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 9 & 10



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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Chapter 9: Sacraments

While medieval theologians were wont to stress that man is a rational animal, contemporary theologians would probably prefer to say that man is a psychological animal. During this century we have become increasingly aware of the psychological dimension of man, and how his rationality is influenced and perhaps even conditioned by the world that surrounds him. Because he is psychological as well as logical, man is often persuaded by reasons that are not purely rational. He needs arguments that appeal to the heart as well as to the head. Emotions and feelings must be included in his theology as well as reasons and distinctions.

Although the full complexity of this aspect of man is only now being explored systematically, the basic truth about man’s psychological make-up has been a part of his religious intuition for centuries. There is much primitive psychology in religion, and Christianity’s sacramental system is a good example. It is hard to imagine how faith in Jesus could have lasted through the centuries without something more tangible than the New Testament and the abstract formulae of creeds and councils. In intuiting man’s psychological needs and providing its followers with something concrete in the administration of the sacraments, Christianity showed true genius. Despite alterations in form and number, its sacraments have endured as manifestations of the continuing faith of Christians in every age and place of Christendom.

Sacraments are ways of getting in touch with the Jesus-event. They recall concretely and symbolically the faith Jesus inspired in his followers, and they become themselves occasions of gathering the faithful for new, creative expressions of their belief. One might say that they serve to mediate the past to the present. By “celebrating” the Jesus-event for each succeeding age of Christians, they have enabled Christianity to maintain its effectiveness.


Sacraments have been described in different ways in Christian theology. Probably the most familiar description is that of St. Thomas, who borrows St. Augustine’s idea that sacraments are outward signs instituted by Christ causing inward grace. In Thomistic theology sacraments are primarily signs, but they are not ordinary signs, because they also cause what they signify. What they cause is grace, and this takes place both because the sacrament is properly performed (ex opere operato) and because the recipient is of good disposition (ex opere operands).1 A sacrament is properly performed when one uses the correct matter (material symbols) and the correct form (formal symbols, i.e., language). The recipient is of good disposition when he approaches the sacrament in the spirit of faith, intending to benefit from its graces.

Implied in the Thomistic approach is that a distinct divine intervention takes place every time the sacramental rite is performed. Given the divine institution of the sacraments by Jesus and given the necessity of an individual divine intervention, exact adherence to the prescribed formula of administration became the guarantee that a sacrament was efficacious. This led to an excessive preoccupation with rubrical precision. The validity of a sacrament was judged only according to its fidelity to the prescribed rubrics and in no way according to the intensity it inspired in its recipients. The result was a certain quasi-magic. As long as the prescriptions were fulfilled, grace automatically resulted, and the faithful were automatically enriched. The “filling-station” approach to sacraments became the common attitude: one came to the sacraments periodically to “fill up” again on grace.

It would be unfair to Thomism to claim that it is responsible for the unsophisticated application of its theology described above. Nevertheless, a return to the Thomistic system is probably not the best solution because its language, its concepts, and even its presuppositions sound very strange to contemporary ears. An explanation of sacraments more in tune with the psychological dimension of man would better suit our present mentality, and this is certainly not one of the strengths of Thomistic theology.

In contrast, process theology provides an interesting alternative, because it can speak in terms of sign and cause while also being sensitive to the importance of human feelings and the psychological dimension of man. In the process perspective, each sacramental action is both created by the community and creative of the community. As created by the community it presumes the prior faith of Christians and their desire to renew that faith. This is the function of the sacrament ex opere operands: without the prior disposition of the believing community there can be no sacramental effect. As creative of the community, the sacrament leaves its influence on the faith of the believers and the process of the Church, whether it is performed well or poorly. This is its function ex opere operato; by the very performance of the sacrament the Church comes to grace (or dis-grace).

Sacraments can be described in Whiteheadian language as positive prehensions of the Jesus-event. Prehensions, as we have seen, are concrete “feelings” or “experiencings” of the past. Via prehensions the past contributes itself positively to the present and is immanently incorporated in what the present is becoming. As prehensions, then, sacraments not only remember Jesus and the faith of his followers. They also represent them concretely to the present. Technically, this is called “causal efficacy” in Whitehead’s philosophy. Applied to sacraments, it means that the Jesus-event is causally efficacious during those occasions when the sacraments are administered in his name.

By the same token, the occasions of sacramental encounter are efficacious in the lives of its participants. We have already noted how sacraments are occasions of gathering the faithful, as well as occasions of representing the Jesus-event. To the degree that the sacraments are performed well, i.e., they appealingly represent the Jesus-event to the faithful, they leave their positive impact upon those who have gathered. This is the sacrament’s causal efficacy upon the Church and the way in which the presence of Jesus is dynamically continued. Taken together, this twofold causal efficacy demonstrates how process theology, like Thomistic theology, can affirm that sacraments cause what they signify.

Sacraments are signs as well as causes. They are signs because they are a common ground between the past and the present and because they provide a correlation between them. When we perceive something, we perceive it both as the result of its historical continuity and in its present immediacy. If the latter is in fitting correlation with the historical continuity, we readily interpret a meaning to it. Sacraments are signs because they bring together certain important moments of history and a certain contemporaneous event, and present a definite correlation between them. That is, they suggest the continuity between the Jesus-event and the occasions of sacramental action. In a sacrament, therefore, we perceive both an action and a reference, and we interpret a meaning from them.

The sacramental action need not be a literal replay of particular episodes in the life of Jesus. Indeed, such a literal repetition would be unfaithful to the present moment. An exact translation of an event from one culture to another always betrays the true nature of the event. La traduction, c’est la trahaison! Nevertheless, there must be enough common ground, in the form of common eternal objects and perceivable continuity, so that the correlation can be readily grasped.

The construction of sacramental ritual, therefore, is achieved through a delicate balance between reiteration and creativity. If the sign is to be efficacious in representing the historical Jesus-event, it must reiterate. If it is to be efficacious of itself in intensifying the event it signifies in the lives of those gathered about, it must also be creative. Good liturgy thus depends upon both fidelity to tradition and sensitivity to the needs of those gathered to participate.

Fidelity to tradition is the concern of the entire Church. Since sacraments are the way in which the presence of Jesus is maintained in the Church as a whole, the Church’s future is dependent upon the way they are performed. If the Church is a process and sacraments are creative of that process, then the people of God have a vital concern in preserving their identifying characteristic through the administration of the sacraments. This is why a certain sameness is essential in liturgy, at least to the extent that liturgy celebrates in some way the importance of Jesus in the contemporary context. The survival dynamic of the Church depends upon this minimal fidelity to its tradition.

At the same time sensitivity to the needs of the faithful demands that liturgical celebrations be creative and meaningful. The events to be re-presented must have a purpose beyond the performance of the sacrament itself. The increasing use of themes in Masses and the construction of liturgies for particular community events are recent attempts to elicit more of the intensity dynamic in the Church. Ideally, such themes and liturgies should arise out of the needs and concerns of those gathered to perform the sacraments, since intensity can have its effect only to the extent that it touches them. This, of course, means that well-performed liturgy is well-prepared liturgy. Finding both the right medium and the right message for a particular group is a time-consuming undertaking. Abandonment of the “fillingstation” spirituality, however, makes such efforts imperative.

In the practice of most Christian churches, and especially in Roman Catholicism, there has been a certain reluctance to admit emotion into liturgical celebrations. Expressions of feeling seemed out of place in man’s dealings with God, because they were part of his lower nature and thus inferior to his intellect and will. The sterile liturgies that often resulted from this attitude seem to support the opinion of most modern psychologists that man cannot be so arbitrarily divided. The man who celebrates liturgy must celebrate it with his whole self, or he restricts the efficacy of the liturgy in his own life.


Process theology has an important corrective to suggest here. The way in which man gets in touch with the past is through his prehensions of the past. Now prehensions are fundamentally “feelings” or “experiencings” that re-create the past in one’s present moment of existence. Feelings of this fundamental kind are, therefore, a necessary condition for fidelity to one’s tradition. To abstract from the prehension or feeling of the past only its intellectual component is to strip the tradition of its very reality. We have a feel for tradition because feelings do come to us from tradition. Sacraments, which put us in touch with tradition, are the means whereby we recapture its fullness and allow it to fill us with new life.

Sacraments are privileged moments in the Church because they establish a privileged relation to Jesus. They are important moments to the believer because they collapse the time between him and the origins of his faith in order that that faith can be re-created in the new occasion in which the sacrament is performed. That is why it is imperative that sacraments be adequate signs and full expressions of what they represent.

The sense of the term “sacrament” as we have been using it here obviously can extend beyond the range of the seven official sacraments of Roman Catholicism. Any occasion that gathers two or more together to re-present and re-create the Jesus event and to renew the faith of those gathered is, in the wide sense, sacramental. A sermon, some moments of common prayer, or even a simple conversation that inspires can be sacramental in this sense. Liturgical worship is, of course, especially designed to be sacramental. The primordial sacrament for us is the Eucharist, because it is the most frequently used and most effective means of re-presenting the Jesus-event in a meaningful way. In the last few paragraphs of this chapter we shall attempt to explain the Eucharist, and the sacrament of baptism by which it is preceded, according to the spirit of process theology.

Thomistic philosophy defined the Eucharist in terms of the substances of bread and wine. At the moment when the words of consecration were correctly completed, the substances of bread and wine were “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Jesus. The problem with this explanation in our age is that it is difficult to reconcile with our scientific sophistication. Upon scientific analysis, the so-called substance of bread is merely a mixture of carbohydrates, proteins and other elements, none of which can be properly called bread. Wine is just as much of a problem to identify substantially. If there is no substance of bread or wine, how can that substance change into the body and blood of Jesus?

Some contemporary theologians, using insights of existential philosophy and phenomenology, have suggested that the underlying reality of bread and wine is not substance, but meaning. Bread is bread because man has agreed to call a certain combination of baked elements “bread.” When the words of consecration are repeated, this combination of baked elements is re-moved from the level of ordinary bread and assigned a new meaning in faith, according to the promise made by Jesus at the institution of the sacrament. This explanation of the Eucharist has been called “transignification” or “transfinalization.”

In process philosophy there is no underlying reality of bread and wine that can be transubstantiated or transfinalized. The only realities are actual occasions, which are temporal as well as spatial. The best description of the Eucharist, then, is in terms of an event. What is transformed is not the substance or meaning of bread and wine, but the action that is performed. Jesus is made present again, or re-presented, by a sacramental event that corresponds to the Jesus-event. Except for the sacramental action there can be no Eucharist. Corresponding to the common expressions of the early Christians, the Eucharist is the “breaking of the bread” and the “sharing of the cup,” not simply the bread and wine by themselves. It is the re-presentation of the Last Supper event in the new event of the Mass. The community, in causing the actions of the Mass to become sacramental, is itself transformed by that sacramental action to live at a new intensity and to continue the process of the Church.

Baptism is the event whereby a new member is incorporated into the community of faith. That is why the new liturgy of baptism in the Roman Catholic rite insists upon the presence of a representative group of the community. The person is becoming a member of the community, and a new relation is being established. The sacramental effect of the baptism event is therefore important both to the person and to the community. The community assures the person of its support in faith, and the person pledges his support in faith to the other members of the community. Jesus’ own action of incorporating new members into the first Christian community is thus re-presented in the rite of baptism. The sign of the sacrament causes what it signifies. Through it the process of the Church continues to create and be created.

A description of the other sacraments would follow the same pattern, to a greater or lesser degree. A number of other liturgical or para-liturgical actions could also be explained in a similar manner. The number of sacraments has not been constant in the history of the Church, and there is no reason to believe that even the seven so defined as sacraments are to be considered as equally important. A clue in this regard comes from our Protestant brothers in Jesus. For most Protestants, baptism and the Eucharist have been retained, even while the other sacraments have been abandoned or restructured. The fact that in many segments of Roman Catholicism this same phenomenon is occurring suggests that perhaps there is something more fundamental and important in these two sacramental events than in the others. But on this subject process theology has nothing unique to contribute. It is content to observe the new developments in order to understand better the shape that the process we call the Church is taking in our time.


Notes:

1. Although this distinction, to the best of my knowledge, does not appear as such in the writings of St. Thomas, it is suggested by a similar distinction in the Summa Theologica, III, 62, 1 and 4. Nevertheless, it has been popularized in this form in the commonly used high school religion texts during the past generation. Thus it has become the accepted Thomistic teaching on the Subject for most American Catholics.


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Chapter 10: Morality

The new morality has been around for quite a while now, but it still manages to generate plenty of heated discussion, especially when the participants are parents and their adolescent children. No changes in our society have caused more fear and anxiety to the older generation than the numerous challenges to traditional moral standards. Contrary to what they had formerly been taught, moral standards do seem to change, and in fact have changed radically in one generation. Or, in the interests of precision, we might say that what has changed is the understanding of morality. While it is evidently not true to say that young people are less moral than their parents, it is quite true to say that what they understand morality to include or exclude is often very different.

The so-called new morality is quite simple in the minds of most young people. They hold two fundamental principles: (1) nothing can be decided unless you are in a concrete situation, and (2) it’s O.K. as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. By this standard Vietnam was wrong because it was a concrete situation where people were being hurt and killed, and no abstract strategies of American foreign policy could justify it. Likewise, extra-marital sex cannot be condemned in itself; when both parties agree, there is no wrong because it is a pleasure that does not hurt anybody. In such a perspective the just-war theory of Augustine and the sexual restrictions of the Roman Catholic Church are equally unpersuasive, and, indeed, are themselves immoral!

In contrast, we generally hear the older generation arguing in the traditional way. Morality comes ultimately from God, according to his eternal law. When that law is revealed to us, or when it has been deduced by reason, we are constrained to obey its prescriptions. To live morally, one is not so much concerned with the situation as with the law. The situation is important only insofar as it enables one to know which law is applicable. The task of teaching us the law and helping us to apply it is the function of the state and the Church, and one can expect his reward or punishment in this life or in eternity, according to his obedience to civil and divine law respectively.


While these two descriptions may be oversimplified, they are detailed enough to illustrate the major strengths and weaknesses of each approach to morality. The new morality is more flexible and less confining. It permits one to reach reasonable decisions even where the law indicates otherwise. Responsibility rests upon the person who makes the decision; he cannot blame the law or the authorities for making him do what he did.

There are also weaknesses in the new morality. If no decision is valid outside of the concrete situation, what is it about the concreteness of the situation that suddenly enables one to choose wisely? It is precisely in moments of crisis where a decision is demanded that one often is unable to mobilize his powers of reflection to make a prudent choice. What his personal values are prior to the crisis and what previous reflection he can draw upon are always important determinative components in any decision. But if we admit the importance of pre-determined personal values in making a critical decision, does not this imply that one has some aim or purpose that gives meaning to those values and that directs his moral behavior? For what makes something a value is that it is seen to have more worth than something else, which is judged to have a lesser value, according to the overall aim or purpose one has chosen to pursue. So “leaving it up to the concrete situation” really doesn’t suffice. Some guidelines are necessary for dealing with the situation, and these guidelines are precisely the abstract values, ideals, aims and purposes that are not, and can never be situational. Some kind of ethical standard will be at work in deciding how to handle a particular situation. To refuse to reflect seriously about that ethical standard until one finds himself in the concrete situation does not lead to purity of decision; it merely means that impulse will have a greater share than reason in the final outcome.


The other problem with the new morality is the principle that one must not hurt anybody. It sounds innocent enough, but as ethical principle it is too minimal to be of much use. For one thing, it is stated negatively and doesn’t suggest any positive aims or directions one ought to strive for. Secondly, “anybody” presumably means “any human being.” But an ethic that is limited to human beings is going to be somewhat inadequate in this age of ecological crisis. There has to be a way of judging the hurt we inflict on other things. This is a difficult problem, because we must continue to eat, to build homes, and to warm our bodies. Since every action ultimately affects and often hurts something, we cannot extend this principle to say, “as long as it doesn’t hurt anything.“ Some more sophisticated way of determining what kinds of hurts are tolerable, and what kinds are not tolerable must be found. Some of the hurts will be to man, at least in the form of fewer conveniences or luxuries. But we have passed the age where humanism can be the sole ethical criterion. We are too intertwined with nature as a whole, and too dependent upon it. New ethical theories must be sensitive to that fact.

On the other hand, the old morality is just as defective, and perhaps even more so. Its weaknesses have been so frequently subjected to the scrutiny of the new moralists that it will not be necessary to repeat them here, except in summary form. The new moralists argue that the old morality is too rigid and inflexible. It tends to enslave man to the law, rather than liberate him to act creatively in society. In the name of stability it often causes stagnation and immobility. Because it is centered on law, it has become the refuge of traditionalists seeking to preserve the status quo. Observance of the law is the final justification for conformity. As Whitehead once put it, “The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.”1

However, the old morality cannot be discarded out of hand. Any system that has served for so many centuries must have something to say for itself. ‘What it teaches is that we cannot get along without some ethical guidelines. Perhaps, in a quickly changing world where law always loiters behind the moral conscience of people, it is no longer right to judge the morality of actions exclusively according to the prescriptions of the law. But if the moral laws of the past can be understood in a new way, not as prescriptions to be followed but as values that the wisdom of history provides, then perhaps the old moralists can still teach the new moralists some important things.

The point of convergence between traditional morality and situational morality is in their attempts to articulate a set of values that can offer guidance in the task of building the future. Laws, when interpreted as principles or guidelines, can warn us about what we ought to avoid. The concrete situation can focus upon the immediate facts. But something more is needed. Our projections of the future demand some assessment regarding what kinds of things — given the new possibilities for science and technology — we really want to promote for the ages ahead. A philosophy of values, enriched by a dialogue among diverse ethical theorists, is thus indispensable for any ethics in the twentieth century. Process thought, because it is both metaphysical and flexible, can make an important contribution to this discussion.

“Value,” says Whitehead, “is the outcome of limitation.”2 Limitation is the result of the selection by which an actual occasion is ultimately shaped. Only as a result of how it prehends its relevant past and gives it new focus does a new concrete occasion come into existence. Value is the intrinsic reality of the occasion, insofar as its own synthesis is unique and will have an impact upon further process.

Value, therefore, is always concrete and never realized except in individual actual occasions. It is the consequence of the particularity that emerges and then contributes itself as new data to the world. We can, of course, abstract from concrete values to speak of value systems and value hierarchies. These are simply ways in which the human mind operates to understand and coordinate what is happening in reality and to decide what is truly important.

Morality is “the control of process so as to maximize importance.”3 “Importance” is another technical word in the Whiteheadian vocabulary. Briefly, it occurs when the intensity of feeling leads to publicity of expression.4 In the context of morality, it means that there must be a constant transcending of the present moment toward public novelty and interest. It is the greatness of experience that goes beyond itself. Occasions that contribute greatness of experience to the on-going process of the universe achieve greatness of value. That is, each occasion should aim at new and interesting possibilities, unique harmonies and contrasts. An occasion’s contribution to the future consists in how it makes new data available. The future is the final judge of whether it achieved success. In the words of Whitehead, “The effect of the present on the future is the business of morals.”5

There is no question that the major impetus of Whitehead’s ideas on morality are future-oriented. A less obvious but equally important dimension to his ethical thinking arises from the inter-relational character of reality. Morality is inseparably linked with our position in the whole. It is never a private affair, done in isolation from the rest of reality. Every moral decision has some impact on the whole and bears the weight of that responsibility. Therefore, the general good and the individual good can never be in conflict, because both share a common world and a common future. Individual interests must always be harmonized with the more general interests. This is a significant implication to his statement that morality consists in maximizing importance. Importance is always determined by the individual occasion’s impact upon the future taken as a whole. For in the literal sense, an occasion has no future except insofar as it is integrated into wider perspectives and newer horizons.

Where process thought goes beyond the humanistic ethics that have been so popular in our time is in its concern not only for the unity of mankind, but for the integration of all reality. There is an essential inter-relatedness about all of nature that transcends the needs of the human species, and there can be no separation of the latter from the former at any step of ethical deliberation. The concern of morality is reality, not merely man. For man is not his own end. He dies, and his civilizations die. Were man the ultimate purpose of the universe, creation would have to be judged woefully inefficient. Clearly, something more is at stake, even in this age of environmental pollution, than the survival of man. In the final analysis, the survival of the universe is a value of greater importance, because from it the processes at work in reality can continue to create a history.

In light of this ethical perspective, what can we abstract from the concrete values we are given in each emerging occasion of reality? Can we suggest some abstract values and aims that are truly worthy of human efforts?

Whitehead suggests that the aims of a civilized society are a “fineness of feeling” and a “generality of understanding.”6 We might note that these aims are intrinsic to the process and do not define values apart from the process itself. Both are expressions of what process, as process, is about. The first aim of morality, then, is the continuance of process in its maximal effect. This occurs at the level both of individuality and of society. Each individual occasion contributes its fineness of feeling, and the whole achieves a generality of understanding. For process thought, the individual and the totality are equally of value. Therefore, morality is compromised when there is the totalitarianism of the whole over the parts or when there is the anarchy of the parts with respect to the whole. Morality never chooses between the welfare of the particular or of the communal. It must always strive toward their integration in a way that values both the uniqueness of individuality and the harmony of generality.

While the first business of morals is to safeguard experience and to continue the process, Whitehead does make some suggestions about the qualities that ought to be furthered by process, and here we see especially the Platonic character of his thought. In his book Adventures of Ideas he lists five eternal objects: truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace. Curiously, good and right are not included in his list. The main reason is simply that these terms are so overworked that their meanings have become quite imprecise. Instead he chooses these five as qualities which do have meaning, and which are sufficiently clear and comprehensive so as to include in a general way what man actually finds valuable in process.

Whitehead defines truth much like Thomas Aquinas. It is the conformation of appearance to reality.7 A truth relation is constituted when the content of two connected facts participate in the same general pattern. There can be many kinds of truth relations, thus justifying the use of the term both for art and mathematics, as well as for concrete impressions and abstract speculations. Sense perception is the primary way of attaining truth, because from it appearances are usually derived clearly and distinctly, despite occasional failures or interferences. Thus the things we perceive provide steady values, and these are incorporated into the subjective form of the prehending occasion and become part of the data out of which new occasions emerge.

Beauty goes beyond truth in the spontaneous adaptations of some of the factors prehended by an occasion of experience. The adaptations arise in pursuit of a certain aim, in which intensity of feeling and conformity to a common pattern combine for the attainment of harmony. That is, there is the perfection of the subjective form arising out of the variety of prehensions in such a way that the component feelings do not inhibit each other from achieving their ideal inter-relation. Beauty is thus wider and more fundamental than truth, because it deals not only with the conformation of appearance to reality, but also with the perfection of the subjective forms that are shaped by their interrelation.

Art is the purposeful adaptation of appearance to reality. The achievement of art thus depends upon the perfection of man, as he has been shaped by beauty. But perfection is not a static concept. Like civilization itself, it must always promote novelty and originality. When these cease to be important, civilization dies. Thus, Whitehead includes adventure as a necessary quality, lest inspiration yield to mere repetition. Finally, peace, the harmony of harmonies, is a call to go beyond limitations and beyond the self, without denying the self. Peace thus seeks to achieve the integration of order and love. It is the positive quality that crowns the “life and motion” of the soul.8

The final question we must ask is whether there is in the universe any general drive toward the realization and perfection of these five qualities. Is there a greater and more perfect conformity of appearance and reality revealed in the movement of history? In other words, is a constant progress inherent in the nature of process? For process thinkers of a Whiteheadian bent, the answer to these questions is less optimistic than it is for the disciples of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Process is a metaphysical principle of reality, but there is no corresponding principle of progress. Thus, there is no guarantee of improvement in history.

Whiteheadians generally eschew the claim of inherent progress. First, it would be difficult to establish absolute norms of progress, and norms that might seem sufficient for the best self-interests of man may not necessarily serve the best interests of reality as a whole. To absolutize human norms simply because they are human seems rather presumptuous in the wider perspective of things. Another reason is that our experience does not indicate that even on the human level process has resulted in progress. By human standards, scientific and technological advances can probably be called progress, and yet there do not seem to be any similar advances in moral living. Man is just as likely to occasion discord as harmony, selfishness as love.

What our experience tells us is that change is not necessarily improvement, and that in the moral order every new possibility for good is simultaneously a possibility for evil. The size of good and evil grow apace. Scientists and technologists have enabled us to understand the finitude of our world and our essential interdependence with the forces that constitute it. But they have not — and cannot — provide us with the resolve to integrate ourselves into it. This is the domain of morals. It is today a frightening domain because of our knowledge. In our individual occasions of experience we are collectively deciding the very fate of process on this planet, and the size of this moral predicament is truly overwhelming. It is perhaps so overwhelming that it is beyond the scope of any one of us to comprehend.

That is why the new morality and the old morality, taken individually or together, are inadequate. More is at stake than can be answered by a situational analysis and an appeal to past wisdom. What is also needed is a vision of the future as an integrated totality and a sensitivity for the values that will get us there. This will not come from a commitment to seek out the evil and overcome it. Perhaps now more than ever, the Don Quixotes are irrelevant because of the magnitude of evil and the increasing number of evil possibilities. Nor will it come from an attempt to isolate evil and reject it, situation by situation, as one threads his way through the choices of life. No corporate good of any size can be achieved by such piecemeal, individualized efforts. Instead we must ask the question: How can we collectively look evil in the eye, accept its reality, and undertake to incorporate it into a larger good? Process is made up of everything in the past, however it is judged morally. If quality and size are to be squeezed from the relentless cadence of process, we must harness evil into our service. This is possible only when the good toward which we strive is truly large enough, important enough, and holy enough to lure us enthusiastically into the enterprise.


Notes:

1. Adventures of Ideas. op. cit., p.268.

2. Science and the Modern World, op. cit.. p. 94.

3. Modes of Thought, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

4. Ibid., p. 8.

5. Adventures of Ideas. op. cit., p. 269.

6. Ibid.. p. 282.

7. Ibid., p. 241.

8. Ibid., p. 285.


Robert B. Mellert - What Is Process Theology: Chapters 7 & 8



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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Chapter 7: Jesus

A recent survey revealed that among clergymen today the most perplexing theological question is: “What can we say about Jesus Christ?” It is an old question, one that dates back to Jesus’ own interrogation of his disciples. Curiously, it is being reasked by Christian clergymen at a time when so many others are unhesitatingly becoming part of the Jesus movement or returning to fundamentalist churches. Interest in the person of Jesus has perhaps never been greater, and the spectrum of opinion as to who he is and what he means to modern man has never been wider.

For the clergyman, the question of Jesus is not generally a crisis of faith or a skepticism about the world of Christianity or its message. It is rather the result of coming to grips with much new scholarship regarding both the biblical origins of the faith and new interpretations of tradition. From biblical scholarship alone, for example, we probably know more today about the life and times of Jesus than was known at any period since the second generation of Christians. Archeological explorations of the Holy Land and surrounding areas have given some important insights about the people of that period and their ways of thinking and writing. New insights into the language used by Jesus and the languages in which the Gospels were originally written have also added to a better understanding of the Christian message. In addition, advances in secular philosophy and literary criticism have enabled scholars to be much more accurate in the way in which they interpret the Gospels and other religious writings. Hermeneutics has become an important science in its own right.

At the same time there has been at the other extreme almost an unquestioning and uncritical acceptance of Jesus by many other Christians, especially among large groups of young people without any formal church affiliation. They accept Jesus literally as their personal Lord and Savior and do not in practice make a distinction between him and God. The Bible, the prayer meetings, and the witness of their fellow believers provide them with the support and direction they need in their lives. In some cases the commitment is so intense as to include an abandoning of their former life-style. For most of them, biblical scholarship and hermeneutics are not important. Jesus reveals his will to them through the readings of the Scriptures and in prayer, and doing his will is all that really matters. Intellectual distinctions and interpretations of doctrine are merely a curiosity of the rationalist, and not usually conducive to witnessing the faith. This neo-fundamentalism has been on the increase in recent years despite — or perhaps because of — all the new and complex scholarly information now available about the historical person of Jesus. It has created an ever-widening chasm between the new believer and the careful student of the Bible, among whom are many so-called “liberal” or “relevant” clergymen.

The problem is to reconcile the Jesus of the scholars with the Jesus of the believers in a way that genuinely profits from contemporary scholarship without compromising the credibility of Jesus as Lord and Savior. In other words, what can we say about Jesus that is faithful both to the historical Jesus and to the belief of his followers? It is fundamentally a question of finding a language suitable for describing the person of Jesus and his significance for today.

The problem of finding suitable language is not a new one in the history of Christianity. It first emerged shortly after the foundations of Christianity itself in a form very similar to today’s. The problem at that time was how to reconcile the humanity of Jesus with his followers’ profession of his divinity. It was not an easy problem to resolve, and it was immensely complicated by the fact that when the disciples of Jesus began preaching his message, they took the message westward, where they immediately encountered Greek philosophical thought. Thus, even before Christianity had a chance to define itself in terms of its own Hebrew origins, it was already being called upon to deal with an alien culture which had a level of philosophical sophistication higher than its own. The primitive faith in Jesus therefore had to be expressed accurately within the thought patterns of a second culture before it had the opportunity to mature adequately in its original culture.

The Hebrew understanding of Jesus is best represented by the Gospels and the non-Pauline epistles. It is filled with concrete images, models and stories, all characteristic of Hebrew literature. The title “Son of God” is an example. When we consider that the creedal formulation of the Trinity had probably not yet been conceived, we become aware that this title had quite a different connotation to the early Hebrew Christian, for whom it meant “privileged creature of God,” than it had to the later Greek Christian, who transposed it to the form “God the Son,” meaning the second person of the Trinity. The pre-Hellenic language about Jesus was not a denial of the divinity in him, but the use of a different, more mythical literary form. It was intended to affirm that the Hebrew believers did experience God at work in Jesus, and that in him they experienced the revelation of God’s own love. In this way it was quite different from Greek language which preferred a more philosophical literary form to interpret Jesus’ relation to God. Thus the Greek implication of metaphysical plurality in God as a result of the divinity of Jesus was a foreign idea to the Jews because of their strict monotheistic heritage.

For the Greeks, reconciling the divinity and the humanity in the single person of Jesus was not as impossible as it seemed for the Hebrews. Theirs was a polytheistic tradition, and plurality in God was not an insurmountable difficulty. What was essential to them, however, was to incorporate Jesus into the divinity in such a way as to raise him beyond the petty gods and goddesses of their tradition. Thus the affirmation of a single deity containing three persons, the second of whom was the eternal person of “God the Son,” was a clear and consistent theological explanation of the divinity of Jesus in the framework of their philosophy. This explanation, which seemed to express adequately the experience of the early Christians, has continued ever since to function as the authentic expression of the faith.

This Hellenic formulation of the Trinity in the creeds and the definitions of the Christological dogmas at Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon became the normative statements of Christian belief about Jesus. In other words, the criteria for determining orthodoxy shifted from the original experience of Jesus to statements about what that experience meant. And these normative statements were formulated in a particular philosophical frame of reference, phrased in its terminology, illustrated by its distinctions, and encased in its limitations.

In view of the fact that our knowledge of Jesus and his times is superior even to the knowledge of those early councils or creedal authors, there is a growing dissatisfaction with continuing to employ the traditional statements as theological norms. This is in no way a denial of the fact that these norms did serve as adequate expressions of the Christian faith for centuries of believers. But with the knowledge presently available to theology and with the vast change of philosophical perspective that has occurred since the first centuries of Christendom, tentative new formulations of the original Christian experience that are not always literally contained within the traditional normative statements are now being proposed by theologians from a variety of philosophical perspectives. Process theologians are among those making such tentative formulations.

Truly this work is tenuous, insofar as it depends a great deal upon both the findings of biblical scholars and a creative understanding of the tradition that it seeks to interpret. Furthermore, it must be carried on in dialogue among the biblical exegete, the historical theologian, and the contemporary interpreter. Each must refine and enrich the perspective of the others. Such a task is obviously beyond the scope of any one person or book. In this introduction to process thought, we can only hope to sketch out a possible understanding of the person of Jesus and his significance to our contemporary world based upon a very general familiarity with advances being made in biblical and hermeneutical studies. What we are doing, however, is very similar to what the Christians of the first few centuries did. We are attempting to explain the primitive Christian experience of Jesus in the language of a philosophical perspective of God and man to suggest how that perspective might deal with the inter-relation of humanity and divinity in the person of Jesus, who is called the Christ.

Essentially, the primitive Christian experience is that Jesus claimed a unique relationship with God, and that his disciples experienced God at work in and through him. Furthermore, they accepted his teachings as ultimately normative for their own lives and for the world. In other words, in the person of Jesus the first disciples experienced God manifested to them in a unique and decisive way. Process theology is one attempt to offer a new, tentative explanation in modem terminology of how God was uniquely present in the person of Jesus and how that presence is still decisive for us today.

As an historical person, Jesus was human in exactly the same way we are human. The description of the humanity of Jesus, therefore, is the same as it is for every man. He was composed of body and soul, that is, of nexus of low-grade occasions coordinated by an ordered series of high-grade occasions, which traced his personal identity through his own, life-history. Each moment of that personal history was its own unique occasion, arising out of the series with its own particular initial aim, prehending the past of that series and the relevant environment, and freely arriving at its own synthesis before ceding its reality to the new occasion emerging from it. This philosophical pattern is the basis for explaining how it is possible for one man, namely Jesus, to have enjoyed a unique relationship with God, and how the consequences of that relationship are still important to us.

There are two ways in which we can argue that Jesus was a unique person. The first concerns the sequence of initial aims in the soul of Jesus; the second deals with the manner in which he prehended. We must remember that the source of every initial aim for each actual occasion is God himself. The convergence of the past into a new locus in space and time can be realized as a new actual occasion only when God contributes an initial aim. Therefore, God contributed the initial aim to each successive moment of Jesus’ life.

This alone might be sufficient theological basis for describing the divinity of Jesus. One can simply maintain that in Jesus the initial aim that God contributed was at each and every moment to be his Son, or, in more philosophical language, to realize the divinity at every occasion in the series. Jesus, responding to the promptings of these initial aims, freely chose to realize that divinity by directing the synthesis of each and every occasion of his life toward the fulfillment of that divine initiative. Every moment of his life was an acceptance and a reaffirmation of God’s special initiative on his behalf. In religious language, every moment was a moment of grace; he was like us in all things but sin.

There is. however, a certain difficulty that some process theologians find with the above explanation. It is the positing of an arbitrary initiative on the part of God that applied solely to the person of Jesus. Such an arbitrariness still makes Jesus a somewhat artificial insertion into history. This raises the impossible question: Why only in Jesus? If God’s initial aim is totally free and arbitrary, why does he not call all of us to such a divine relationship with him by virtue of his universal love? One can, of course, simply consign the inquiry to the realm of mystery, but the theologian by profession must remain unsatisfied until he can be assured that there is no better way of dealing with the problem.

Perhaps indeed God would offer to each occasion an initial aim to realize the divinity, but because of inherent limitations that even God cannot circumvent, such an aim can only be expressed partially in most occasions. For example, the nature of the sequence of occasions that characterizes a stone does not allow for consciousness, simply because that mode of prehending is not available to an occasion in that series. God’s initial aim for such an occasion is consequently limited by the kinds of prehensions available in that nexus. In other words, in giving an initial aim, God himself is limited to the kinds of determinants out of which that occasion is emerging.

When God contributes an initial aim to a high-grade occasion in a personal series, he is likewise limited by the prior environmental factors that have been shaping that series, especially by the past occasions in the series itself. There is always a call to fuller realization of the divinity in each occasion, but for most occasions that realization cannot achieve the unlimited fullness that it achieved in Jesus. Thus, due to cultural familial and other environmental conditions, God was able to initiate the possibility of a full relationship with the person of Jesus from the beginning, and at every moment of his life Jesus freely chose to affirm and maximize the initiative that was his.

This latter explanation is more involved than the former, but it has the advantage of avoiding any arbitrariness on the part of God. Thus, it escapes the mythological pitfalls that beset explanations in which some human events can be described only in terms of special and distinctive interventions of God. A theological system in which God acts exactly the same way toward every occasion avoids the necessity of justifying certain divine actions or explaining the absence of others.

There is a second element in process thought that provides a further possibility to describe the uniqueness of the person of Jesus. This is the theory of prehensions. Each actual occasion is the result of many prehensions that are synthesized into one coherent whole. These prehensions are the relations of the occasion to its own past and to its relevant environment. One such prehension is necessarily the prehension of the divinity. It can focus upon that prehension and make it a significant component in its synthesis, or it can render it trivial. On most occasions, the prehension of the divinity is not significant in the final synthesis, but on some occasions, such as moments of prayer or spiritual enlightenment, it can be the dominant element.

To say that Jesus prehended the divinity in an intense way would imply that he maintained a stronger relation with God than is common to most men. It would not in itself, however, make him unique, because the same kind of explanation would describe the prophet or mystic. Nor can we say that Jesus prehended only the divinity, because this would place his humanity into question. Rather, we might suggest that Jesus prehended God at every moment of his life in such a way that his relation to God partially displaced his experience of self, so that in fact Jesus could have experienced himself as both human and divine. That is to say, the series of actual occasions that defined the person of Jesus were marked by prehensions of the deity according to the same mode that marked his prehensions of his own human past. Therefore, the self that Jesus experienced throughout his life was a moment by moment integration of the human and divine in his own person.

This is, of course, the maximal statement a process theologian can make about Jesus. Translated back into the traditional terminology of two natures in one person, it seems to conform quite adequately to what was proclaimed at Ephesus and Chalcedon. It is a clear reaffirmation of the divinity of Jesus and a strong basis for acknowledging him as Lord and Master, as do the Jesus movement and other fundamentalist groups today. At the same time, for the so-called liberal Christians to whom this may seem too much like philosophical mythology, the explanation of Jesus as simply a holy man with intense prehensions of the deity provides the description of a fully human person who was related to God in a very special way.

Thus, Jesus is unique either in the unique composition that he experienced as his “self” or in the fact that no other person has ever achieved such a total relation with God. Either way, process theology can accommodate the Christian seeking a philosophical explanation of the person of Jesus. This is a distinct advantage, because it enables process theology to reduce the differences among Christians to the way in which prehensions of the divinity can be posited in the person of Jesus.

When we consider both the initial aim and the prehensions of God by Jesus as factors in resolving the question of reconciling the humanity and divinity in Jesus, we must understand that the basis of the process explanation is the theory of immanence, namely, the divine immanence in Jesus. God is immanent to every actual occasion both in giving it its initial aim and in that occasion’s own prehensions of the deity. Jesus is unique because the immanence of God finds expression in him in a unique way. This is why his followers were amazed that he spoke with his own authority. With God’s immanence totally present to him at all times, Jesus did not need to appeal to the tradition or even to some private revelation. He spoke from the depths of the divinity that was in him, and in this way he persuaded his hearers both by what he was and by what he said.

What is decisive in Jesus and what makes him significant for all subsequent history is that in his person God reveals himself to us as immanent in our world. He is not merely the prime mover of Greek philosophy or the God of the covenant in the Old Testament. He is, as Augustine so succinctly stated, more intimate than I am to myself. God’s immanent presence to every man is made known in his presence in Jesus. This is the significance of the incarnation. God is immanently present in Jesus and in our world. Conversely, the significance of the death and resurrection is that Jesus is immanently present in God. God has taken what is human and worldly into himself in a complete and positive way. Man and his world are not alien to God or insignificant to him. We are indeed, moment by moment, likewise being taken up into the divine nature and “resurrected” into objective immortality where we become part of the prehendable data for future occasions. Great, admirable men of history, such as Socrates, Buddha and St. Francis, are examples of persons whose lives and inspirations are continually being resurrected from the past for the edification of emerging moments of history. In Jesus this resurrection was uniquely striking, because it was experienced by his followers immediately after his death, and it has continued to be a part of the Christian faith experience ever since.

The purpose of Jesus in history, therefore, and his continued significance for us today, is his redemptive function. The term “redemption” is perhaps somewhat misleading in this context. Literally, it means “buying back.” In the tradition of Irenaeus, Anselm and Thomas, this referred to God’s act in Jesus of buying us back from the consequences of original sin. Process theologians generally prefer the tradition of John Duns Scotus, which holds that God predestined the person of Jesus as the crowning of creation and as the total manifestation of his love, regardless of whether man sinned. In process theology Jesus is the primordial example of God’s immanence in the world and the world’s immanence in God. Redemption, consequently, states the fact that man need not slavishly move through life from occasion to occasion, merely creating each new synthesis from worldly data in pursuit of worldly satisfaction, but that he is freed to respond to the divine immanence within him and within the world, thus constantly striving, occasion by occasion, to maximize a realization of that divinity as best he can, within the limitations imposed by his history and his environment. In brief, redemption is the freedom to appeal to the immanent divinity in the self as a more perfect authority than the authority of history or environment alone.

We have not answered definitively the question of whether Jesus is an absolutely unique person and absolutely decisive for human history, or whether he is merely the primordial model of human existence. Is he different in kind, or only in quality? There are, as we have seen, ways in which process philosophy can be used to argue both positions. Christian tradition, until relatively recently, has been very careful to insist upon an absolute distinction between the person of Jesus and other human persons. Is this absolute a part of the original Christian experience, or is it rather the result of the Hellenic concept of God that underlay the Christological dogmas? To put the question in another way, is it necessary to hold Jesus’ absolute distinctiveness as divine if one’s philosophy does not hold God’s absolute distinctiveness from the world? Is it not accurate to say that the divinity of Jesus is represented more by the way in which he was really related to God than by the way in which he was unrelated to the world? And if his relation to God constitutes the ideal relation for every man (even though it may be impossible to realize this ideal in every successive occasion the way it was realized in Jesus), can we not say that what best characterizes the divinity of Jesus is precisely that he was ideally human?

This line of reasoning can put aside the old notion that uniqueness requires an absolute distinction from all other reality. Instead, it suggests that uniqueness can be a relative term, and that Jesus is in fact unique because in his humanity he is a more perfect model of ideal humanity than has ever existed, or, we may believe, will ever exist in the future. Since man is most ideally human when he responds to the immanence of God in every occasion of his continuity, both by the realization of God’s initial aim and by his positively prehending God. Jesus is most divine when he is most ideally human. He is divine not because of an absolute difference from other men, but because of the realization of divinity within him. For divinity does not :1 require such a difference; indeed it denies such a difference, since the God who is immanent in Jesus is the God in whose consequent nature the world is immanent. The very nature of God in process theology rejects such an absolute distinction between Jesus and the rest of humanity, except as an abstract mode of speaking.

Jesus is really related to God, and really related to man, just as God is really related to man. The mode of Jesus’ relation to God, however, is such that God is experienced as uniquely present in him. This relation, which constitutes his divinity, in no way renders him different from us, but more an intimate part of us. He is divine because he is the primordial exemplification of God’s immanence in the world, and our ultimate immanence in God. In him we are freed to discover the divinity in each new occasion of life. Jesus is thus the primordial model of human life lived in freedom and love. In him man can find both his meaning and his Savior.


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Chapter 8: The Church

Institutions are not having a very happy time of it these days, and the Church, despite its long and venerable tradition, is no exception. Like the other parts of the so-called “establishment,” the Church is now suspect of being inflexible and unresponsive to the needs of a rapidly changing twentieth century. Furthermore, since its ultimate claim to existence is rooted more in the events of the past than in contemporary social problems, it has even a more conservative image than political and economic institutions. As a result, many today have abandoned their ties to organized Christian churches and replaced them with more personal forms of religious beliefs.1

A Christian church that is not in some way related to human concerns has lost the spirit of its foundation in Jesus and has little to recommend it to the world at large. Mindful of this fact, Pope John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council for the purpose of making necessary reforms in the Roman Catholic Church. The history of the Council is now well known, and its repercussions have been felt by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Its spirit continues in the Church into our own time, even though the old concerns have given way to new ones. Because it focused internally upon reform and adaptation, and externally upon dialogue and interaction with other churches, its thrust can best be described as forward and outward. Fidelity to the Council thus implies not merely a repetition of its formulae or even a restudying of its documents. We are no longer afforded the luxury of looking backward for security and stability. There is no longer any reprieve from the task of continuing to build the Church of the future. The Vatican II Catholic, therefore, is one who is willing to think beyond the Council and to engage in the creative process that ought to characterize the Church.

The key to understanding Vatican II can perhaps best be expressed in two phrases that characterized it. They are the description of the Church as semper reformanda (always in need of reform) and as populi Dei (the people of God). These expressions characterize a new self-image of the Church that began to emerge at the Council. They suggest a replacement of the old model of the Church as a monolithic, unchanging institution to a new model that uses evolutionary and relational modes of thought.

The old model of the Church was a faithful reflection of the old substance mode of philosophy that had characterized the Church since the fourth century. It was a stable, definable institution established by Jesus and transmitted in its total essence throughout the ages. It was infallible and indefectible, and change affected it only accidently. Those who could acknowledge in faith its claim to possessing the eternal truths could become members of the institution by baptism. In a certain sense, however, the Church was self-sufficient by virtue of its divine foundation, and even its members were extraneous to its essential nature and structure. It was, Catholics were taught, a “perfect society,” i.e., complete unto itself in its purposes and the adequate means of attaining them.


The two expressions referred to above suggest that the model of the Church has changed considerably since Vatican II. The new model has not yet been fully formulated either theoretically or operationally. But the spirit of the Council and the events in the Church subsequent to it suggest that the new model is heavily imbued with processive and organismic patterns of thought.

The processive nature of the Church is implied in the expression Ecclesia semper reformanda. In its origin, the Church was the society that developed when followers of Jesus made an act of faith in him, Its continued existence has depended upon others reiterating that act of faith in Jesus throughout its entire history. Apart from that faith, the Church is nothing at all. Dogmas, creeds, and doctrines, as well as structures, hierarchies and authorities, are merely the ways and means whereby the faithful can articulate and organize their belief. They do not define or constitute the Church itself. They simply express how that faith has been integrated into the various moments of history.

The Church, then, is a process. More specifically, it is the 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. In this view the Church is not a stable, immutable institution that has existed since the time of Jesus, founded by him and protected by him from the changes of the world. The Church is the consequence of its first members’ faith in Jesus and the subsequent faith that it inspired. In its dialogue with the world that faith takes new shapes, thus giving new shapes to the Church. In this sense, then, the Church is constantly changing and readapting according to the exigencies of the world. Because the world changes, the Church must change, too. Change is therefore not something merely to be tolerated, but something to be encouraged as important to the vitality and continuity of the Church. Fidelity does not consist in mere repetition. The Church can be faithful to the spirit of Jesus only within the process of each succeeding moment of history.

The Church as a process is also the Church as an organism in society. It is the consequence of the followers of Jesus related to each other by their faith in him. As the Church moves through history and increases its membership, the number of these faith-relations increases. The reality of the Church is always found in the faith-relation of its believers, in continuity with the faith-relation of believers at every moment in the Church’s history. This is what Vatican II implies when it speaks of the Church as the people of God. Apart from its people, the Church is nothing at all.

Since the relationship of faith about which we are speaking is essentially a belief in Jesus, the entire structure of the Church is obviously larger than simply those who are card-carrying (or basket-contributing) members of a particular Christian sect. Furthermore, insofar as the meaning of that faith can be expressed in non-Christian ways by people of other backgrounds and cultures, they too can be included in a still larger concept of the people of God. The Church in its widest sense, then, is the entire community of men as related by the faith in God to which Christianity aspires in the name of the Lord Jesus. These levels of identification describe the Church as an organism.

A new model of the Church as processive and organismic would be difficult to define with dictionary precision. Its history is the manifestation of the spirit of Jesus in all of its variety and unpredictability throughout the Christian epoch. It is not the succession of the papacy or the formulation of creeds and dogmas. And its present moment is not lived only in church buildings. The Church is wherever two or more are gathered in faith to reiterate and reinterpret the importance of Jesus according to the inspiration of his spirit.

In Whiteheadian philosophy, the processive and relational aspects of reality are described in terms of nexus of actual occasions. We have already defined a nexus as a set of actual occasions related to each other in time and space. The Church, then, is a nexus of its individual members in time and space. As a nexus, these individual elements are joined together in a single fabric, called the Church, or assembly of the people of God.

A nexus in which the component actual occasions are ordered among themselves in a certain way is called a “society.” A nexus is a society when a certain identifying characteristic is a contributory component of each of the elements in that society. It is not sufficient that a class name can be applied to each element of the society. It is necessary that each element also incorporate within itself the same identifying characteristic as the other elements within that nexus. That is, each actual occasion of the nexus must prehend positively that characteristic which identifies the society as a whole.

The Church is a society as well as a nexus. Its claim to being a society rests upon the prehension of the importance of Jesus in each of its members. The Church is not merely the class name of all those who believe in the importance of Jesus. It is rather the consequence of that importance being prehended in each moment or occasion of its history. That is, the Church is a society in the technical Whiteheadian sense because its members prehend that importance from past members of the society and incorporate that importance into themselves. In this way the spirit of Jesus literally lives on in each of the members. Therefore, the Church, as a society, is a creative force in the environment, because its past is always the data for further becoming in faith. This further becoming occurs both in new members and in new understandings.


No society exists alone. Each is set in the context of a wider society which constitutes its environment. Without the wider context there could be no identifiable characteristic. The Church, therefore, is always in relation to what is not the Church. This interaction is the basis of its ecumenical interests and its pastoral mission. Both of these imply movement and change within the Church. The Whiteheadian model of inter-relatedness and process provides a convenient framework to explain the incorporation of new insights and the resultant growth within the Church, and the Church’s influence on the world in general. In its ideal form, the evolution of the Church is an illustration of the evolution of reality: the many become one and are increased by one.

The identity of the Church according to the model we have been suggesting is not found in an essential definition of its nature as an institution, but in the function of its evolution. The Church is primarily a process, not a structure. That process has an identifying characteristic, but that characteristic is not a definition of the Church. This may seem like a small point to stress so frequently, but its implications for ecclesiology are vast. It spells the difference between looking at the Church as a substantial, structural reality which contains members who believe, and viewing the Church as an event moving through history, constantly evolving in its very make-up according to the shape that the belief of its members takes at a given moment in history and according to the way in which that belief finds expression in relation to the larger environment or culture where it is found.

The identifying characteristic is a way of conceptualizing what is important in the society, but it does not define the reality of the society. Its function lies not in the fact that it is conceptualized for purposes of an abstract definition, but in the fact that it is successively incorporated in an immanent way into the actual occasions that constitute the society. In other words, being a Christian makes a difference because belief in the importance of Jesus enters into the very composition of the actual occasions that constitute the life of a Christian. The Church is the consequence of their being Christians. One does not become a Christian by joining a Church.

The incorporation of the identifying characteristic in the elements of the society has two functions. It is the basis both for its survival as a society and for the intensity that it achieves. The art of survival, Whitehead suggests, is to be a rock.2 It exists in its environment simply, continually reiterating the past to the present. Bare survival contributes a passivity and a sameness to a society. In contrast, intensity requires complexity, not simplicity. Elements are continually molded and kneaded into new shapes and forms. There is an active and creative appropriation of the past and of the immediate environment for the purpose of building the future. Intensity is the zest and flavor of life, and this is also an important ingredient for a society. Both survival and intensity are necessary in an organism, whether it be an actual occasion, a society of occasions, or the entire cosmos. Survival and intensity, reiteration and novelty — these are the dual elements in Jesus’ own statement that upon a rock he would build the Church.

One might argue that a belief merely in the importance of Jesus is inadequate to be the identifying characteristic of the Church, and that a statement about the divinity of Jesus would be a better expression of what that importance means in the Christian tradition. The problem is precisely that such a statement is an expression, not a prehension. It states how Christians have traditionally expressed Jesus’ importance, whereas the former deals with how they originally intuited the person of Jesus. Surely the divinity statement adds a new intensity to the faith. But as a statement it tends to generate other statements, which together take on a normative and exclusive character. A more simple description of the experience, without regard for how that experience has been expressed, promotes the survival dynamic by not limiting the possible expressions of that experience. Minimal statements expand the range of inclusion; maximal statements increase the depth. When the latter become the normative statements, exclusion inevitably results. The identifying characteristic of the Church with an eye to its survival mechanism should therefore be painted with a wide sweep of the brush, allowing the precisions of intensity to fill in the narrower, more aesthetically pleasing lines.

There is often a tendency for intensity to view survival with disdain. When intensity wins out at the expense of survival, rather than in harmony with it, definitions and statements of exclusion narrow the scope of the society. Such definitions and statements, issued in the interests of preserving internal purity, cause the society gradually to lose touch with the wider, “impure” environment in which it is located. Since no society can long remain independent of its surroundings, the demands of preserving purity can also effect societal suffocation.

The difficulty with the substance model of the Church is that intensity is generally won at the expense of survival. Dogmas, creeds and doctrines within the context of structure, hierarchy and authority express the intensity of the Church. These sometimes tend to cut the Church off from its environment, because they become the essential definition of the Church and the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion. A process-relational model of the Church also recognizes these elements as necessary for the Church’s intensity factor, but the intensity factor serves as a characteristic, not as a definition of the Church. The definition of the Church, if indeed it can be defined at all, is always the people of the Church in the act of creating the Church. What they are creating is shaped by a common characteristic — their prehension of the importance of Jesus. Survival is not threatened by the variety of ways in which expressions of that faith introduce novelty into the process. In this way, survival is enhanced by intensity and novelty.

The process-relational model of the Church does not tend to isolate the Church from what is going on around it. It is ecumenical in the widest sense of the term. Just as no society exists in isolation from its environment, so also the Church always finds itself temporally and spatially in the wider context of the world and essentially inter-related with it. Because of this relatedness, the Church contributes itself to the world and the world contributes itself to the Church.

The mode of contribution is always via the elements that constitute it. The Church as a society does not contribute apart from the elements that constitute it, although the weight of the elements working together may outweigh the collection of individual contributions. Rather, the Church contributes to the world because, and merely because, its members contribute to it. This is because the Church is a society of the faith of the people of God. Apart from its people, there can be no faith and no society.

The above describes how the Church contributes to the wider environment. What it contributes is its in-touch-ness with the importance of Jesus today. Therefore, the Church can never entertain a conflict between relevancy and tradition. This is always a false dilemma. The Church’s relevance is its tradition. Just as an irrelevant Church is ultimately unfaithful to the spirit of its foundation in Jesus, so also a Church disinterested in its tradition is ultimately undermining the basis of its faith. But the Church tradition is not a static, stable past fact, repeated from epoch to epoch. It is past data still shaping and forming the present by virtue of its real inclusion in it.


Notes:

1. For a fuller explanation of some of the ideas in this and the following chapter, see Bernard Lee’s The Becoming of the Church (New York: Newman Press, 1974).

2. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p.4.