Replies

Yes, context, the context that we live and think in is never static and stagnant, even though conservatives would like to make it fixed and unchanging. A context is always an instance of creative-processive interrelationality, and the same creative-evolutionary interrelationality that produces it guarantees that it will inexorably undergo change and creative transformation.

There are many brilliant theological minds in the tradition of process theology, but I think that John Cobb has arguably done more to refine the cosmological and theological insight of Whitehead into a full-fledged naturalistic theology than anyone else. He’s quite humble and modest and would not make that claim about himself, but if we’re going to give credit where it’s due then we need to give a great deal of credit to Cobb for the tradition that we’re studying. Many have participated in realizing the theological potential of the ideas in Process and Reality, but Cobb should be recognized as a pioneer.

Thank you for your reply. I think that you’ve already been doing what I was advocating. Kudos! When we go directly and exclusively to thanking God for something, and leave out any mention of others, we’re kind of implicitly making what Hartshorne called the theological mistake of attributing omnipotence to God. We’re tacitly assuming that it was God’s power alone that brought about what we’re thankful for, and perhaps also that that power is a controlling form of power capable of making things happen rather than the power of inspiration and persuasion. The way that you and your family have been doing Thanksgiving prayers is perfect, you completely avoid that theological mistake, you give unto God the thanks that are appropriate to give to God, and unto others the thanks that they deserve. I admire your intuitively getting it right even before you began to familiarize yourself with process theology. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

I think that we’re on the same wavelength. In my view it’s the objective immortality of Jesus that matters to Christian spirituality, much more than just the facts of the historical Jesus. And the great contribution of process philosophy here is that it enables us to understand the Jesus of faith and theology as an actual part of the reality of Jesus, i.e. his objective immortality, rather than a mere construction.

I would stress that reading a Christian, or a romantic idea of purity of heart, or the Christian idea of sanctification into the Second Temple purity beliefs that Jesus seems to have subscribed to would be a mistake. Second Temple Judaism conceived purity largely in terms of ritual purity, of being without any blemish or defect that would supposedly make one unfit for the presence of God. Purity involved not merely moral purity—being free of inward moral blemishes—but also being free of physical blemishes or contamination that had nothing to do with morality, such as contamination by contact with a corpse or menstrual blood. Here’s where I think we have an instance of the historical Jesus not being perfectly led by divine initial aims, unless one really thinks that God discriminates based on physical fitness, and would lure Jesus to believe that people with diseases and disabilities were unworthy, and could only become worthy to enter the eschatological Kingdom of God if they were first cleansed of their disease. And so I think that process Christology, which is a form of exemplarism that conceives Jesus to be spiritually exemplary in terms of being perfectly attuned and responsive to divine initial aims, needs to be clear that it’s talking about the Jesus of faith, not the historical Jesus. Process Christology needs to explicitly acknowledge that Christians have grown the objective immortality of Jesus into a perfect model of godliness that transcends whatever godliness the historical Jesus might have had going for him, otherwise some people who are stuck on a strict identification of Jesus with the historical Jesus will have just as much difficulty accepting process Christology as they do accepting traditional supernaturalistic Christology.

And this is also relevant to viewing Jesus as a “call forward” from God to “lure” us into the actualization of God’s vision of an ideal, shalomic future form of life for humanity. If we’re fixated on simplistically and literalistically identifying Jesus with the historical Jesus then the historical Jesus’s apocalypticism, his looking forward to and expectation of the unfolding of a certain supernatural eschatological scenario will muck up Cobb’s image of him as a divine “call forward”, muck it up with a supernaturalistic apocalypticism that’s alien to it.

I don’t know if the question is really relevant if we’re talking about the freedom that is attributed to actual entities in process ontology. Whitehead doesn’t conceive the freedom of finite actual entities, or God to be an unbounded freedom, “the ability to do whatever”. The freedom of finite actual entities is conditioned by their past, context, and dependence on divine initial aims (they can of course reject God’s initial aim for them, but they still depend on it to get their concrescence in gear, so to speak). And God’s freedom and power, power to impact the world, is limited by the freedom and power of finite actual entities. At any rate, even if the idea of our self-creative freedom has appeal in this country for cultural reasons, that doesn’t have any bearing on its truth-value, so to speak. An idea can still be true, even if people believe in it for the wrong, cultural reasons.

Well, my preferred metaphors aren’t terribly original, they’re Whitehead’s “great companion” and “fellow sufferer who understands”. And God as primordial muse of the universe’s intrinsic creativity.

Hi Kent. I think that both terms, “alive” and “conscious”, can be problematic, because they can suggest too much about the subjectivity of actual occasions, the majority of which are not conscious; and they can give people who are unfamiliar with panexperientialism and process philosophy the idea that human type consciousness is being attributed to objects such as toasters and fingernails. The term panpsychism, although more common than panexperientialism, also suffers from the same problem. It gives people the idea that full-blown psyches are being attributed to inanimate objects. I think that the least problematic terms, the ones that we would do well to stick with, are experience, and panexperientialism.

Hi Jason. A couple of friendly corrections. You loosely refer to a rock physically experiencing, and prehending, but rocks are what Whitehead would term a democratic society, and what Hartshorne would term an aggregate individual. A rock doesn’t have a “regnant”, nuclear occasion, or series of occasions that would be its experiencing center, and so we can’t really say that a rock as such prehends. All of its constituent actual entities prehend, but the rock as an individual doesn’t. It’s important, not trivial or pedantic, to make this distinction and point, otherwise we open process panexperientialism up to criticism and derision, to the hackneyed criticism of skeptics that goes: Oh, so you think that fire hydrants are conscious.

Also, it isn’t quite accurate to say that the actual entities of an inanimate object such as a rock don’t have conceptual prehensions. Whitehead posited that all actual occasions are di-polar, they all have both a physical and a mental pole, physical and conceptual prehensions. In the case of “low grade” actual entities the mental pole doesn’t do a lot of work, so to speak; and those occasions routinely just go with their conformal feelings of antecedent occasions, they conform to the “form of definiteness” of their predecessors. Their conceptual prehensions play a minor role in their concrescence, but are not nonexistent. Also, recall that the actual entities in the makeup of a rock are members of a society, and the “defining characteristic” of a society that each member prehends is an eternal object, which is prehended conceptually.

Hi Jennifer. It’s nice to be in a course with you again. The thinking behind my heads-up to fellow students about their upcoming experience of encountering in this course some ideas that aren’t pure Whiteheadianism was that some of us have just finished Dr. Andrew Davis’s course about, and titled Whitehead’s process philosophy. Our focus for the last five weeks has been trained primarily on Whitehead’s philosophy; and, also, I suspect that perhaps some of our fellow students have the pre-existing misconception that process thought, whether it’s process philosophy or process theology, = Whitehead. But, as you know from your studies, process theology is a living tradition that has been enriched for many decades now by other thinkers and so I thought that I’d forewarn our fellow students to expect to move beyond Whitehead, into a greater exposure to the thinking and insight of Hartshorne, Cobb, Griffin, et al. They’ve taken Whitehead’s concept of God, and the God-world relation to another, more developed level. It will be very exciting to explore their thinking.

The program has been great, and I’m very much looking forward to the theology course. It’s not one that I’m taking for credit, but process theology is actually my focal interest, and has been the focus of much of my reading over the last 15 years. For anyone who isn’t familiar with process theology, it’s largely, but not exclusively, an outgrowth of Whitehead’s philosophy, which means that some of its roots are in his cosmology and ontology, but that it’s also grown well beyond those roots. Much of it has been shaped by Hartshorne, Wieman, Pittenger, Cobb, Griffin, Ford, Suchocki, and Keller, who are all not merely expositors of Whitehead but rather brilliant original thinkers who’ve creatively built upon on the theological implications of Whitehead’s thought, and contributed genuine and valuable novelty to the tradition. So don’t be surprised when we encounter some new thinking that deepens the theological dimension of Process and Reality but is no longer pure Whiteheadianism.

Thank you. Yes, I did derive the expression from the title of his book.

Thank you. I’ve also recently been looking into Confucius again. I have more of an appreciation of what he was really all about now. Confucius was essentially a relational philosopher. He wasn’t a metaphysician of relationality like Whitehead. He didn’t explore relationality at the ontological and theological levels. However, he was every bit as much a relational thinker as Whitehead and Hartshorne. His focus was relationality at the meso level of the social relationality of human beings; the question of how we can live together, create our existence and well-being together in a way that’s conducive to our realization of the best creative potentialities of human existence—or, as Whitehead would say, our actualization of the ideal eternal objects available to human beings and attainment of an optimal human satisfaction (this is the level of what Dr. McDaniel would term the branches, the practical implications and applications of process-relational thought). So I would recommend Confucius to anyone who would prefer to study a nontheistic social-relational thinker. He of course has a not so attractive reputation, as a stodgy proponent of hierarchical social structures, but he’s actually a deep relational thinker who teaches an essentially eudaimonic kind of relational wisdom. Fingarette’s book, Confucius: The Secular As Sacred can be enormously helpful for anyone seeking to get value out of reading Confucius.

Thank you. As for Atenism, like most people I used to think that it was an early form of monotheism, however according to the scholarship on it it’s likely that it was actually a form on monolatry rather than full-fledged monotheism. As far as scholars have been able to determine Akhenaten didn’t actually deny the reality of the other Egyptian gods, and that would make his religion monolatrous, or henotheistic, rather than truly monotheistic. But scholars aren’t 100% certain, so who knows, maybe Atenism was the first monotheism. We’ll probably never really know.

Personally, I’m a panentheistic theist whose theism is so Whiteheadian that some conventional supernaturalistic theists don’t even consider me to be a fellow theist. But that’s okay, because they don’t own God or theism, and don’t get to tell me whether I’m a theist or not. But that being said, I’m also what I would term a pancreativist. I also hold the Whiteheadian perspective that creativity is the ultimate metaphysical reality, creativity is foundational to my axiological, existential, and spiritual thinking. I would say that I oscillate between being a theist and a pancreativist, except that for me they’re interpenetrating, or fused forms of spirituality; something made possible by Whitehead’s metaphysics, in which creativity is the ultimate reality, and God is the ultimate actuality (as Dr. Davis has put it); God being the “primordial” and supreme exemplification and subjective individualization of the creative-experiential interrelationality and drive for value-realization that is Whitehead’s creativity.

Well, my point is that if someone finds value in process thought and wishes to develop a spiritual practice out of it, s/he doesn’t have to get hung up with God. It’s entirely possible to be a religious or spiritual processist without God if one is finding God to be too problematic. However, I find that process theism can add considerable enrichment to one’s spirituality, so I think that it’s worth the effort to overcome any difficulties that one has with the concept of God. It can help to remember that many of those difficulties arise from the supernaturalism of traditional theism. They’re baggage which, as adherents of the process theological idea of God, we can let go of and jettison. As for arguments for God, the need for them only arose from the doxic and pistological turn that Western religion took with Christianity. Christianity transformed religion from being something performative with no formal creed or stress on “orthodoxy” into a creedal “faith” in which what one believes, and battling and vanquishing disbelief with logical arguments becomes important. Again, supernaturalism and transcendentalism is the culprit. Christianity transformed the divine into something so supernatural (the pre-Christian Gods had been a part of the order of nature) and transcendent, so out of this world and beyond that one had to cultivate “faith”, and maintain one’s devoutness by faith. That is, when divinity becomes an extramundane and unseen reality, and religion ceases to be something that one simply lives and becomes instead a matter of propositional belief, well, that necessitates, puts one in the position of needing faith (“faith” in the sense of a clinging to belief and fighting off doubt) and arguments to support faith. Process theology is a way to be a theist without supernaturalizing God, and it panentheistically locates God back in the world with us. It enables us to find God interpenetrating all of the creativity of the world, all experience. It helps to bring God back into our lived experience, which helps to lessen the need for intellectualized faith and logical arguments. So if logical arguments for God’s existence are not working for you, that’s okay, you can actually carry on well enough without too much focus on them. You can simply cultivate mindfulness of God’s interrelatedness and “demiurgic” involvement with everything in the world (sustained appreciative awareness); receptivity to divine initial aims; and knowing God by practicing Gods values, values such as connectedness, compassion, and creativity. Instead of struggling with arguments and beliefs we can simply align our lives with God’s own subjective aims and axiological orientation.