Replies

Thank you Charles! I responded to another post with some writing from Thomas Hosinski on Divine self limitation, and I’ll try to grab it and post it as a new thread.

Thank you, Kyle. Your last two paragraphs really resonate with me and bring a valuable perspective. How sad that we “exile” God in order to feel more “secure.”

Yes, that’s a very valid perspective, Scott. the relationality is foundational to process understandings of power and presence and do invite a sense of Oneness.

Thanks Elvi! Sounds like you had a wonderful experience in the classes you took. What seminary?

Thank you for raising these tensions, Michael. Good points for sure. And I also appreciate Kent’s response. I’m okay with “flabby” theology and a “principled loose hermeneutics”! As long as, at the end of the day, they are life-giving and free us from anything that binds us.

Thank you Bill for these important reflections on process thought and mental health. I also think the availability of novel possibilities in every moment to help us experience positive change is a key help.

Thank you Jace. I very much appreciate this paragraph in particular: “Explorative attention to personal de facto reality, particularly intense experience, is integral to my core values as well, and within these explorations I, too, feel suffering occasioned by past events. As I understand these movements from a Whiteheadian tradition, which is to say that when I suffer, I am really presently experiencing a past event, as “the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity” (1929, p.14). While different circumstances than those Dr. Shah shared, by my experience and study, feeling through traumatic suffering contrastingly amplifies the life I am creatively experiencing.”

Charles, thank you for this. I resonate strongly with what Durkheim says about this. A similar perspective on neoliberalism and loneliness has been written by George Monbiot at this essay https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/12/neoliberalism-creating-loneliness-wrenching-society-apart

Thank you for this great post, Lu Wei-dong, and to all who responded. These are important conversations.

Regarding the idea of divine self-limitation, there are thinkers who fall into the process camp that lean toward this perspective, Thomas Hosinski and Langdon Gilkey (who Hosinski points to in his book The Image of the Unseen God) are two. Hosinski is the author of Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance, an excellent presentation of Whitehead and process theology. In the Image book (p. 118), he writes:
“Whitehead extended freedom to every agent in the universe, but he did not believe that freedom was a gift from God. For reasons that are a bit too complicated to enter into here, he believed that the limitation on God’s power was ‘built into’ the metaphysical system, so to speak. He believed that every again in the universe (‘actual entities’ in his technical vocabulary) inherently enjoyed creativity, the drive to become something new for itself. In his philosophy, freedom is correlated with creativity. so in his metaphysics, freedom is inherent in the universe, a function of the creativity driving all processes of becoming; it does not come as a gift from God.

In my judgment this position is incompatible with the Christian understanding of God and reality; it compromises what Christianity intends to affirm in its doctrines of monotheism and creatio ex nihilo. Consequently, I agree with a revision of Whitehead first suggested by the great American Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey (1919-2004). Following his teacher, Paul Tillich, Gilkey argued that we must regard creativity as the divine life itself, not as a force independent of God. Doing this allows one to retain much of Whitehead’s philosophy, but enables a revision of it that makes it compatible with what Christianity affirms in its doctrines of monotheism and creation from nothing. Creativity, as in Whitehead’s philosophy, is the force or power driving the processes of becoming of all agents in the universe, and it is the power or force driving the becoming of the universe as a whole. But it is the power or God’s own life graciously shared with the creatures of the universe, not a force independent of God. This means that the freedom enjoyed by all agents in the universe is a gift, part of the endowment with which God creates each and every agent…If God wishes the universe to be free, then God must limit God’s own power.”

I tend to lean more toward this perspective as well.

Thank you Jared for providing a wonderful addition to this discussion, and thanks Rolla for starting it off!

This is a great discussion so far. Very good questions. Coming at it from a Jungian perspective, where ego consciousness and differentiation from the collective unconscious is important, it is also true that full humanity and integrated personality comes when the ego learns to bow to the Self within, the God-image within the psyche, without being annihilated by it or absorbed into it.

Those are great questions, Jennifer! We might ask do we need people to buy into every aspect of process thought on principle, or can pieces of it within an otherwise resistant tradition still do some good (like the yeast in dough)? Good stuff to ponder.

[Sheri Kling]

Thank you Kyle, that’s very helpful. Lots to ponder. I might wonder if even objective immortality is a kind of universal salvation, because every entity is “saved” (held eternally) within the consequent nature of God, even without the subjective piece. With all of the evidence supporting reincarnation that has come out in recent years, I also wonder what that means for URS? Near death experiences also, for me, point very strongly to subjective immortality. And I’m sure that Whitehead would have to amend his thinking if he was confronted with evidence showing subjective immortality.
I know that Marjorie Suchocki has done some work to show how subjective immortality can be part of process theology, but I’m not familiar enough with it to describe it. I also want to read Griffin’s recent book on Whitehead, James, and life after death. It’s on my list!

• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Sheri Kling.

I love this reflection on Hesed, Charles. You’ve made some really nice connections and I especially like what you’ve included about theistic vs. nontheistic religions/traditions. Thank you!

Beautiful, Ben. Yes, the view of power is a key part, though I might not say it is THE key part, as the becomingness and relational characterizations of reality I think are more central. But the question of power comes directly out of those two things as a natural consequence.
Anyway, very glad to hear that things are clicking for you and that you have been moved by the readings and courses.