Process Theology & Religious Pluralism

Attend in person in Claremont, California or online via Zoom.

Live Session Info

Dates: Monday, July 31 – Friday, August 4, 2023
Times: 10:30 – 12:00 PM Pacific (Note: The session on Tue, Aug 1, will be held at 2:00 – 3:30 PM Pacific.)
In-Person Location: Middle Tree Learning Center, 250 W 1st St #330, Claremont, CA 91711 (Google map)
Online Zoom Info: Click on the session links below. (You must be enrolled in the course and logged in to access.)

Rethinking Process Theology and Religious Pluralism
Through the Lens of Divine Omnipresence

Course Summary

In this five-session course, we will explore the question of religious pluralism and consider what difference a process understanding of divine omnipresence and the centrality of compassion in all major religions can make to how one develops a Christian theology.

Course Description

Marjorie Suchocki wrote the first drafts of what became God Christ Church in 1979. But her teaching career actually began five years earlier, when she was hired by Wichita State University to teach introductory courses in eastern religions. There was no intentional overlap between what she learned through her studies in eastern, and eventually western, religions, including Judaism and Islam, and how she developed a process theology. But some important resonances emerged.

In 2001, she wrote Divinity and Diversity, which explored the implications for religious pluralism within various Christian doctrines. In this course, more than twenty years later, she tackles the issue again, this time working from and focusing on a process understanding of divine omnipresence. The central question of our study will thus be the following: What are the theological and practical implications of interpreting religions through the lens of divine omnipresence? The first and foremost suggestion is the near-universal importance of compassion as an essential element of religions.
‘Omnipresence” has fared poorly in the Christian triumvirate of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, usually interpreted as something like the authority of a ruler’s laws throughout the realm regardless of where the ruler actually is. But what if, as process thought suggests, God is necessarily present to each and every occasion of experience? Could we not expect to see some universal quality as a sort of “residue” of God in the various religions of the world? I am suggesting that the near universal value of compassion in all the world’s religions is a kind of “divine residue,” a sort of footprint of the presence of God.

But if compassion is considered a “footprint” of God’s presence, then shouldn’t all expressions of Christian doctrine reflect this attribute? What happens to “Christology” if compassion is central? “Salvation”? “Ecclesiology”? “Missiology”? “Eschatology”? For that matter, dare we explore what compassion implies for Christian notions of God as triune?

Yes, of course we dare. This course presents the process of doing so by looking for answers as we consider Christian doctrine through its historical development, its process formulation, and religious pluralism. We conclude each morning with the role of compassion in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism.

Course Outline

• Session 1
  • Getting Acquainted; Issues for the week’s study
  • Brief history of how omnipresence has been considered in Christian history
  • The process model and its implications for how we can understand God, particularly with reference to omnipresence
  • Judaism and the centrality of compassion
• Session 2
  • Implications of the process model for understanding evil
  • Sin and the need for redemption
  • Confucius, the social good, and humaneness
• Session 3
  • Christology: incarnation and redemption
  • Redemption: forgiveness, renewal, compassion
  • The Compassionate Buddha: four noble truths, wheel of samsara
• Session 4
  • Church and sacrament viewed through compassion
  • Mission
  • Taoism, the compassionate path
• Session 5
  • Trinity; Eschatology
  • Islam and the Koran