What is Catalyst?
Four issues of Catalyst are mailed each academic year to some 5,000 UM theological students in more than 100 seminaries in the U.S.A.

AFTE
Catalyst is a project of A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE).

What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program?
Each year AFTE awards up to five John Wesley Fellowships to assist gifted United Methodists in their doctoral studies at the finest universities.

Back Issues
Several back issues of Catalyst are now available on-line.

Subscriptions
Subscription is free for UM seminarians, and is available to all others for $5 per year.

GOD AND THE ACTUAL ENTITY: MUSINGS ON PROCESS THEOLOGY

Process theology is one of the most powerful and active movements in modern North American theology. Anyone studying theology in North America must, at some time or other, come to grips with it. Here I want to begin what will no doubt be an ongoing dialogue with this theological tradition, and at the same time help seminarians come to understand better the strengths and weaknesses of process thought.

I am critical of this theological position, but I hope not unappreciative of its best insights. Process theology has helped many theologians, such as C. Pinnock, to rethink their understanding of God. Process theology has insisted that God is involved in the historical process, that God suffers with us, understands and sympathizes with us, and his grace (“subjective aim”) is available to all creatures. Furthermore, process philosophy emphasizes the connectedness of all creation: all are alike in being actual entities or actual occasions, and all such beings in Whiteheadian thought are united together in the organic oneness of reality. I appreciate these themes in process theology. We do need to rethink our notions of God, change, time, eternity, history, omnipotence, and immutability. Our Western tradition does need to be reminded, again and again, of our connectedness with nature and our duty to care for the earth.

I also appreciate process theology’s emphasis on rationality and clarity in Christian talk about God. In the modern world of “post-modernism” and neo-pragmatism, where the church’s theologians feel free to develop whatever model of God seems most “useful” to the present tasks of the community, process theologians stand against these forms of relativism in theological talk. They insist on clarity and reasoned, argued discourse in theological writings, goals I hope other theologians take to heart. There are many things to admire about process thought.

I have already begun to use a number of terms which it would be well to discuss before moving on. Process thought is not a monolithic movement. There are currents and eddies in this stream, as there are in the Wesleyan movement. Process thought can be divided roughly into three camps. First there are process philosophers, thinkers like D. Emmet who are not theologians by trade, but philosophers in the process school. “Process philosophy,” as I use these terms, refers exclusively to those thinkers in the tradition of A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947). It is from Whitehead, and in particular his book Process and Reality (Macmillan, 1929), that the technical vocabulary and basic metaphysical position of process theology is derived. “Process theology,” however, is used in a very broad and a narrow sense. In the broad sense, any theologian who emphasizes the dynamic and involved nature of God, and who rejects the medieval synthesis brilliantly developed by such persons as J.D. Scotus, is a “process” theologian. Pinnock might thus be understood as a “process theologian.” In the narrow sense, “process theology” refers to theologians who ply their trade within the confines of process philosophy and a basic Whiteheadian metaphysics. These would be the most familiar process thinkers, such as C. Hartshorne, J. Cobb, S. Ogden, and N. Pittenger. In this essay I will use “process theology” in the narrow sense.

One obvious criticism sometimes made of process theology is that it is enslaved to a particular metaphysics in a way that Christian theology should not be. This criticism is wide of the mark. Although the main doctrines of the church (dogmas) are not and should not be tied to particular metaphysics, any explication and contextualization of church theology will be so tied. Process theologians are simply more up-front about their choice of metaphysics than, say, K. Barth ever was. My basic problem with process theology in the narrow sense is not that they adopt a particular metaphysics, but that this metaphysics is inadequate.

What then is the metaphysics of process philosophy? This is not easy to answer in short compass. I can only give here a brief outline of Whiteheadian thought.

Whitehead complained about the false bifurcation of nature into mind and matter. He reconceptualized the idea of “nature” as that which is present to our experience (Principles of Natural Knowledge [Cambridge University, 1919]). Whitehead fought against the idea that nature is a system of moving particles— tasteless, colorless, odorless—which cause the sensations we have in our minds. This, he thought, led to a dualism of passive mind and determined, mechanistic matter. It also led to a number of thorny philosophical problems which could never be adequately overcome without a thoroughgoing revision of the whole scheme of nature. Whitehead began such a revision.

He understood nature to consist of “actual entities” or actual occasions. These tiny, momentary events are what is truly real. An actual occasion is not an enduring object like a rock. Instead, it is a momentary event, a “drop of experience” made up of “prehensions” which then becomes the basis of future actual occasions (Process and Reality, 35). What we see as a rock is actually a society (nexus) of actual occasions. Whitehead tells us that prehensions, which make up every bit of the ultimately real (“actual entities”) are relations of a mental sort (I use “mental” here in the normal sense, not the Whiteheadian one). Whitehead tells us, “With the purpose of obtaining a one-substance cosmology, ‘prehensions’ are a generalization from Descartes’ ‘cogitations’ and from Locke’s ‘ideas”’ (29). Prehensions, then, are a certain kind of thought, a thought-relation, which actual entities have between themselves, and which constitutes their very nature as occasions. Reality for Whitehead is relationship. Real things (actual entities) are made up of their positive and negative prehensions (thought-relationships) with every other actual entity. Like many philosophers before him, Whitehead analyzed “nature” into certain types of thoughts or ideas, mental events in the process of becoming.

Whitehead’s works point to some real problems, but the ordinary view has fewer difficulties than the implausible metaphysics he so brilliantly developed. There is a broad and useful distinction between an object and an event—a distinction Whitehead blurs. Likewise, there is a broad and useful distinction between a thought on the one hand, and gravity, electricity, and other kinds of physical connections on the other. Whitehead was wrong to put them all in one basket, called “prehension.” Rocks do not have any kind of mental life, and they do not consist of mental events (“actual occasions”). Whitehead’s talk of “physical feelings” and other confusions of the mental and the physical is just that—a confusion. Of course, a short essay like this cannot do justice to Whitehead’s work as a philosopher, nor develop an adequate metaphysics incorporating his criticisms of dualism. I can only say that I find dualistic interactionism, with its problems, a metaphysics more adequate to our ordinary experience, to natural science, and to reason than the Whiteheadian “philosophy of organism.”

Whitehead never really did justice to interactionist dualism. He tended to focus on a dualism where the mind is passive, and matter is wholly determined. Needless to say, few dualists today hold such a view. Like too many of his followers, Whitehead had a tendency to caricature the worst type of view he rejected, and then present his position as the only alternative. There is much to learn in Whitehead’s works, but I cannot possibly believe that physical reality is composed, at bottom, of mental events (again, I use these words in their ordinary sense).

So far I have been treading the high road of metaphysics. Perhaps the true power of process theology is not in its metaphysics, but in what is says about God. Let us examine this aspect of process theology.

Like everything real, God is also an actual entity (or society of actual entities, as some process theologians have it). All actual entities, including God, have a “physical” and a “mental” pole, which consists of “feelings” or prehensions of other actual entities (note: the words in quotes are used in a non-normal sense by Whitehead). The so-called “physical” pole is that aspect of an actual entity that receives what is given it from the past and God. In God this is called the “consequent nature” by Whitehead (524). The mental pole of an actual occasion is its power of self-determination. In God this is called the “primordial nature.” Thus Whiteheadian theology is a “dipolar theism.” The primordial nature of God is unconscious, and consists of his envisioning of all possibilities, containing the “eternal ideas” (similar to Plato’s Forms or Ideas). The consequent nature of God is conscious, but passive. It receives from every actual occasion its basic experience upon the occasion’s “satisfaction” or passing away.

Whitehead writes, “The consequent nature of God is his judgement on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life” (525). What role, then, does God play in the world? First, he holds all the possibilities of existence in his mind (the eternal ideas). Second, he gives each actual occasion its “initial subjective aim,” or what God sees as its best actual goal in being, given its present context. However, this initial aim can be rejected by the actual occasion. Third, God receives the datum of each actual occasion, after it has passed away. That is all.

The Whiteheadian God is clearly involved in the world. God does feel with us, and he remembers us. Perhaps God even loves us, in a sense, since after all God needs the world in order to exist. And God gives every reality a goal to aim toward, what Aristotle would have called a “final cause.” But clearly on this view of God, God does not do anything in particular. All of his acts are general, and involve giving possibilities to things. God is not directly involved in bringing about real events in history. God does not directly act in the world in particular deeds of salvation or judgment. Process theologians like D.D. Williams, S. Ogden, and J. Cobb realize that this is the case, and have said so in their writings. What are the implications of such a view of God? Here is a brief listing:

God does not answer our prayers, in the sense of changing actual events to conform to our requests.

There is no hope, in the NT sense of elpis, that God will overcome evil, or establish a New Heaven and a New Earth.

God does not love us, in the NT sense of agape (self-sacrificing, giving, grace). God can at best love us in the sense of eros.

God did not raise Jesus Christ from the dead, nor does he perform miracles in the traditional sense.

Imagine if you will the father of a family that loves his children, and has given them life. He also is full of good advice. He records the lives of his children on video tape. However, he never washes a dish, he never takes the children to a ball game, he never pays a bill: he never does anything. What kind of a father would that be? And yet the process theologian would have us believe that this is what our Heavenly Father is like. The biblical model is of a God who is active in history, sending plagues, rescuing his people from Pharaoh, sending the prophets and giving them his message, becoming a child in Jesus, changing water into wine, etc. Prima facie, the biblical view of God and process theology are fundamentally incompatible.

Process theology has a number of important things to teach us. Process philosophy has a whole host of important philosophical points that we need to listen to carefully. But full-blown process theology (in the narrow sense) does not recommend itself to rational Christians, either in its metaphysics or in its view of God. The view of God it implies is contrary to the Bible and the intuitions and traditions of the Christian faith. Of course Whitehead never claimed to be biblical or Christian, particularly.

Why then do so many living North American theologians hold to process theology? Perhaps because process philosophy gives what looks like a rational and philosophical basis to the theology of Liberal Protestantism.

These comments have been brief. As such, they cannot do justice to the full range of process thought. They present conclusions, rather than real arguments. I have tried to indicate some of the shortcomings of process thought, reasons why I cannot embrace it. This is, no doubt, just the beginning of a longer discussion. For further reading, I recommend two sympathetic critiques: R. Neville, Creativity and God (Seabury, 1980) and D. Basinger, Divine Power in Process Theism (SUNY, 1988).

By Alan G. Padgett, former John Wesley Fellow, elder in the UMC, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Bethel College.