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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Process Theology Beyond Control, Certainty, and Fear
Series Outline: Essays IV–VII
Essay IV - What the Greeks Already Knew (and We Forgot)
Ethics, Explanation, and the End of Coercive Belief
→ Extracts and reframes the core lessons of Greek unbelief developed in Essays I–III, showing that ethical failure, explanatory sufficiency, and epistemic humility dismantled divine authority long before modernity.
Ethics precedes metaphysics.Divinity must remain morally responsive.Faith collapses when ethical trust collapses.The gods are refused, not denied, when disenchantment rises.
Power, Empire, Trauma, and Identity
→ Examines what Greek unbelief did not face: imperial entanglement, domination systems, identity-based belief, and religious trauma - factors that make modern Christian collapse more volatile and painful.Meaning may persist without metaphysical closure.Unbelief and skepticism may become optional rather than forbidden.Epistemic humility may be seen as a strength, not a loss.
Process Theology Beyond Control, Certainty, and Fear
→ Introduces a constructive but restrained process-theological framework in which faith is reimagined as relational responsiveness rather than metaphysical certainty or as institutional authority.
Hope, Trust, Participation, and Becoming
→ Explores faith as lived orientation rather than belief-system: a way of inhabiting an open, evolving reality through trust, participation, and ethical becoming.
Faith is not certainty about what will be,but participation in what is becoming.
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| Together, the essays form a metamodern sequence: from collapse → through critique → toward inhabitable faith. |
Preface: Why Construction Must be Restrained
The preceding essays traced the collapse of religious authority through ethical failure, explanatory redundancy, epistemic humility, and the trauma produced when belief becomes inseparable from power. That work was necessarily critical. Yet critique alone cannot sustain a viable future for faith. What remains is the more delicate task of reconstruction.
This essay does not attempt to restore religion to cultural dominance, nor to defend faith as a universal necessity. Such ambitions would repeat the very errors that produced the present crisis. Instead, Essay VI asks a narrower and more difficult question: what form of faith could remain credible in a world that no longer requires it to function, obey it to belong, or fear it to survive?
Process theology offers a vocabulary for this question, not as doctrine imposed upon reality, but as a descriptive grammar for a world already experienced as relational, unfinished, and ethically demanding. The aim here is not to establish certainty, but to articulate how faith might persist without domination - without control over knowledge, bodies, identities, or futures.
Introduction: The Question of Authority Revisited
Authority that must be enforced
has already lost its moral claim.
Every theology rests upon an answer to the question of authority.
Historically, Christianity located authority in divine sovereignty mediated through scripture, religious institution, and state power. To believe rightly was to submit rightly. Truth was fixed, revelation was assumed completed, and obedience to all became the measure of faithfulness. This structure functioned effectively so long as authority remained uncontested and alternatives remained inaccessible.
That condition no longer holds.
In a pluralistic, post-certainty world, authority no longer flows naturally from institution or inheritance. It must be justified relationally, ethically, and existentially:
Claims to final truth ---> now provoke suspicion.Assertions of divine mandate ---> invite scrutiny.Appeals to fear or exclusion ---> generate resistance rather than allegiance.
The crisis of faith, then, is not primarily about belief in God’s existence. It is about where authority is allowed to reside. Currently it is residing in many places. Here are several:
- Is authority located in religious institutions that claim divine sanction?
- In the state, enforcing moral order through law?
- In autonomous human reason?
- In shared ethical responsibility?
- Or nowhere at all?
Process theology reframes this question by refusing to locate authority in domination of any kind. It rejects coercive sovereignty, metaphysical certainty, and fear-based allegiance. Instead, process-based authority is reimagined as persuasive rather than controlling, relational rather than imposed, and responsive rather than final.
Within this framework, God is not the ruler who commands/demands obedience, nor is God the guarantor of certainty. Rather, God is the relational depth of reality itself - the lure toward value, coherence, and intensified life within an open universe. Faith, accordingly, is not submission to power, but participation in becoming.
This reorientation is not a retreat from seriousness. It is a refusal of false strength. Some describe this approach as a “theology of weakness.” Yet process theology is more than an embrace of vulnerability or renunciation of power. It inhabits weakness only insofar as it rejects coercion as a measure of divine or moral authority. What it affirms instead is a different ontology of power altogether: power as persuasive presence, as patient fidelity, as the capacity to sustain relation without overriding creational agency (freewill).
Within a process framework, weakness does not signify absence of agency, but the discipline of non-domination. Divine power is not diminished because it does not compel. It is intensified precisely because it remains responsive to freedom, suffering, and becoming. God does not win by force, secure outcomes by decree, or resolve history through intervention. God remains with the world, luring it toward richer forms of relation even when such lures are refused and unwanted.
Faith shaped by this vision is neither triumphant nor resigned. It is resilient. It does not seek control in the face of uncertainty, nor certainty in the face of loss. It accepts unwanted exposure as the condition of genuine relation. What appears as weakness from the standpoint of sovereignty becomes, in process terms, the only power capable of sustaining love, creativity, and ethical growth in an unfinished world.
The sections that follow develop this claim in four movements:
- Authority without coercive sovereignty
- Faith without absolute certainty
- Trust without imposed fear
- Commitment without unquestioned domination
Together, they sketch a form of faith capable of remaining present in devastation, pluralism, and uncertainty without collapsing into either dogmatism or despair.
What is at stake is not whether faith can regain power, but whether it can relinquish it - and still remain faith.
I. Authority without Sovereignty
Power that cannot persuade
must compel.
Persuasion that cannot compel
may yet endure.
The collapse of religious authority in modern contexts is often misdiagnosed as a failure of belief. In fact, it is more accurately understood as a failure of sovereignty. When authority is grounded in domination rather than persuasion, it becomes brittle. When it can no longer compel assent without coercion, it fractures.
Classical Christian theology inherited its model of authority from imperial metaphysics. Consequently, its theology is written from that perspective: God was conceived as supreme ruler, omnipotent sovereign, and final judge. Authority flowed downward - from divine decree to ecclesial institution to political order. Faith, within this framework, was obedience to a settled hierarchy of power.
This structure proved historically effective, but only under conditions of enforced uniformity. Once non-institutional pluralism, skepticism, and moral critique entered the public sphere, divine/institutionalized sovereignty could no longer secure allegiance. What remained was command without credibility.
Process theology offers a decisive reconfiguration. It rejects coercive sovereignty as the proper model for divine authority:
- Instead of power-over someone or something ---> it emphasizes power-shared-with someone or something.
- Instead of coercion ---> it seeks loving (rather than selfish) persuasion.
- Instead of final control ---> it seeks lovingly responsive co-participation.
Within a process framework, authority is not located in the ability to override freedom, but in the capacity to evoke response. God does not rule by suspension of natural or moral order, but by presenting possibilities for richer forms of relation within it. Divine action is not supernaturally interruption, but naturally invitational.
This shift has profound implications for faith. If authority is persuasive rather than sovereign, then faith cannot be enforced. It cannot be legislated, threatened, or demanded. It must be freely enacted or not enacted at all. Authority survives only insofar as it remains credible and credibly helpful to society's conscience and experience.
The history traced in earlier essays shows that religious systems collapse when they attempt to preserve authority through domination. Greek religion lost authority when its gods failed ethical scrutiny. Christianity fractures when it insists upon obedience without moral credibility, as is presently displayed in maga-Christianity's harsh policies to those it distrusts, displaces, or destroys. In such cases, authoritative sovereignty has outpaced spiritual and moral trust. Nor does it act in league with processual reality as it is undergirded by processual divine love.
Authority without sovereignty does not mean authority without seriousness or capacity. It means authority is re-grounded in relational depth rather than coercive, hierarchical force.
As example, Jesus had experienced unloving, imposed authority upon his person and work. That authority believed itself to be acting on God's behalf as exemplified by both the religious Jewish priestly authorities in tandem with the secular state of Roman authority acting together.
They each formed by assent to imposed dogmas of "authoritative belief + religious body + state mechanism = to kill and put-to-death the body and soul of not only a person, Jesus, but of a movement of imperial overthrow."
When they did, process took over and birthed an anti-authoritative religious movement which sought a non-coercive, lovingly helping Sacred/divine sovereignty not founded in Judaism's harsh God, nor imperial Rome's harsh emperors, but in a co-suffering sacred community of fellow remonstrants.
In consequence, the sacred is no longer located by fear of punishment -though the church of history and religious dogma has done so time-and-time again - but finds refuge in, and draws hope from, the Sacred/divine promise of inhabiting meaning, value, and shared becoming through Christ as enacted in loving community and general welfare.
Here then is ethics preceding belief, and belief re-settled upon ethical enactment. When authoritative power acts unjustly and unlovingly, then its authority is diminished, if not left altogether. Whereas processualized authority/sovereignty may appear weaker but is far more effective in community and in endurance.
Sacred/divine Process never guarantees dogmatic compliance, but it does remain responsive to skepticism, brokenness, suffering, and hatred. It sustains fidelity to creation and humanity by not conquering resistance but remain present within it.
The relinquishment of so-called dogmatic sovereignty is therefore not a loss of faith’s power, but a test of faith's integrity. What cannot survive without domination was never worthy of allegiance to begin with.
A Processual CodaWhen authority no longer coerces, faith changes form.
In the absence of sovereignty, authority is no longer something faith possesses. It is something faith must earn again and again through credibility, resonance, and moral responsiveness. Authority becomes provisional, relational, and fragile - not because it is weak, but because it no longer shelters itself behind fear.
This shift is not primarily institutional. It is experiential.
For the person of faith, authority without sovereignty is encountered as a claim that may be refused. Nothing compels assent. Nothing threatens punishment. Nothing guarantees belonging. What remains is an invitation rather than a command - an appeal to conscience rather than obedience.
Within a process framework, this is not a deficiency but a correction. If reality itself is relational and unfinished, authority cannot function as final decree. It must operate as persuasion within freedom. Loving authority becomes the capacity to evoke response without overriding autonomy.
This changes the meaning of faithfulness. Faith is no longer measured by submission to external power, but by the quality of one’s participation in shared becoming. The faithful person is not one who obeys correctly, but one who responds attentively - ethically, relationally, and with awareness of consequence.
Such authority does not belong exclusively to religion. It can appear in moral insight, communal practice, artistic truth, or acts of care. It does not claim supremacy. It claims relevance. It does not silence alternatives. It remains accountable to them.
This form of authority cannot survive abstraction. It must be embodied. It is tested not by doctrinal coherence, but by whether it generates trust rather than fear, responsibility rather than compliance, and openness rather than enclosure.
For this reason, authority without sovereignty is experienced less as certainty and more as weight. One feels drawn rather than driven. The claim presses inwardly rather than descending from above. It may be ignored without penalty, but not without consequence to one’s integrity of being and being-ness.
Here faith becomes exposed. Without domination to enforce allegiance, belief must justify itself through its fruits. It must remain present in suffering without explanation. It must act ethically without guarantee of success. It must speak truthfully without control over outcomes.
What cannot survive without coercive sovereignty must dissolve here as dross. What remains of worthiness and value is faith as response - a way of inhabiting reality rather than ruling it.
Authority stripped of coercive sovereignty cannot promise stability. But it does offer fidelity to community with the need to secure compliance. More importantly it invites participation and allows participation to determine its own course of loving actions and responses. And unimposed participation, once chosen freely, proves more durable than fear ever was.
II. Faith without Certainty
Certainty ends inquiry.
Faith begins
where certainty refuses to rule.
When certainty is no longer available, faith does not disappear. It changes faith's grammar.
Faith without certainty is not indecision, nor is it skepticism disguised as belief. It is the acceptance that ultimate reality cannot be possessed as knowledge without remainder. What is relinquished is not meaning, but finality.
In earlier religious forms, certainty functioned as protection. To know the truth was to secure oneself against doubt, loss, and contingency. Belief promised stability in a fragile world. Yet once certainty becomes a requirement for faith, belief collapses whenever certainty proves unsustainable.
Process thought reframes this impasse by releasing faith from the burden of epistemic closure. If reality itself is in process, then no description of it can be complete. Knowledge remains provisional, situated, and revisable. Faith, accordingly, is no longer assent to a finished account of the world, but fidelity to a way of relating within it.
This shift alters how belief is experienced. Faith becomes orientation rather than conclusion. It shapes attention, action, and responsiveness rather than answers. One does not believe in order to settle questions, but in order to remain open to what may yet emerge. Why? Because the nature of reality, like the sacred divine, is always in process of emerging.
Such (processual) faith is quieter. It lacks the confidence of certainty, but also its violence. It does not demand agreement. It does not require defense through exclusion, abuse, oppression, or murder. It allows disbelief, doubt, and refusal to exist without threat.
Within this frame, faith and skepticism are no longer opposites. Skepticism disciplines faith by preventing premature closure. Faith sustains skepticism by preventing disengagement. Together, they resist both dogmatism and despair.
Faith without certainty does not promise that things will turn out well. It does not guarantee coherence, rescue, or vindication. What it offers instead is commitment without possession - a willingness to remain oriented toward value, relation, and responsibility even when outcomes remain unresolved.
This form of faith proves resilient in devastation. Because it does not depend on explanation, it can endure loss without collapse. Because it does not require final answers, it can remain present amid ambiguity. Because it does not insist on certainty, it does not fracture when certainty fails.
Here belief is no longer defended as truth held securely. It is lived as trust extended repeatedly, without guarantee, within an unfinished world.
Faith without certainty does not close inquiry. It keeps company with it.
Fear creates obedience.Trust creates relation.Only trust can sustain a living faith.
When fear no longer governs belief, trust must learn to stand on its own.
Fear has long functioned as a stabilizing force within religious systems. Fear of punishment, fear of exclusion, fear of meaninglessness, fear of death. These pressures produced obedience, conformity, and endurance. Yet fear never generated trust. It only simulated it.
Faith without dominance cannot rely on fear, because fear contradicts the very relation faith now seeks to sustain. Trust emerges only where coercion recedes.
Trust without fear is not confidence that things will turn out well. It is not blind optimism, false reassurance, or psychological safety nets. It is the willingness to remain present without guarantees. It accepts vulnerability not as a defect to be corrected, but as the condition of relation itself.
Within a process framework, trust is not belief in divine control. It is confidence that (processual) divinity/reality remains responsive even when outcomes are uncertain. God is not the one who prevents loss, but the one who remains present within it, luring toward coherence, care, and meaning even when repair is incomplete.
This reorientation transforms how suffering is encountered. Faith no longer promises exemption from devastation. It promises accompaniment. It does not explain why harm occurs. It refuses abandonment within it.
Such trust cannot be commanded. It cannot be threatened into existence. It must arise freely or not at all. When fear is removed, trust becomes an act rather than a reflex. One chooses to remain/abide rather than withdraw, to care rather than disengage, to respond rather than harden.
This form of trust also reshapes prayer. Prayer is no longer petition aimed at control of outcomes. It becomes attunement - a practice of attention, alignment, and readiness to respond. Prayer does not secure results. It sustains relation.
Trust without fear allows faith to coexist with trauma. It does not require healing before belonging. It does not demand resolution before participation. It remains with what is broken without insisting that it be made whole in order to be worthy of care.
In this sense, trust is not faith’s reward. It is faith's risk.
To trust without fear is to accept that meaning may emerge without closure, that love may persist without certainty, and that fidelity may endure without rescue. Such trust does not protect faith from loss. It makes faith capable of surviving it.
Faith without fear does not promise safety. It offers presence.
And presence, freely chosen, proves more enduring than fear ever was.
Commitment that requires submissionis not faith - but psychological captivity.
When faith relinquishes dominance, commitment must be reimagined.
Commitment without domination does not mean weak conviction. It means conviction no longer secured by supremacy. Faith no longer claims authority by excluding alternatives or by requiring assent as proof of loyalty. Instead, commitment becomes the choice to participate without the need to prevail.
In earlier religious forms, commitment was often measured by boundary maintenance. To belong was to affirm correctly, obey visibly, and separate from those who did not. Faith was stabilized through contrast and control. Once dominance recedes, these strategies lose coherence.
What remains is a different form of commitment - one that persists without conquest.
Within a process framework, commitment is understood as ongoing responsiveness rather than absolute allegiance. It is not a once-for-all submission to doctrine, but a repeated decision to align one’s actions with value, care, and relational depth as they emerge within concrete situations.
Such commitment does not require the elimination of difference. It assumes difference as a condition of reality itself. Pluralism is no longer a threat to faith’s truthfulness, but the environment in which faith must learn to speak responsibly.
This has direct implications for how faith relates to other traditions and to those who inhabit non-faith environments. Commitment without domination recognizes that ethical seriousness, meaning-making, and relational integrity are not the exclusive property of religion. Atheism, agnosticism, and other faiths are not rivals to be defeated, but fellow participants in the shared labor of becoming human within an unfinished world.
- Here faith abandons the need to justify itself by various forms of superiority.
- Faith no longer requires validation through numbers, power, or permanence.
- Its credibility rests instead on whether it contributes to justice rather than exclusion, care rather than control, and hope rather than fear.
Commitment without domination also reshapes evangelism. There is no longer an obligation to persuade others to adopt or assimilate to the majority's belief. What remains is witness - not dogmatic proclamation aimed at conversion - but integral (relational) presence that invites curiosity through life's many perplexities.
Such faith accepts the possibility of refusal without resentment. It allows others to walk away without threat. It recognizes that commitment freely chosen by some is more faithful than allegiance extracted from many.
This form of commitment is fragile. It cannot guarantee survival. It may diminish in visibility. It may lose institutional protection. Yet it gains something else in return - coherence between belief and practice, humility without collapse, and fidelity without force.
Faith without domination does not seek to win history. It seeks to remain integrally faithful within it.
What endures here is not a system, but a way of faithfulness to the divine sacred. And a way that does not require domination may finally be worthy of trust.
Essay VI has not argued for the survival of faith. It has described the form faith must take if it is to survive at all.
Once dominance is relinquished, faith no longer functions as authority over others, certainty about reality, or protection from fear. What remains is not belief as possession, but faith as practice - a way of orienting oneself toward value, relation, and responsibility within an unfinished, processual world.
Divine authority becomes morally persuasive rather than empowered-sovereignty (via king, church, dogma). Faith becomes orientation rather than dogmatic-conclusion. Trust emerges without fear of punishment (abuse, exclusion, oppression) or promise of rescue (from uncertainty, suffering, cruelty). Commitment persists without the need to prevail or win-out one's beliefs.
None of these shifts weaken faith.
They expose the fragility of living in a relational world.
This exposure is decisive. Faith without dominance cannot hide behind institutions, metaphysical guarantees, or cultural privilege. It must justify itself through its fruits alone - through whether it deepens care, sustains presence amid loss, and remains ethically responsive to those beyond faith's dogmatic boundaries.
Such faith will not command allegiance.
It will not stabilize identity.
It will not secure outcomes.
Yet, a processualized faith will remain vulnerable to refusal, marginalization, and decline.
And what it loses in control, it gains in credibility. What it relinquishes in certainty, it recovers in integrity.
This form of faith can coexist with skepticism, pluralism, and unbelief without anxiety. It does not require supremacy to remain meaningful. It does not demand salvific closure in order to act. It does not flee real-life devastation in search of divine explanation.
Faith without dominance does not promise that the world will be redeemed. It promises only to remain faithful within it.
What follows in our last discussion, Essay VII, is not a defense of belief, but an exploration of how such faith is practiced - not as doctrine asserted, but as life inhabited. If faith is no longer something one must believe, but something one may live, the question shifts accordingly. Not whether faith is true, but whether it is worth practicing.
Idealized faith came clothed in certainty,
and asked the world to kneel to its beliefs.
It came armed with answers,
and mistook divine silence for consent.
It demanded allegiance,
and called obedience as love.
But then the world broke -
and idealized faith broke with it.
does not command - it listens.
it no longer assimilates to conquer.
It stays and abides through thick and thin.
It does not promise unrealistic rescue,
but stays present through the tribulations.
Faith, when stripped of power,
can learn to walk again, mature, grow up.
attentive to how one becomes faithful.
January 18, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
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