Andrew Davis
Jason, excellent post and very important. Many of the critiques do not obviously apply to eastern orthodox circles (and sources), and there is much to explore here in terms of relevance and resonance with Whitehead (in ways he may well have accepted).
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Jace, a brilliant post! I really love the Möbius strip as a means of imaging these Whiteheadian relations. Excellent.
Dr. Davis
Too large…I’ll send via email instead!
Dr. Davis
Dear Leslie and Thomas,
Thank you both. Leslie, your sentiments as to an “emboldened ambassador” are lovely. Panentheism has many advocates and I’ve found Brierley’s work to be very important. The chapter I assigned was merely a fraction of a much larger investigation that to my knowledge has not been published in full. I attach below his excellent dissertation as a resource.
Best,
Dr. Davis
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the question. Briefly: my language of “chiefly” aims to be consistent with God as “chief exemplification.” I agree with you that “mostly” or “primarily” would be misleading synonyms of “chiefly.” I take God as chief exemplification to be the “preeminent” or “supreme” expression–and yes, “unsurpassed.”
Best,
Dr. Davis
Great conversation friends. It is certainly the case that “God” is a problematic word form many, and it may or may not be a word that we can live without. The great Karl Rahner argues in Foundations of Christian Faith that the terms “God” is indispensable and essentially makes us human. As Whitehead’s corpus developed the language of “God” did became less and less (although not fully absent), but “God” was still there in various creative formulations: the Eros of the universe and the Adventure of the Universe as one for example. Still, Whitehead recognized that various formulations have been used to name that indispensable referent without which the world could not be: “This reality occurs in the history of thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God” (SMW, 94).
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Thanks Ben, Kent and Thomas.
Ben: While Whitehead’s metaphysics has been called a “pluralistic monism,” such that even God exhibits the same dipolar description as all actuality, his panentheism is better conceived as a form of nondualism. Nondualism allows for independent inseparability between God and World. The world is not just a mode of God (as in Spinoza’ monism), but a genuine other that is distinct but intimately entangled with God.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Thanks Charles for a great post. Was your quotation of “the river of God” a reference to Greg Riley’s rich text? I took several classes from Riley during my M.A. work. I appreciate his emphasis on the Greco-Roman side of Christian origins. As for discussion of Egyptian theology, see the discussion in Hartshorne’s and Rees’ great text Philosophers Speak of God.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Friends,
This is an excellent “anatheistic” conversation. I appreciate each of your willingness to share your personal journey (at least in part). I’ll say again one of my favorite poetic expression of anatheism from T.S. Elliot:
“And after all our [theological] exploration we will we will return to where we started and know that place again for the first time.”
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Charles, thanks for a great post and suggestion here.
In fact, good work is being done on the intersection of Whitehead’s ontology and new materialism. I’ve just been reading portions of Clayton Crocket’s new book Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology which is making these kind of connections in light of Whitehead and Catherine Keller’s work. You may enjoy it. Of course, there is more work to be done on this topic. When time permits, I’d like to invest myself deeper into this conversation.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Great conversation here, friends. I recommend Suchocki’s Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology as a wonderful process harmatology dealing with these and a variety of other themes.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Ben, a great post! I past below part of my response to Donald’s post as it is directly in line with yours.
“You raise an important question concerning God and Creativity, one we will touch on in our final session. First, God is an agent, but creativity is not. Creativity is the formless ultimate that is embodied in all agents. In other words, Creativity is nothing at all without its expression through agents (ontological principle). For Whitehead, God is the primordial agent that shapes Creativity toward value. You’re right that Whitehead does say confusing things like God is an “accident of creativity,” or the “primordial created fact,” but he never means that God comes into being (such that there was a time when God was not). What he means is that God too is to be conceived in terms of ultimate creative expression to the upmost degree. Creativity is Ultimate Reality, but God is Ultimate Actuality. There can be no ranking between them because they mutually require each other to be what they are. Without God, Creativity could not be shaped toward meaning whatsoever. Neither does Whitehead want to say all creativity is Divine, since this raises the obvious question of evil. Rather Creativity belongs to finite events and the infinite divine event together, but is metaphysically distinct from them both. You can think of Creativity is the irrevocable metaphysical freedom of the cosmos that is shaped in the process of becoming by each agent.”
As for resonances with the Russian Sophiologists, there may indeed be some great parallel works to be done here!
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Rolla, great post!
You bring up an important point that is often reference when reading Whitehead. As you say, he’s a man of his time and uses the male pronoun for God in some of his most memorable quotes, but certainly not all. Naturally, neither he nor any other philosopher or theologian actually thinks God is gendered. I think this is good enough reason not to use male pronoun at all. But I also tend to think the criterion for using the male pronoun is knowing you shouldn’t. While the female pronoun is equally inadequate on these terms, I think it better captures Whitehead’s God (as feminists theologians have argued).
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Great post, Thomas, and great response, Charles!
An important division occurs precisely on this point as Charles has pointed out. I side with Charles on this point and think the “reversal of the poles” (which is often overlooked in Whitehead) is the key. I can’t recommend Sochacki’s work in the End of Evil more highly on this question. Not just Suchocki, but also Roland Faber, Lewis Ford and others have insisted on God as a single ever-concresencing actual entity to be coherent in contrast to Hartshorne, Griffin, Dombrowski, others. See also the contributions in World Without End: Christian Eschatology in Process Perspective which engages and critiques Suchocki’s contributions. I know we only mentioned the “reversal of the poles” quick last session, and I should have spoke to its importance in these ways. My apologies.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis
Donald,
You raise an important question concerning God and Creativity, one we will touch on in our final session. First, God is an agent, but creativity is not. Creativity is the formless ultimate that is embodied in all agents. In other words, Creativity is nothing at all without its expression through agents (ontological principle). For Whitehead, God is the primordial agent that shapes Creativity toward value. You’re right that Whitehead does say confusing things like God is an “accident of creativity,” or the “primordial created fact,” but he never means that God comes into being (such that there was a time when God was not). What he means is that God too is to be conceived in terms of ultimate creative expression to the upmost degree. Creativity is Ultimate Reality, but God is Ultimate Actuality. There can be no ranking between them because they mutually require each other to be what they are. Without God, Creativity could not be shaped toward meaning whatsoever. Neither does Whitehead want to say all creativity is Divine, since this raises the obvious question of evil. Rather Creativity belongs to finite events and the infinite divine event together, but is metaphysically distinct from them. You can think of Creativity is the irrevocable metaphysical freedom of the cosmos that is shaped in the process of becoming by each agent.
As for transcendence: Whitehead insists that God is not only immanent in our cosmic epoch, but also transcends all cosmic epochs. Whitehead wrote prior to Big Bang cosmology, but likely would haves insisted (as process thinkers after him) that God transcends the Big Bang which brought our particular epoch into being. So too to does Creativity transcends all epochs, since Creativity is the metaphysical reason becoming is more fundamental than being. So: Transcendence not lost, and neither (I would argue) is meaning. Cosmic epochs can transcend and move into ever-new modes of meaning and value never previously achieved–and the reason they do so is because of divine creativity. There is thus not “endless meaningless lightshow,” rather, the cosmic lightshow itself is the meaning. It is an endless meaningful lightshow that can self-transcend into deeper and deeper modes of meaning and value.
Cheers,
Dr. Davis