of the history and structure of reality, and at the same time be the foundation upon which that history and structure are based? Can he be both temporal and eternal, loving and removed, personal and metaphysical, immanent to the world and transcendent of it?

One of the most original and fascinating insights of Whiteheadian philosophy is the way in which it makes this reconciliation. It is a new attempt, born more out of a philosophical need than from a religious concern. And yet, it has captured the imagination of both process philosophers and religious thinkers concerned with the availability of God. Unlike the Scholastic tradition, Whitehead rejects any notion of God as the philosophical ultimate who is self-sufficient and beyond the laws of nature. It is unfortunate. Whitehead maintains, that it was thought necessary to pay him metaphysical compliments. For Whitehead, God is not a last resort who stands outside the system and remains independent of it. Rather, God is an integral element in the whole and participates actively in its struggles and concerns.

The development of Whitehead’s idea of God occurred only gradually in his writings. At first he described God merely as the principle of limitation — that principle by which a specific entity does not become other than it is. Here God’s function is to envisage the totality of possibility, and to make available to emerging occasions those possibilities that are relevant to its becoming. Limitation is essential to process because some reason must be given for the particularization of what in fact occurs. Without a principle of limitation, there could be no individual, novel actual occasions. In fact, there could be no actual occasions at all.

This position created a philosophical difficulty for Whitehead. If God’s function is to envisage possibilities, God has to be real. And the only realities are actual entities. Hence, to bridge the gap between pure possibilities and their real availability to process, God has to be an actual entity in which those possibilities are contained. Therefore, God is that actual entity who gives reality to eternal objects by including them within himself.

Because the ultimates in his system are abstractions from reality and because God is real, Whitehead could not include God in the category of ultimates. God is an actual entity. As an actual entity, he can be described in the same terms as every other actual entity. He is temporal; he prehends physically and conceptually; he has a subjective aim and seeks satisfaction. Furthermore, he is constantly increasing and is an integral part of the process of all reality. Although he is not perfect or ultimate in any absolute sense, he has a perfection and an ultimacy relative to all other things.

In his final statement about God Whitehead developed his theory of divine di-polarity. It is based upon his analysis of an actual entity as prehending both physically and conceptually. God, too, has aspects that allow for physical prehensions and conceptual prehensions. These are called his primordial nature and his consequent nature. The choice of terms is Whitehead’s and it may be somewhat confusing for the novice theologian, for we are dealing with a different kind of distinction from what is found in our theological traditions.

In the first place, the words “primordial” and “consequent” have no reference to the antecedent and consequent will of God in Thomistic theology. Thomas’ distinction was based upon the necessity for God to restructure the divine plan in the aftermath of man’s sin. Whitehead’s distinction has to do with the ways in which God is related to other actual entities. Secondly, the term “nature” must not be identified with the divine nature or the human nature of Scholastic theology. In the latter system of thought, nature separates levels of reality according to a hierarchical arrangement — God, angels, man, animals, plants and inanimate matter. For Whitehead, nature is simply an abstract way of talking about how something relates to the rest of reality. Having two natures, therefore, does not imply any real duality since they are merely aspects of the one actual entity.

In other words, the primordial nature and the consequent nature of God are not two individual elements which, as joined together, form the deity. We cannot, at this point, make any meaningful analogies either to the union of the three persons in God (the doctrine of the Trinity) or to the two natures in Christ (the hypostatic union). We are speaking here simply of one God, who is represented as an actual entity and who manifests at least two ways in which his divinity is related to the world.

God’s primordial nature, Whitehead says, is independent from his commerce with particulars. It is the abstract side of God, or God “alone with himself.”1 By virtue of his primordiality, God contains within himself the totality of possibility through his conceptual envisagement of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. In his primordial nature God is without any temporal connotation and without any direction toward individual entities. It is the purely conceptual side of the divinity, without any actuality in itself. Rather, it is the basis of actuality, because it is the foundation for the actualization of possibilities.

As primordial, then, we understand God as the structure of possibility and the context in which actualization takes place. Whitehead uses the terms “ground” and “principle” to illustrate this side of the divinity. It is similar to, but not identical with Paul Tillich’s concept of God as “Ground of Being” or the medieval interpretation of “Supreme Being.” The difference is that Whitehead is not trying to distinguish the Being of God from other beings, or isolate him into a distinct and unique classification. He is trying to relate God to the whole of reality. Even as primordial, he stresses that God is not before all creation, but with all creation. God’s primordiality is simply a way of talking about how God is related to the world as the context or structure from which all reality emerges.

The images used to describe the primordial nature of God have definite similarities to the God of philosophy and the biblical Yahweh outlined above. It is the impersonal and unknowable side of God, the side not engaged in particulars. In the consequent nature we find the God of history and the Lord of all things. It is the personal aspect of God, whereby he constantly feels what is happening in the world and is affected by the world.

In his consequent nature God is intrinsically related to physical reality. He prehends all of the actual occasions of the physical world as they emerge. Every actual occasion that occurs is thus taken into God and adds its reality to the reality of God. This is why God has a temporal aspect. He is constantly changing as he includes more and more reality in his consequent nature. Indeed, he is constantly being changed by that reality. What we do on earth makes a difference to the very reality of God. What we are and how we become affects what God is and how he is to become. God prehends other actualities in the same way that actual entities prehend each other. There is a physical prehension of the datum according to a particular subjective form. And there are also conceptual prehensions of possibilities in the incorporation of that datum into a new occasion. Because God prehends all actual entities and all eternal objects, every prehension of an actual entity involves both what that actual entity is and what it might have been. In this way God sees the ideal while prehending the actual. Because of his vision, and because of his concern and care for what is happening in reality, he is constantly luring reality on to newer and greater things. Whitehead describes this aspect of God as the “poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness.”2

But God is not an all-powerful, arbitrary ruler of the earth. In fact, he is powerless before the freedom of each individual moment. For in this sense he is no different from every other actual entity. He knows more. because he envisages more. He suffers more, because he knows more. He is, says Whitehead. “the great companion — the fellow sufferer who understands.”3

One important way in which God is different from other actual entities is that he is an everlasting entity. He does not emerge and perish, only to be succeeded by another occasion, as is the case with the rest of reality. He continues through time as the one enduring reality, prehending all things. As a result, nothing is ever lost, because everything that has ever been is incorporated into the consequent nature of God by virtue of God’s prehending it. God is the fullness of all actuality, in whom all actuality is preserved everlastingly. Every actual occasion thus achieves objective immortality in the consequent nature of God and is thus made available as datum for further process in the world.

The consequent nature of God is, therefore, the composite nature of all the actualities of the world, each having obtained its unique representation in the divine nature. We have already seen that each actuality is an organismic unity, whether it be the unity of prehensions in an actual occasion, the unity of a nexus of actual occasions, or even the unity of many nexus. God in his consequent nature is the organism in which all other organisms are prehended and contained. Everything is thus immortalized in the consequent nature of God.

In sum, God is that actual entity that is both the structure or context in which reality emerges (primordial nature) and the totality of that reality (consequent nature). This is because he prehends fully both the totality of possibility (primordial nature) and the totality of actuality (consequent nature). He is both abstract and concrete, eternal and temporal, transcendent and immanent. He can be identified as the God of philosophy as well as the God of history, and he can serve man’s metaphysical needs as well as his religious ones. To him we can apply the images both of Yahweh and of Lord.

There is one final thing to say about the God of process philosophy before we can move to the next chapter, where we will consider the implications of God for the world. In several passages of his major work, Process and Reality, Whitehead refers to the “superjective nature” of God. It is not entirely clear how this concept fits into his overall schema, but he does describe what he means by the term.

We have just discussed how every actual entity that has ever emerged is taken into God in his consequent nature. God is thus the repository of all reality because he is the unique subject that prehends every actual occasion. But just as this reality contributes to the reality of God, so also is it the data for all further development in the future. In this sense, therefore, God contains the data out of which the world is continuously being renewed. The fact that God contributes what he is in his consequent nature to the on-going process of reality is the meaning of his “superjective nature.” This contribution is unique in that God passes back to the world not only the stubborn facts of history, but a sense of what perfected actuality might have been. God can do this because, in addition to prehending the totality of actuality, he also prehends the totality of possibility. In his superjective nature, then, God offers back to the world everything that is of value from the past for the formation of the future.

Is the superjective nature a third nature of God? Considering Whitehead’s infrequent reference to it and recalling the number of times he refers only to the primordial and consequent natures, it appears unlikely. It seems instead to be a casual use of the word “nature.” perhaps with the specific purpose of warning his readers against employing that word too categorically. The superjective nature might thus best be explained as an aspect of the consequent nature. That is, when considered in its fullest sense, the consequent nature not only gathers into itself all actual occasions that have emerged and perished, but it also makes those occasions available once more to the world in God’s own loving way.

This, in brief, is Whitehead’s description of God in his philosophical system. It is his way of speaking about the unspeakable. There are many important differences between Whitehead’s God and the deity as described in other philosophies. There are even more important differences from the God of religious men. A Christian, for example, may well have some serious reservations about whether this description of God can be harmonized with what he has learned from his tradition.

And yet, despite the difficulties and doubts, there are some significant advantages in Whitehead’s explanation. First, he suggests to us a God that comes more from the exigencies of reason than from the psychological needs of man or the uncharted beginnings of his varied traditions. As such, his God is less vulnerable to the attacks of skeptical rationalists. Furthermore, Whitehead’s God is concretely alive and active in the world as one who comforts, loves and understands. He is not a candidate for inclusion as an obituary in Time magazine. Finally, Whitehead’s notion of God does seem to be an adequate way of understanding and explaining the biblical images of God, and perhaps it is even more suitable for this task than the God of Plato or Aristotle, Augustine or Thomas. For the Christian, this may be the most persuasive reason of all.


Notes:

I. Process and Reality. op. cit., p. 39.

2. Ibid., p. 408.

3. Ibid., p.413.


Thursday, October 5, 2017

Robert B. Mellert - What Is Process Theology: Preface, Chapters 1 & 2



Introduction to Process Theology
by R.E. Slater


The "Process of Theology" is not the same as "Process Theology". In classical terms biblical hermeneutics has always been viewed as working from the original language of the Hebrew or Greek manuscripts outwards to an understanding of God resulting in a faith response from that spiritual understanding. Now, if the derived meaning of one's "understanding" or "interpretation" is "agreed upon" by enough people then religious Christian fellowships will work those thoughts into their teachings, creeds or dogmas of the bible - both biblically and systematically. From this "a faith-action of one kind or another" is subsequently undertaken. Practically speaking, such actions have been as good as they have been bad for humanity. Some actions have given us horrible religious inquisitions, tyrannies and oppression while others have provided a healing unity across societies. Telling us that it is as important to make sure of one's understanding of the spiritual before it is acted upon in resultant faith-actions.

Of course, a religious Christian group's faith-understanding/interpretation of God changes from one era to the next, from circumstance to circumstance, and from situation to situation. Thus identifying a common sense axiom telling us "There are as many variables which might affect a faith-belief as there are processes in which to effectuate that faith-belief." Which is why there are so many different kinds of Christian faiths reflected through thousands of faith-forms and worship-varieties within Christianity. Then, after a little while when some time has passed, some prophet or preacher, or body of "sanctioned interpreters", will come along and declare a past/present faith-understanding either  anathema to the faith or worthy of being followed either in its parts, or its whole, which action then incorporates itself into the hoary traditions of a Christian faith tradition. Some groups may "canonize their faith understanding" through "Catholic Encyclicals" while others may codify them into "Protestant Creedal Confessions." After which these adapted faith-understandings are embedded into the adopting fellowship's ways of thinking and behaving according to their belief systems.

Now with so many variants of Christianity a 21st century Christian might question how one might pick-and-choose between the many strains-and-forms of the Christian faith. Or ask why those forms area the way that they are in their structure-and-content. Or even whether or not those synchretized beliefs hold any validity for today's contemporary societies. As example, consider the commonly accepted orthodox teaching that "God never changes."  It's context can be found in the NT Church's grasp of the Hebrew Scriptures (OT) expressing Greek Hellenistic thought of who or what "The Divine" was or is in His Being.  Many centuries later it became the mantra of the early medieval church when faced with the unsettling ideas arising from science. Today it is used again to disavow any kind of display of humanity to the transgender, homosexual, gay or lesbian. Such rigorous fiats leave no room for interpretative disagreement or culturally benevolent engagement except to engage its declaration flatly in its form of solitary binary thinking common to Cartesian dualistic systems.

However, in deference to such flat fiats, one begins to wonder how older philosophical systems could so strongly "color" our thinking about the character of God as to cause Christian beliefs to react in assertive dogmatic statements with a finality that would bar no trespass to other ideas on this subject. Rightly we may ask, "Are such traditionally accepted faith expressions viable to the Christian faith?" Perhaps God does change. Or perhaps we change. Or perhaps we both change in relation to one another. At which point the "parsing" of God's character begins all over again as to who-is-right and who-is-wrong. In other words, competing religious bodies within Christian orthodoxy begin asking the question whether an understanding/interpretation of Scripture had been rightly understood and is being rightly applied? Or even, was it actually implied in the original autographs of the biblical record as claimed by the various prophets and priests of its day likewise influenced by the epochal philosophies of their day in which they thought and lived within the community's social/cultural restraints, mores and beliefs?

Process Theology then is a way of stepping out of all of this interpretive mileu to ask the larger philosophical questions of Divine engagement (i) with creation, (ii) in relationship to Jesus' Atonement and Reconciliation, and (iii) what Divine engagement might mean to our lives and societies today. It takes the entirety of the "process of theological interpretation outcome" to then rearrange that set of processes within a broader philosophical process known as "Process Theology." Hence, the former is a way of rearranging our understanding of God whereas the latter is a way of rearranging our understanding of our understanding of God.

As such, Process Theology is not a new kind of biblical hermeneutic but rather circumscribes the entirety of theological interpretations from apprehension to outcome. In essence, it is a different way of bringing God into the human psyche of faith and faith-response by asking of our motivations and whether we had considered our living faith when set within a more subtler, more fundamental, process seemingly everywhere present around us except perhaps in our classically-held theologies. This is the value of difference, of questioning, of deconstructing, and reconstructing one's beliefs to be more in accordance with the bedrocks of the Christian faith we would teach rather than the accepted traditional norms of the Christian faith we choose to hold and believe. Process Theology is a philosophical outlook to the kind of theology we think we see in the bible telling us of God. If so, we should know what this kind of theology is and how it may be important to the Christian faith. Let us begin with Mellert's discussion of Process Theology.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
October 5, 2017

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What Is Process Theology?


Dr. Mellert is an assistant professor in the department of theological studies at the University of Dayton.

Published by Paulist Press, New York, Paramus, Toronto, 1975. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Summary

(ENTIRE BOOK) Dr. Meller writes about Whiteheadian thought, without the jargon and technical intricacies, so that the lay person might have better understanding of the thinking of the founder of process philosophy.

Chapters

Few libraries had any books on Whiteheadian thought in 1947 when he died. Today libraries of all sorts have shelves laden with books trying to explain, interpret and apply his thinking, but these authors are inclined to talk to each other. The author attempts to make process thought understandable to the rest of us.

The core of process thought: Rather than a “substance theology” based on static, spatial models, process thought “switches gears” to a concern with spatial-temporal models such as change in God, Christ becoming divine and the on-going process of revelation.

Some basic Whiteheadian concepts: becoming, actual occasions, eternal objects, prehensions.

The author contrasts Whitehead’s thought with traditional religions which start with proof of God. Whitehead inverts the process, starting with the experience of religion and grasping the truth that there is more at issue in the world than the world itself.

God is constantly changing as he includes more and more reality in his consequent nature. What we do on earth makes a difference in the very reality of God.

Dr. Mellert discusses the relations both of God to the world and the world to God.

Process thought is being compatible with the presumptions of Christian faith and is friendly with Christian ideas regarding body and soul.

Jesus is unique because in his humanity he presents a more perfect model of ideal humanity than has ever existed, or will ever exist. He is divine because of the realization of that divinity within him.

The Church is a process whereby individuals come to believe in Jesus and add the weight of their belief to the furtherance of the process that is the Church. The Church is not a stable, immutable institution that has existed since the time of Jesus.

In the process perspective, each sacramental action is both created by the community and creative of the community. Concrete experiences of the past contribute positively to the present and are immanently incorporated in what the present is becoming.

The new and the old morality are both inadequate. Process thought can make important contributions to the old and new because it is both metaphysical and flexible.

Process theology as a provider of a solid philosophical framework for a great diversity of human experience and belief. It therefore is helpful in synthesizing the diversity of interpretations of immortality.

The notion of relativity that process theology employs is discussed. All reality is inter-related in space and time, and no single real entity has a prior absoluteness that stands outside the process of reality as a whole.


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Preface

During the 1960’s a remarkable revival of the thought of the contemporary American process philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, took place in the studies and dens of graduate students in philosophy. It was remarkable because, although he died in 1947, Whitehead was only a few cards in the library catalogue until, during the past decade and continuing into the present, literally shelves of books have been written explaining his thought, interpreting it, and applying it to a variety of areas.

One of the most fruitful applications of Whiteheadian thought has been in the area of theology. In fact, the study of "process theology" in departments of religion and theology has perhaps equaled, if not exceeded, the study of process thought in departments of philosophy where it all started. This, despite the fact that Whitehead was no theologian, and indeed, after a short period of curiosity, he sold all his theology books and never returned to the subject.

Today every respectable graduate school of theology has its process theologian, or at least someone able to teach the subject adequately. And consequently, more and more people engaged in religious education — religion teachers, seminarians, catechetics coordinators, clergy, and interested laymen — have heard about process theology and perhaps have seen references to it. But a comfortable familiarity with what it is all about has, for most of them, been an elusive goal.

This little book is written as a reply to my many friends who have asked me, in the midst of conversations going in various directions. "What is process theology?" I have never really known how to respond to that question briefly and politely. Surely there is no way to reply adequately, short of three credit hours or a select bibliography. Now, at least, I can tell them where they might get started.

It is my hope that this volume will help to "bridge the gap" between the professional philosophers and theologians and the many other persons who are looking for a basic familiarity with process theology but who do not have the time to struggle with the complexities of the process system as a whole. There is, I feel, a great need for such a volume. Once process philosophers and theologians have mastered the jargon and technical intricacies of Whitehead’s thought, they generally prefer to share the intellectual excitement of their work with each other, rather than to attempt repeated explanations for the benefit of the uninitiated. Thus, journal articles abound since the early 1960’s, but only fleeting references are found in the more widely circulated religious magazines. Hopefully, the 1970’s will see a better dissemination of this mode of thought to a broader range of interested persons.

There are already indications that this is beginning to take place. Graduate students have received their degrees in Whiteheadian studies and are now teaching undergraduates. Institutes have been conducted to acquaint clergy and laity. And recently two volumes of collected writings have appeared in paperback: Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by Delwin Brown, Ralph James and Gene Reeves,1 and Process Theology, edited by my friend and former teacher, Ewert Cousins.2

My own work here will attempt to simplify as best I can the foundations of process philosophy and to suggest ways in which I find it helpful for explaining Christian thought. My own orientation in Christianity has been in the Roman Catholic tradition, and this may in part determine the topics I choose and the ways in which I treat them. However, this should not dissuade readers of other Christian traditions because the differences are, for the most part, negligible for the beginner in process theology.

A greater danger lies in over-simplification and distortion, and I am very much aware that in "watering down" Whitehead for the popular palate, I may in fact destroy the real flavor of his philosophy. This would be a grave disservice both to Whitehead and to my own conviction that process thought has a very important contribution to make to our age of critical religious rethinking and reconstruction.

Nevertheless, process philosophers and theologians must not be allowed to talk only to each other. Others, too, must be initiated, and they must begin with simpler things. If this book, as a simple thing, spurs someone on toward the greater things, or if it simply convinces someone that there might be greater things than he had previously conceived of in his theology, then I shall have achieved the goal I have set for myself and my efforts will be adequately rewarded.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the numerous persons who have helped me and encouraged me in this work. I wish to mention especially the University of Dayton’s Summer Research Institute, which provided me with a grant to begin this project; Rev. Matthew Kohmescher, S.M., my department chairman; and two personal friends. Sister Carol Gaeke, O.P., and Ellen Simonetti, who graciously read the manuscript and suggested many improvements.


Notes:

1. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

2. New York: Newman Press, 1971.

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Chapter 1: Why Something New?

The term “process philosophy” has taken on a special meaning in the past two decades of American thought. Although many philosophers in history have written from a process perspective, the term today is reserved for a particular school of thought centered around the works of Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophical writings spanned the two decades of the 1920’s and 1930’s and the two countries of England and the United States. From its inception, but especially in the past fifteen years, Whitehead’s process philosophy has been attracting students and scholars at numerous universities to study and elaborate upon his basic insights. Recently a special institute and a professional journal have been established to aid the growth of Whiteheadian studies in this country and abroad.

What are the origins of Whitehead’s thought, and why is he attracting so much attention today? What is his value for theology in this age of radical thinking? Is Whitehead just one more passing fad, or does his philosophy provide a solid, durable basis for understanding and interpreting the Christian faith?

The roots of process thought, like most of Western philosophy, can be traced back to the Greeks. The most ancient of the specifically “process” thinkers is probably Heraclitus. Unfortunately, the ideas of Heraclitus and his contemporary Parmenides are available to us only in a few fragments, and these provide merely a hint of their thought. We are told that Heraclitus once observed that one could never step into the same river twice (because by the time one steps into it the second time the water has already moved downstream), and that the basis of reality was change and flux. This idea was in sharp contrast with Parmenides, who suggested in his poem about nature that “being” was prior to “becoming,” and that underlying every change was some more fundamental reality that endured. By a fateful choice of history, Parmenides became the father of metaphysics and the basis for later Greek philosophy, while Heraclitus was largely ignored. As a result, the thrust of Greek thought, and most of Western thought thereafter, was derived from the static concepts of “being,” “substance,” and “essence,” rather than the more dynamic concepts of “becoming,” “process,” and “evolution.”

Whitehead likewise acknowledged his indebtedness to the Greeks, especially to Plato. Indeed he once remarked that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Although Plato is not a process philosopher, his thought can be reconciled with a process perspective. This is exactly what Whitehead did. How he reconciled them is not as important to us here as the knowledge that contemporary process thought, following Whitehead, is both processive in character and Platonic in spirit. When we discuss some of the basic concepts of Whiteheadian philosophy in the next chapter, the implications of these facts will become more clear.

Whitehead’s increasing importance today in America can be attributed to the fact that his philosophy arises out of the Hellenic tradition and emerges in an age of rapid change. Because he is thoroughly a part of our Western tradition, his insights are not alien to our cultural presuppositions. For all the difficulty of understanding his thought, he can be more readily grasped and appreciated by Western man than can, for example, Oriental thought, because Whitehead’s thought is built upon what is already familiar to us in our own Western culture and tradition.

But today there is developing a certain discontent with our culture and its tradition, and a certain suspicion regarding its capacity for radical change. There is the feeling that our institutions, both civil and ecclesiastical, and even the thinking that inspired them, are inadequate and insufficient to meet the future. Doubts of this kind are fundamentally philosophical doubts about the ability of our philosophies to deal with change as a fundamental category of reality. Our philosophical heritage is being questioned in the light of a rapidly changing culture.

One of the reasons for this radical questioning is that the very way in which we perceive reality has been changing. Until very recent times we were quite content and intellectually satisfied with the way Parmenides viewed the universe. There was an underlying stability to our institutions, our culture, and our lives. But in recent years we are being confronted more forcefully with the fact of change, and with the fact that the rate of change is itself increasing.

All of this rapid changing has created for us a new perception of reality. No longer is reality fundamentally stable, with change being merely an accidental alteration of its makeup. Today reality itself is experienced as being in constant flux, so that the basic category of reality is process, not stability. In a more sophisticated way we have returned to the insight of Heraclitus: we cannot step into the same river twice because our world is not the same world twice. Reality is a process.

There is also another way in which our perception of reality has been changing. Because of new means of communication and rapid methods of transportation the world seems much smaller to us now than it did just a couple of generations ago. Today, a political event in the Middle East has instant repercussions on the stock market in New York. thus changing the financial plans of people around the world. Our astronauts, relying on the precision technology of a team of scientists, can travel to the moon and back in half the time it took our grandparents to cross the Atlantic to settle in this country, and the event is seen live on television sets around the world. We experience more than ever before the interrelatedness of the people and things in our universe and the interdependence of reality as a whole.

We experience this relational character of reality also in our heightened sensitivity to the natural environment and to the historical context out of which things emerge. Knowing whether a child comes from the suburbs or the ghetto, from a loving family or a broken home, gives us certain insights into his conduct and suggests certain methods of helping him mature. Or, to use a different example, we learn to understand and interpret certain events in history or expressions in literature according to the context in which they arose. To know something requires knowledge of its environment and context, because nothing exists in isolation. Every bit of reality is essentially related to the totality of reality in its own unique way, and it depends upon the rest of reality for its origin, meaning and value.

Whitehead was very conscious of this interrelatedness of reality, and it is an essential part of his philosophical theory. In fact, he chose to call his philosophy the “philosophy of organism” because he based it upon a theory of the real relatedness of things. That is why his thinking tends toward integrating and synthesizing, rather than individualizing and classifying. Reality is first of all a complex unity, or organism, and each element in that unity is itself an organismic unity. One of his purposes for doing philosophy is to suggest how they all interrelate. The concept of organism provides the model for understanding this relatedness and integration of all reality.

Because Whitehead is a part of Western tradition and takes it into account in the development of his own thought, and because he gives us a philosophical system that is essentially processive in character and relational in structure, his philosophy of process and organism seems more relevant to contemporary needs than any of the “substance philosophies” that are more common in this tradition. This is the basic advantage of Whitehead. Whereas most of Western thought is formulated in static, individuating and non-temporal concepts, Whitehead adds the temporal and integrative dimensions that make his system dynamic, holistic and four-dimensional. This is the reason why he finds it necessary to invent a new vocabulary to explain his philosophical concepts. The next chapter will be devoted to defining and explaining some of the most significant Whiteheadian terms.

The reasons that make Whiteheadian thought important for philosophy also make it relevant for theology. No institutions are more tied to their respective traditions than religious institutions, and nowhere has the accelerating rate of change been more upsetting and misunderstood than in the Christian churches of the last two decades. This has been particularly true in the Catholic Church, which has guarded its individuality more tenaciously than its Protestant brethren, and which is still in the throes of the radical (and reactionary) renovation that Vatican Council II was supposed to have resolved.

There is in many Christian, and especially Catholic circles today a tendency to blame theology for the confusion and to demand a simple, unquestioning act of faith. According to such thinking, any attempt to formulate a theological perspective according to Whiteheadian — or any — thought is to continue the confusion and frustrate the return to a peaceful Christian orthodoxy. But an appeal to faith is not a solution to intellectual problems, and an appeal to orthodoxy is simply an appeal to the expression of faith of the Christians of another era who formulated that orthodoxy. Faith is not a substitute for thought, and orthodoxy is not a substitute for either. Rather, faith is the immediate occasion for challenging and developing thought so that it can better integrate itself with reality as a whole. This is precisely the function of theology. According to the old Latin expression, theology is fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Although this expression goes back to the early traditions of Christian theology, it is still applicable today. Faith does seek understanding; it does not replace understanding. And the understanding it seeks must be discovered in conjunction with the most enlightened perception of reality available to it in a particular historical epoch.

Whitehead is becoming important for Christian theology because he provides us with such an enlightened perception of reality. He sees reality in a way that makes sense to our contemporary mind. Those who, like Whitehead, see reality in terms of process and organism, and who likewise believe in a special revelation that comes to man in the Christian tradition, will seek to integrate what they believe with what they see. This is precisely what Augustine did with the philosophy of Plato and what Thomas Aquinas did with the philosophy of Aristotle. Each sought to integrate his Christian faith with the best available understanding of reality as a whole. This is the fundamental task of theology. It is the immediate task of any believer who thinks about what he believes, and who lives on the basis of his beliefs.

To suggest that we ought to return to the “original faith” and ignore theology is to reject any attempt to think about our faith in our contemporary context or to integrate what we believe with how we live in our contemporary world. To suggest that we ought to return to “orthodoxy” is to suggest that we can best express our faith today by disregarding the development of human philosophy subsequent to the original, or “orthodox” expression of that faith. Such suggestions are blind to the processive and contextual character of reality as a whole, where faith must ultimately find its meaning.

What process theologians are attempting to do is essentially the same as what Augustine and Thomas did: to express their Christian faith in the conceptual language of a philosophy that makes sense to their age. But can process theologians actually write a theology in the sense that Augustine and Thomas did? That is, can they truly integrate their philosophy with the beliefs of the Christian community and provide those beliefs with a credible foundation in reason?

To answer such questions, we must do some reflection on what we expect of a theology. First, it must be based upon a conviction that a particular person, event or tradition has a special revelatory significance for man. For Christian theology, that event is the person of Jesus and the tradition that has developed in his Spirit. Second, it must seek to understand that conviction in a coherent, consistent and relevant way. Here the Christian is free to choose whatever philosophical perspective can best integrate his faith with his view of reality as a whole. The perspective that he chooses will determine the way in which he expresses his faith. That is, his choice about a philosophy will determine the shape of his theology. Consequently, there can be many theologies endeavoring to explain the one faith. Unity in faith comes from a common belief in the revelatory significance of Jesus; plurality in theology comes from differing views regarding the nature of reality into which that faith must be integrated.

Process theology is a theology that uses processive and organismic models to explain the faith of Christians in the person of Jesus and the events and traditions that he has inspired. It is still theology in the traditional sense of “faith seeking understanding.” But it is different from traditional theology in that it uses the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (instead of Plato or Aristotle) to express and integrate that belief into our contemporary perception of reality — a perception which is increasingly sensitive to integration and change as the fundamental reality.

It is indeed a difficult task to “switch gears” from a theology based on static, spatial models alone, such as the essence of God, the natures of Christ, and the substance of bread and wine, to a theology that is concerned with spatio-temporal models, such as change in God, Christ becoming divine, and the on-going process of revelation. It is also difficult to change from an analytic approach, where one is constantly distinguishing among essentially different kinds of reality and the individual “beings” in each level of reality, to a more synthetic approach, where everything, including God, is ultimately explainable with one set of categories and is integrated with the reality of the whole. And yet, such concepts are not so strange to one who believes that God is alive and that religion ought to integrate and influence the dynamics of human living. Both Scripture and tradition contain much data to support the use of process models in the development of a Christian theology. Whether such a theology will ultimately find more acceptance among scholars and believers than the “substance theologies” of the past can only be tested by the passage of time.


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Chapter 2 Some Basic Concepts
http://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/chapter-2-some-basic-concepts/

Alfred North Whitehead was a man of many interests and many talents. Born in England in 1861, he entered the intellectual life before the deluge of scientific knowledge and the age of specialization. As a result, he was able to pursue and develop an expertise in several fields in a way that is perhaps no longer possible for anyone today. His interests first took him into the realm of science, and he made important contributions in both physics and mathematics. Only later did he turn his attention to philosophy. Throughout his life he maintained a lively interest in the literary and the fine arts. In addition, he was always an avid student of history.

Such a broad range of interests gives Whiteheadian philosophy a rare richness. But this richness is the cause of difficulty for the reader of a narrower ken. To master Whitehead is a long, arduous task. Even a comfortable acquaintance can be difficult because of the new terminology that Whitehead formulates and the new meanings he sometimes gives to old terms. Without these precisions of vocabulary, however, his unique insights are in danger of being lost.1

Whitehead’s basic insight is that reality is a series of interrelated becomings. How a thing becomes constitutes what a thing is. The process of becoming is more fundamental than the being that is achieved, and thus it is more important for philosophical study. It is perhaps interesting to note that the term “being” is actually a form of the verb, even though most philosophers use it as a substantive noun. To say that something is a “being” or has “being” is to attribute to it more than static reality. It is to infer a continuous existence in that reality through time. It is a being because it is being. Because this temporal connotation has been lost in speaking philosophically about “beings,” Whitehead prefers to speak philosophically about “becomings.” In this way he wishes to emphasize the fundamental processive character of reality.

This insistence on the temporal dimension of reality requires that Whitehead formulate a vocabulary that can lure us out of our static representations of reality. If, for example, someone were asked to identify the smallest unit of reality, he would probably say “the tiniest bit of matter, an atom, or perhaps an electron.” The problem with this answer is we not generally think of tiny bits of matter as becomings; we think of them as beings. Hence, to use bits of matter as the model for our philosophical understanding of the fundamental elements of reality is to freeze us into a static pattern of philosophical thought. Whitehead frees us from this kind of thinking by coining a new term: the fundamental elements of reality are actual occasions (which he sometimes calls actual entities or occasions of experience).

To enable us to understand what he means by this new term, Whitehead suggests a new model. Instead of bits of matter, we might better think of the basic units of reality as moments of experience. Moments of experience provide a more suitable model for understanding these fundamental elements of reality because they have a temporal thickness to them which bits of matter do not have. Thus, when we think of reality as consisting of moments of experience, we are conscious that reality is always becoming.

Another advantage of the “experience” model is that it demonstrates the essential interrelatedness of reality. A moment of experience cannot be thought of in isolation or as an independent entity. It is always an experience by someone of something, and it always requires antecedent experiences to give it meaning and relative importance. A moment of experience necessarily implies a reference to the world around it. Both process and interrelation are thus built into this model of reality, whereas they were only accidental to the old “bit of matter” model.

The concept of actual occasion is the central notion of Whiteheadian thought. Actual occasions, or “drops of experience,” are the final real things of which the world is made, and there is no going behind them to find anything more real. All of reality, from God to the most trivial puff of existence, is explainable in terms of actual entities, and only in these terms. They are the reasons for things. Outside of actual entities, there is nothing at all.

One clarification may be needed at this point. For Whitehead, experience need not be conscious experience. The latter belongs only to certain kinds of actual entities. Everything experiences: the balloon experiences relative air pressures; rock experiences the earth upon which it rests. Experience is basic to all real things. It is the reason why reality is interrelated as well as processive in character.

The other fundamental type of entity in Whitehead’s philosophy is called the eternal object. Eternal objects are pure possibilities. They are similar to Aristotle’s universals or Plato’s forms in that they are abstract. But they differ because they do have a real mode of existence in actual entities. They likewise have a reference to other eternal objects, because relatedness is a condition of organism even at the level of abstraction. Examples of eternal objects are colors, sounds, scents and geometric characters. They are required for nature but they do not emerge from it the way actual entities do. They appear and disappear in many different contexts, and yet whenever they appear they are always the same. However, they do not have an independent or ideal existence apart from the actualities in which they are manifested. They are merely possibilities available for actualization. Whitehead defines them as pure potentials for the specific determination of fact.

The way in which every actual occasion is the subject of experiences brings us to the third important concept, prehension. At first glance, this term may look like a misspelling of “apprehension.” The similarity is not accidental. Both are derived from the Latin, meaning “to take.” The word “apprehension” connotes “taking hold of” something, understanding it, and finding its meaning. It is the action of a subject perceiving an object and evaluating its import for the future. However, before a subject can take hold of and understand an object in this sense, it must be relate to that object. The fact of being related to something is more fundamental than a subjective perception of an object. Prehensions, says Whitehead, are the concrete facts of relatedness.

The fact of relatedness has a further implication that is not contained in the word “apprehension,” but which is essential to Whitehead’s notion of “prehension.” A child is related to his parents differently from the way in which his parents are related to him. Whereas parents are only externally influenced by their children, a child’s very existence, his genetic inheritance, and parental influences during early childhood all help to determine how he is to mature and grow. He “takes” from his parents his very reality as an individual person. An emerging entity is similarly related to eternal objects and past actual entities in that these are the elements out of which the new entity is to become. Prehension, therefore, also indicates that the relatedness of these elements to the emerging actual entity is determinative because the relatedness constitutes the entire data available to that entity in its process of becoming. In the language of the Scholastic philosophers, a prehension would be roughly equivalent to a “real relation.” That is, the relation of the things prehended to the subject prehending determines what that subject will become.

Another way of understanding “prehension” is in terms of “feeling.” As an actual occasion or moment of experience emerges, it “feels” all the data available to it in its own universe. These are its prehensions. They can be of two kinds, physical or conceptual. Physical prehensions relate the emerging entity to the actual occasions of the immediate past that are within its scope and enable it to “feel” them. Conceptual prehensions are “feelings” of relevant eternal objects.

Every actual occasion prehends both physically and conceptually during the formation of its own unique synthesis. The more it prehends physically, the more it tends to repeat what it feels from the past; the more it prehends conceptually, the more novelty is introduced. It is important to emphasize again in this context that because a prehension is a determinative relationship, these “feelings” are not accidental additions or modifications of the actual entity (as “apprehension” would imply), but constitutive of it. An actual entity is what it feels.

Because an actual occasion is merely a drop of experience, we are generally conscious only of groups of actual occasions, or nexus (plural of nexus). A nexus is a set of actual occasions experienced as related to each other. Sometimes it is called a society of occasions. The human body is a society of this type because the actual occasions of each part of the body are experienced as being spatially connected in the formation of a single body. An illustration of this kind of nexus might be a loosely crocheted garment, where the knots constitute the actual occasions and the connecting threads their relatedness. Man is, in addition, a serial nexus, i.e., a series of actual occasions, or a stream of personal experiences that can be traced through a definite period of history. A serial nexus might be described as a “motion picture” film, in which a rapid series of individual occasions of experience project movement.

The nexus is the way in which Whitehead explains the real connections of things in space and time. Moments of experience are intrinsically related to each other by prehensions to form nexus. It is the real connections of things that we perceive, not the individual actual occasions. Our experience of reality is in terms of networks and patterns. Nothing is experienced alone. Each nexus is perceived in the context of a wider nexus, just as each element of a nexus emerges out of the environment of that nexus. Every part of reality is as we perceive it — a part of a larger whole.

These four terms — actual occasions, eternal objects, prehensions and nexus — are the most important terms in the Whiteheadian vocabulary. We are now ready to explain how they fit together to form a philosophical perception of reality. The explanation will require the introduction of still more new terminology, but the new terms will be of lesser importance and will be more easily defined.

Each actual occasion emerges at a particular locus in time and space when that locus becomes the center of converging feelings, or prehensions. As it emerges it has its own particular subjective form, which controls the becoming of that subject. This subjective aim is directed toward the particular satisfaction that the actual occasion seeks to achieve. An emerging occasion prehends its relevant data according to its subjective aim and gives it focus according to that satisfaction.

The key to how an actual occasion becomes lies in the interaction that takes place between the subject (actual occasion) prehending and the data (past occasions and/or eternal objects) being prehended. How this interaction takes place is determined by the subjective form, which is the particular mood or attitude by which the subject prehends a particular datum. There are many species of subjective forms. Examples are emotions, valuations, purposes, aversions, aversions and consciousness. While an actual occasion can have only one subjective aim, the subjective forms depend upon its prehensions. One occasion, therefore, can involve a number of subjective forms.

Every act of prehending has its subjective form, but not every prehension contributes its datum to the emerging occasion. This is the reason for distinguishing between positive and negative prehensions. A prehension whose datum is included as a constitutive aspect of the occasion is a positive prehension; one in which the datum is eliminated from feeling is called a negative prehension. This is why the new actual occasion is constituted by its prehensions of the past but it is not necessarily a mere repetition of the past. It can be constituted into a new and novel synthesis because it can prehend the elements of its past in different ways. In one sense, then, the past determines the present moment of experience, in that it is the only data available for the present; in another sense, the present moment of experience is free to determine how it is to become.

And yet, nothing of the past is ever really lost. Every actual occasion lives on, contributing its reality to the occasions that succeed it. This is the meaning of objective immortality. After the actual occasion achieves its subjective aim and reaches its own particular satisfaction, it perishes. That is. it can experience no longer. But it is not lost or annihilated, because it can still be experienced. It becomes an objective datum for future occasions to take account of, positively or negatively, in the continuance of process. As it is prehended, it is immortalized as a constitutive element of the nexus of occasions that continue to “feel” its impact on history.

Because each actual occasion is its own unique synthesis of its past, each contributes its own actualization to the totality of reality. Each becomes part of the many, and adds itself to the complex environment that gives rise to a new occasion. The new occasion emerges by the unique way in which it objectifies, immortalizes and brings to a new unity the elements of its relevant past. When it achieves that satisfaction, it, too, perishes, clearing the way for the process to continue. In Whitehead’s succinct phrase, “The many become one and are increased by one.”2

This is what Whitehead means by creativity. It is the ultimate principle by which the multiplicity of relevant data become one actual occasion, illustrating the fact that it is the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. The three ultimate notions, then, are creativity, many, and one.

The above description of the process by which an actual entity becomes explains both the processive character of reality and the essential integration of reality as a whole. It should be noted that at every level of Whiteheadian thought we are dealing with unities of pluralities in dynamic inter-relation. In the above analysis of actual occasions as moments of experience, we have been discussing reality at its smallest, or microscopic level. Even at ‘this level the actual occasion, which is the smallest reality considered in process thought, is the unity of many prehensions. That is why actual occasions must themselves be understood as organisms.

In this point Whitehead’s thought is essentially different from those philosophical traditions where the miscroscopic elements are bits of matter. The presupposition in the latter is that every unity can be further broken down into its components, which are also real. One finally arrives at an ultimate unit of reality — an electron, for example — which can then be described abstractly in terms of locus, function, quality and quantity, etc. For Whitehead, there are no such fundamental units of reality because reality is composed of moments of experience and not bits of matter. When a moment of experience is analyzed into its components, these components (prehensions) are not real apart from the moment of experience, or actual occasion itself, even though they contribute reality to that occasion. Actual occasions, which are the final real things of the universe, are thus unities, not units of reality. Hence, ultimate reality is organismic reality. It cannot be broken down for further analysis except by forsaking the realm of real things for the realm of abstraction.

By analogy, nexus, or societies of actual occasions, are also organisms, because they are unities of more fundamental elements. Larger organisms are complex unities of smaller organisms. At the largest, or macroscopic level of reality the same pattern obtains. Reality as a whole is a complex unity of pluralities. Here, too. Whitehead’s central notion is manifested. The many become one and are increased by one. Each group of smaller unities that occasions the emergence of a larger, more comprehensive unity adds to the total sum of organisms in reality and thus adds to reality itself. For this reason, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because the whole is itself a new reality beyond the parts. Therefore, both in its processive character and in its relational structure, creativity is achieved when multiplicities give rise to new unities and are thereby increased by those unities.

This, in very brief outline, is the basic structure of Whitehead’s thought. There are many other terms and concepts which have been purposely eliminated for the sake of simplicity. There are also many controversies regarding various aspects of the interpretation presented here, and these, too, have been set aside. Our main purpose has been merely to introduce the reader to what is fundamental in process philosophy so that the theological chapters which follow can be more fully and positively prehended.


Notes:

1. The discussion in this chapter is based upon Whitehead’s “Categorial Scheme.” as outlined in Process and Reality (New York: The Macmillan Company, Free Press Paperback edition, 1969), pp. 22-35.

2. Ibid., p. 26.