A continuing series on method in religion and science.
Integration and Dialogue: Process Theology
Strong Integrationist models tend towards a willingness to reconfigure religious categories in ways that seem required by the natural sciences. Process theology, which tends to identify Godself as part of the developing and emerging cosmos, is a prime example of this sort of move.[2] For process theology, reality is fundamentally a dynamic process.[3] Rather than envisioning God as the transcendent source of the universe, for process theology, “God is not the exception to the dynamic nature of the universe, but rather the dynamic God-world relationship is the primary example of creaturely experience in its many expressions.”[4] In this view, “[i]n our dynamic and ever-changing world, God is the most dynamic and ever-changing reality; God’s becoming embraces the eternal, temporal, and everlasting in an ever-creative, self-surpassing dialogue with the universe.”[5]
Because God is a dynamic and evolving reality, process theology eschews the classical notion of God’s perfections.[6] Process theologians view the claim that God is omniscient and omnipotent as remnants of Greek thought best left behind.[7] They argue that a God who is omniscient and omnipotent must be responsible for evil and that both scripture and Christian experience disclose God in relational terms.[8] They further argue that God’s classical perfections would destroy the possibility of human creativity and creaturely freedom.[9]
A thread that ties these claims together within process theology is the integration of theology and science.[10] Indeed, “[p]rocess theology is firmly rooted in an evolutionary understanding of the universe.”[11] Many process theologians argue that evolutionary theory destroys the classical understanding of God’s perfections:
While some Christians believe that God has directed the course of the universe from the very beginning, determining every detail without creaturely input, and is guiding the universe toward a pre-determined goal, process theology imagines an open-ended universe, in which God’s vision is also open-ended and subject to change in relationship to creaturely decision-making and accidental occurrences.[12]
Thus process theology also eschews the concept of creation ex nihilo, arguing that, instead, “[e]ven before the big bang, God was interacting with the primordial elements of this universe or another universe from which this universe may have emerged, as some cosmologists suggest. God has never been without a world, which provides opportunities for, and limitations of, the embodiment of God’s creative vision.”[13]
This vision of emerging reality also affects process theology’s anthropology. Human beings are not metaphysically special but rather are “fully embedded in the evolutionary process.”[14] Human beings are not impacted by any sort of “original” sin but rather have always partaken in a bilateral relationship of call-and-response with God.[15] In fact, “[t]o the surprise of many more traditional theologians, process theologians recognize that deviation from God’s moment by moment vision is not always bad: it may inject new possibilities into the creative process.”[16] Moreover, process thought tends to identify the human “soul” not with particular individuals, but rather with human society extended over time.[17] The “soul” is “in every sense a part of nature, subject to the same conditions as all other natural entities.”[18] Further, “the body, and specifically the brain, is the immediate environment of the soul.”[19] Because of the embededness of the human person and specifically the human brain in the flux of evolutionary history, the human soul is intimately connected with the entire universe:
The soul is, then, in immediate contact with some occasions of experience in the brain and with the mental poles of experiences of other souls…. Indirectly, but intimately, the soul also prehends the whole society that constitutes its body and still more indirectly, but still very importantly, the wider environment that is the whole world. At the same time, the soul contributes itself as an object for feeling by other souls, the contiguous occasions in the brain, and indirectly by the whole future world.[20]
The strong integrationist program represented by process theology is in some ways appealing. It does take seriously the claims of the natural sciences. It also takes very seriously the problem of evil and the problem of creaturely freedom. The price it pays to cash out its claims, however, is far too high. The “God” of process theology, as well as its vision of the human “soul,” tend to devolve into a kind of pantheistic spiritualism that ultimately vindicates neither contemporary science nor natural theology.
On the scientific side, this problem is represented by concepts of the “soul” that ultimately envision the universe itself as a conscious entity, perhaps as the conscious entity. Nothing could be further from the claims and methods of contemporary natural science. On the theological side, process theology’s representation of the classical view of God’s perfections in relation to creation ex nihilo and creaturely freedom tends towards parody and straw man claims.
It is unclear, for example, who comprises the Christians referenced by Epperly who “believe that God has directed the course of the universe from the very beginning, determining every detail without creaturely input.”[21] In his Guide for the Perplexed on process theology, Epperly uses popular evangelical preacher Rick Warren’s reference to God’s providence in Warren’s popular book A Purpose Driven Life as representative of the classical view.[22] To suggest that Warren lacks the sophistication of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas or Barth on these problems is more than an understatement, and Warren himself would not argue otherwise.
Among more significant representatives of the Christian tradition, perhaps some versions of Calvinism or Jansenism would frame this sort of statement, but orthodox Christian theology has always recognized creaturely freedom, and particularly human moral freedom, within the ambit of God’s providence and in response to God’s grace. Classical Christian orthodoxy is not deterministic fatalism. Indeed the Second Council of Orange, though it condemned semi-Pelagianism, nevertheless held that human beings can participate or not participate in God’s grace: “We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema.”[23] Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church today states that “[f]reedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.”[24] The Catechism further states that
The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart. On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world….[25]
The Catechism therefore concludes that “[t]he right to the exercise of freedom, especially in religious and moral matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of man.”[26] It seems, then, that process theology is overstating a case against a mythical opponent.
[1] See McGrath, at pp. 47-49.
[2] See John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Westminster John Knox 1996).
[3] See Bruce G. Epperly, Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark 2011), at p. 20.
[4] Id. at 21.
[5] Id.
[6] Id. at 33-44.
[7] Id. at 34.
[8] Id. at 38-44.
[9] Id. at 83-91.
[10] Id. at 92-102.
[11] Id. at 97.
[12] Id., at p. 97.
[13] Id. at p. 98.
[14] Id. at 99.
[15] Id. at 100-101.
[16] Id. at 101.
[17] See John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (Westminster John Knox 2d ed. 2007).
[18] Id. at p. 19.
[19] Id. at p. 21. See also id. at 43-49 for Cobb’s refinement of Whitehead’s views on this point.
[20] Id. at p. 23.
[21] Id., at p. 97.
[22] Epperly, at p. 41-44 (citing Rick Warren, A Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan 2002)).
[23] Canons of the Second Council of Orange, available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/orange.txt.
[24] Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1731, available at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a3.htm.
[25] Id., § 1742.
[26] Id., § 1747.