50 Key Concepts in Theology

Process Theology
Argues that God and creation are in a continual process of becoming.
Process theology originated in the twentieth century as the theological
development of the metaphysics of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
At the centre of process theology is the vision of the cosmos as motion rather
than a static system. According to process theologians, there are no static
entities because everything in our world is a movement of continual growth
and decay.
Whitehead argued that creation was the result of God’s ‘yearning after
concrete fact’ – that’s to say, God’s longing to turn his ideas into concrete
reality. The world that God creates is not a static structure but a dynamic
process in which free decisions are made. God himself is caught up in the
ongoing process, becoming an effect of his own creative action. In
Whitehead’s term, God is bipolar: both cause and effect, past action and
future consequence, potentiality and actuality, time-bound and eternal,
transcendent and immanent, idea and event.
The cosmos consists of ‘actual’ events which are partly determined by
their relationship to other actual events and partly free and creative. God’s
creative action is not simply to set the universe in motion (as the Deists had
argued). The act of creation is not an event but a continuous succession of
interacting events in which God is the guiding principle. In Whitehead’s
words: ‘It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is
immanent in the World.’
Although process theology is not necessarily Christian, a number of
Christian theologians have argued that the process view of God fits much
better with the biblical view of a loving creator who is intimately involved in
the history of the cosmos. Furthermore, process theism takes time and history
seriously, showing how God can be really concerned with the minutiae of an
individual human life. Classical theism, by contrast, regards God as
‘monopolar’: eternal, static, abstract. The ‘bipolar’ view of process theology
means that God is both eternal and completely tied up with the activity of the
universe.
Although process theology had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, and
although the technicalities of process theology are now very much a niche
interest in academic theology, the underlying ideas of process theism have
exercised a very considerable influence over Anglophone liberal
Protestantism from the 1960s onwards.

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The principal objection to process theology is that it appears as though
Christian theology has merely been bolted onto a process philosophy.
Although thinking of theology in terms of process is illuminating, process
philosophy works perfectly well without the Christian God, even without God
altogether. Nietzsche and Kazantzakis, for example, have offered staunchly
non-theological versions of process philosophy. Unlike most conventional
theism, process theology does not depend upon any special revelation, so the
teachings in the Bible are supplementary to, rather than essential to, the
philosophical understanding of cosmic process.
It is possible to argue that the logical conclusion of process theology is
the kind of post-Christian process theology set out by Don Cupitt, who argues
that the world is in a continual flux of becoming, but a flux without God.
THINKERS
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued that we experience the world as
‘duration’, the simultaneous happening of events in time.
John Cobb (1925– ): a leading process theologian who tried to
‘understand faith in Christ as demanding openness to others’ and ‘identified
Christ with creative transformation’ (Christ in a Pluralistic Age, 1975).
Don Cupitt (1935– ) argues that ‘we should see the whole of reality as
like a great fountain that continually recycles its own waters … It is
composed of nothing but a pure formless rush of contingency, pouring out and
scattering’ (The Religion of Being, 1998).
David Ray Griffin (1939– ): a leading process theologian who has argued
for a post-modern process theology of nature in which the human subject is
understood within the context of an ecological whole. The task of theology
should be ‘to relate talk of nature, human nature and divine action to
contemporary sciences’ (David Ray Griffin and Houston Smith, Primordial
Truth and Postmodern Theology, 1989).
Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) developed Whitehead’s philosophy as a
theological system. Hartshorne’s God is absolute in the sense of being
‘unsurpassable’, but this does not stop God surpassing himself. He is the
‘self-surpassing surpasser’ who develops in time. Hartshorne differs from
Whitehead in thinking of God as a ‘society of actualities’ rather than a single
actuality.
Heraclitus (sixth century bc) argued that everything in the cosmos is in
continual change, hence his famous dictum: ‘You never step in the same river
twice.’

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Nikos Kazantzakis (1885–1957): a Greek novelist, author of The Last
Temptation of Christ. Kazantzakis believed that life is a process of heroic
struggle: ‘My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of
love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall
give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did
today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are
the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow’ (The Saviors
of God: Spiritual Exercises).
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that the cosmos is ‘a monster of
energy, without beginning, without end … at the same time one and many …
eternally changing, eternally flooding back … with an ebb and flood of its
forms … this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally
self-destroying’ (The Will to Power).
Norman Pittenger (1905–97) argued that the God of process theology is
closer to the biblical picture of God than the static God of classical theism:
‘Every theology must have some final criterion. Paul Tillich has “the new
being”, biblical fundamentalism had “the word of Scripture”; liberalism, in
the older mode, appealed to “experience”. Process theology finds its criterion
in the biblical text, “God is love”.’
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) set out a philosophy and
metaphysics of process that formed the basis of later process theology.
IDEAS
Actual entity (or actual occasion): the description of entities as events
that we experience in time.
Panentheism (literally ‘everything in God’): the belief that God is infused
in the cosmos.
BOOKS
David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, Process Theology: an Introductory
Exposition (Westminster Press, 1976)
C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology: a Basic Introduction (Chalice Press,
1993)

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