Читать книгу Process Theology - Bruce G Epperly - Страница 5

1

What Is Process Theology and

Why Is It Important?

Susan came to my study with a spring in her step. For several weeks, this inquisitive and intelligent young mother had met with me for conversations about God. She had come from a conservative Christian background which discouraged her questions and doubts as a sign of unbelief. Her childhood pastor asserted that all the answers she needed were found in a literal understanding of the King James Bible. He regularly pitted the Bible against science, psychology, literature, and the follies of human reason. She was taught at an early age that only faithful Bible-believing Christians were saved. Despite their good works and commitment to their spiritual traditions, everyone else, including more liberal Christians, was doomed to eternal damnation unless they accepted Christ as their personal savior and subscribed to an inerrant understanding of scripture.

Susan could no longer accept what she perceived to be the narrow vision of faith she had learned as a child. She loved Jesus, but had outgrown the faith of her childhood and saw no alternatives to the old time religion of her youth. When she sought my counsel, she wondered if she could still call herself a Christian.

But, now, two months after our first meeting, Susan greeted me with excitement. “I think I get it now. Christianity is different than I thought it was. I really am a Christian! I’m just different from my parents and pastor. Following Jesus doesn’t mean believing outdated creeds or literal understandings of scripture or turning my back on science. I respect my childhood church. But God is so much bigger. I believe God is alive and as real as my next breath. God wants me to grow and explore new ideas. Now I realize that faith is a journey and not a destination, and God is with me with in all my questions and doubts. God’s love includes everyone, including people who ask questions and have doubts!”

All I could say in response was “Hallelujah! Praise God,” for Susan had found a faith and a God as big as her questions. Susan had discovered that God was intimate, lively, adventurous, and as near as her next breath and her daughters’ heartbeats.

What Susan didn’t entirely know when she initially sought me out was that the village pastor was also a process theologian. In the spirit of process theology, our conversations were free-wheeling and open-ended, with many possible destinations and no censorship. I accepted her where she was and invited her to be comfortable exploring new visions of God and herself. While I didn’t try to convince her about the superiority of my theological vision, I invited her to imagine God as intimate, relational, and creative. I asked her to ponder the possibility that the future is open not just for us but also for God. I asked her to consider the possibility that God is constantly at work in the world inspiring us to be partners in creating a better world. In contrast to her childhood pastor, I invited her to see the relationship between science and religion as a creative dialogue and explore the possibility that God’s revelation comes to people from other cultures and spiritual traditions and not just to Christians.

In the months following her theological epiphany, Susan began reading process theology. She had many questions and struggled with the contrasts between process theology and the faith of her childhood church. But, one afternoon she asserted, “I am so grateful for your introducing me a new way of looking at God and the world. I feel like I’m coming home to a God I can believe in. I don’t have to be afraid of my doubts. I see faith as an ongoing adventure with God right beside me, challenging me with new ways of looking at things. God is real to me again. God is right here in your study and down on the beach. I can find God wherever I go, listening and sharing, and growing along with me.” Susan had rediscovered a living God through encountering the welcoming spirit of process theology.

The Origins of Process Theology. Theology has always been connected with philosophical reflection. One of the greatest theologians, Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), was shaped by Greek philosophical ideas of perfection, meditated through the thought of the philosopher Plotinus and Neoplatonism. He struggled to connect the lively embodiment of Hebraic spirituality and Jesus’ ministry with the neo-Platonic definition of perfection as unchanging and embodiment as a hindrance to spiritual growth. Another great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was influenced by Aristotle, who described the ultimate reality as the Unmoved Mover. Any change in God or influence from the changing world on God’s experience constituted a diminishment of divine perfection. Aquinas also struggled to join the unchanging divinity of Greek thought with the lively, intimate and emotional God of the Bible, embodied most fully in the Suffering Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. The parents of the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564) saw God as dynamic and active in the world, but also struggled with the character of divine knowledge and power. Their understandings of divine perfection required God to have active foreknowledge and foreordination in relationship to the events of the world. Nothing new could possibly happen to God nor could the world determine any aspect of God’s experience. Their vision of divine activity demanded either: 1) that God predestine in advance all the events of history, including the fate of humans as saved and damned or 2) that God choose those who were saved in an eternal vision, while overlooking the unsaved entirely. As a result of their understandings of divine knowledge, power, and grace, they saw humans as powerless to effect anything positive apart from divine initiative and determination.

Process theology is also philosophically driven, but its philosophical foundations emphasize movement, change, relationship, possibility, creativity, freedom, and open-endedness. Process theologians see the origins of process thought as two-fold. First, they see the Bible as the primary inspiration of process theology. The biblical tradition envisions God as intimate, active in history, and capable of changing course in response to human decisions. God’s mercies are new every morning. God’s redemptive vision is reflected in God’s innovative actions to restore the fortunes of Israel and broaden the scope of salvation to include the whole earth. The prophetic tradition, described by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel in terms of the “divine pathos,” saw God as intimately involved in the smallest details of economics, politics, and spirituality. Process theologians also see Jesus as a model for process-relational thought. As the word made flesh, Jesus testifies to the goodness of embodiment and the importance of the historical process. Jesus’ revelation of God’s nature points to a vision of God as intimate, suffering and celebrating, supporting human freedom and creativity, and inviting us to do great things as God’s partners in healing the world.

In addition to scripture, process theologians affirm the significance of the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) in the formation of process theology. The son of an Anglican clergyman, Whitehead became an agnostic early in his adulthood. He struggled with religious and scientific dogmatism and as a mathematician rejected religious systems that turned their backs on the insights of scientific thinking, whether in the theory of evolution or the emerging relativity theory. Following the death of a whole generation of young Englishmen, including one of his two sons, in World War I, Whitehead began to reconsider his religious agnosticism. While he always recognized the relativity and tentativeness of religious doctrines, Whitehead discovered the need for a vision of God congruent with the evolving understanding of the universe described by physics and biology. For Whitehead, God is the ultimate source of possibility and human creativity. God also insures that no event in the historical process is ever lost. In the divine memory, Whitehead’s son and all those who perished in World War I would live forever and, in so doing, influence the ongoing historical process. During his two decades of teaching at Harvard University, Whitehead set the stage for the emergence of process theology by influencing the philosopher Charles Hartshorne and a generation of theologians, many of whom studied or taught at the University of Chicago - Henry Nelson Weiman, John B. Cobb, Bernard Loomer, and Bernard Meland - and through their impact an ongoing procession of process theologians, including David Griffin, Marjorie Suchocki, Joseph Bracken, Bernard Lee, Norman Pittenger, Clark Williamson, Catherine Keller, Rita Nakashima Brock, Jay McDaniel, and myself. Today, hundreds of pastors and chaplains share the insights of process theology in their pulpits, study groups, and pastoral care. Process theology remains one of the most vibrant forms of theological reflection and has significantly influenced emerging and post-modern Christianity, environmental theology, the interplay of science and religion, feminist and liberation theology, and holistic, earth and body affirming forms of spirituality.

Essential Concepts of Process Theology. One of the parents of process theology, Bernard Loomer, described this novel and innovative way of thinking of God and the world as “process-relational” theology. These two words capture the heart of process thought, whether we are describing the nature of God, the God-world relationship, human life, the non-human world, ethics and spiritual formation, the relationship of science and religion, or survival after death.

I believe that theology is best learned through the interplay of 1) affirmations or positive statements about our deepest beliefs, and 2) spiritual practices that enable us to experience the deepest and most pervasive realities that shape our lives and inspire our personal growth and ethical commitments. Briefly put, process theology can be described through the following affirmations:

1 The world is a dynamic process. Life involves constant change and movement. Time is, as the hymn says, “an ever-flowing stream” in which each moment arises, perishes, and gives birth to successors. God is alive and constantly doing things, bringing forth imaginative possibilities in the human and non-human worlds.

2 All living things exist in relationship with one another. We live in an interdependent universe in which each moment of experience arises from its environment, whose influence provides both limits and possibilities. Each moment of our lives also contributes to the larger community and the future beyond itself, whether our personal future or the communities of which we are members.

3 Experience is universal, though variable, and extends beyond humankind. While creatures differ in complexity and impact on the world, every creature has some minimal level of responsiveness to its environment. Process theology affirms that consciousness is the tip of the experiential iceberg. Beneath everyday consciousness, our lives are also shaped through unconscious experiences that emerge primarily through dreams and the mutual influence and continuity of mind and body. More than this, non-humans also experience their worlds, some consciously, others primarily unconsciously. This reality of conscious experience among non-humans is obvious in terms of our companion animals in relation to which we enjoy loving and intimate relationships. But, less obvious and just as real are unconscious experiences and relationships at the cellular and molecular levels. The Psalmist proclaims that the heavens declare the glory of God and everything that breathes can praise God. (See especially Psalm 148 and150.) Jesus affirms God’s love for sparrows and lilies of the field and the Apostle Paul asserts that God’s Spirit groans in the experiences of humans and non-humans alike. Dead and objective matter is an abstraction; concrete actuality is relational and experiential. God, accordingly, can touch every creature from the inside.

4 The universality of experience leads to the recognition that every creature is inherently valuable and deserves moral consideration. Process theology values all creation, even apart from its impact on human life. Although, we are often at cross-purposes with other humans in times of war or in difficult decisions regarding the termination of a pregnancy or the accessibility of medical and governmental services, nevertheless, other humans have value that we must ethically consider. This also applies to our relationships to non-humans. Species, flora and fauna, are valuable not just because we appreciate their beauty but because they experience some level of joy and sorrow. They matter to God and, accordingly, should enter into our own moral calculations. This has led some process theologians to become vegetarians and others, like myself, to purchase meat and poultry that is free range rather than factory farmed.

5 Freedom and creativity are essential to reality. We are all artists of our experiences, creating our current experiences from the environment around us, including our own previous experiences and decisions. Even though the past can be the source of limitation, our past experiences do not fully determine our future responses. In fact, the concrete impact of the past is the womb of possibility and creativity. As psychiatrist Viktor Frankl asserted in light of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, they can take everything away from a person except her or his ability to choose her or his response to the circumstances of life.

6 The future is open-ended and we have a role in shaping the future, for good or ill. The processes of human creativity and history are not determined in advance. Although past decisions made by God and humankind condition and may to greater or lesser extent guide the historical process, there is no predetermined goal to human or planetary history. Along with the Creator, we are creating history as we go along.

7 God is the primary example of the dynamic, process-relational nature of reality. God is embedded in the ever-changing and evolving historical process, shaping and being shaped by the universe with which God constantly interacts. Constantly creating in relationship to the world, God is also constantly receiving the influence of historical events. God can be described as the “most moved mover” or the primary example of what John Cobb and David Griffin describe as “creative-responsive love.” God creates but also receives; God is the ultimate agent and also the ultimate recipient of value.

Process theology is lively, historical, relational, and creative. It can transform the way you look at God and the world around you.