A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Williamson on Christology

    A question that naturally arises for any Christian theology that attempts to recognize the ongoing reality of Jewish faith and life is What about Jesus? That is, do Christians need to sacrifice, or at least modify, their convictions about the uniqueness and salvific importance of Jesus in order to avoid supersessionism?

    In A Guest in the House of Israel, Clark Williamson makes a number of critical comments about both traditional and modern Christologies. Traditional Christology tended to emphasize Christ’s divinity to the exclusion of his humanity, despite official dogmatic statements to the contrary. It was never able to provide a metaphysically satisfactory account of the “two natures.” Inevitably, this neglect of Jesus’ humanity resulted in downplaying his Jewishness. Moreover, much traditional Christology, he contends, describes Jesus as acting in such a way as to make it possible for God to welcome us back into fellowship, whereas for the Reformation, “[t]ransformation of life is the result of God’s gracious gift, not its condition” (p. 172).

    Modern Christologies don’t always fare much better in his view. Instead of grounding the uniqueness of Christ in his metaphysical nature, they ground it in his “empirical-historical” character as supposedly revealed by modern scholarship. While they have, commendably, recovered an awareness of the genuine humanity of Jesus, they try to ground their christological convictions in the supposedly unique (but ultimately unverifiable) character of the “empirical-historical” Jesus. Williamson finds this pattern in Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Harnack–Jesus can save us from “authoritarian religion” (usually identified with Judaism) because of his perfect faith or “God-consciousness.” “In modern critical-historical Christologies, the only way to establish the uniqueness of Jesus is to contrast him with his context; he is unique precisely to the extent that he is differentiated from and opposed to Jews and Judaism” (p. 174).

    “A post-Holocaust Christology,” Williamson writes, “will make it clear that to encounter Jesus Christ is to encounter the God of Israel, maker and redeemer of heaven and earth” (p. 188). Christology is not based on an “appeal to the empirical-historical Jesus” (though historical scholarship can provide a corrective to defective Christologies). When it is, Christians inevitably end up projecting onto the “historical” Jesus their own concerns and values (thus we get the feminist Jesus, the Marxist Jesus, etc.). But Jesus, Williamson insists, is not a norm, but a savior:

    In bringing us to face the decision whether we will understand ourselves in any ultimate sense in terms of and only in terms of the love of God graciously offered to us and in terms of the command of God that we love God and the neighbor, Jesus Christ offers us salvation and is properly spoken of as our savior. (p. 191)

    What we need to be aware of, however, is that Jesus points beyond himself to God the Father. We need to consistently “monotheize” our Christology, which, Williamson says, is what the doctrine of the Trinity is all about. The Trinity safeguards the oneness of God by maintaining that it was the God of Israel who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Jesus is the medium through which we are encountered by the singular promise and command of God.

    To believe in Jesus Christ is to confess that it is through Jesus Christ as witnessed to in the church that we are brought to understand ourselves in terms of the love of God freely offered to us, as accepted and justified, and in terms of the command of God that we love God and our neighbors in turn, called to a new and radically transformed life. (p. 192)

    Drawing on the thought of Paul Tillich, H. R. Niebuhr, and Schubert Ogden, Williamson warns against “absolutizing” the person of Jesus, which is a form of idolatry. Jesus is the medium of revelation, but not the revelation itself (see pp. 188-190). When we encounter the crucified and risen Lord in the church’s life and proclamation, we are presented anew with God’s promise and command–the promise of unconditional love and the command to love God and the neighbor. Jesus Christ is the gift given from within the Israel of God that we (Gentiles) might know the God of Israel. The work of Christ, so to speak, is to “re-present” God’s promise and command to us and to bring us face to face with that promise and command (see p. 190).

    Some might worry that Williamson’s Christology is “gnostic”–that is, that the role of Christ is that of a revealer of a truth (God’s love and command) that could, theoretically, be known by other means. In fact, he holds that it has been known by other means, namely through Israel’s relationship with God. Williamson even goes to far as to say that “salvation…at least in part, is authentic self-understanding” (p. 231), and “[o]ur salvation does not ‘become possible’ in Christ–a statement that the New Testament nowhere affirms–but in him what was previously possible and actual in the history of Israel ‘becomes manifest’” (p. 162).

    What Williamson would say in reply, I think, is that a Christology in which Christ functions to “make possible” our salvation sets limits on God’s grace. If we say that Jesus Christ as a condition apart from which God is not (or cannot be) gracious, then we are promoting a form of works-righteousness. “If we fail to remember that all christological and soteriological have God as their subject–God is the author of our salvation–we will render Christ into a limit on the grace of God and claim that apart from Christ there is no saving knowledge of God” (p. 198). In his view, the grace revealed in Jesus is the same grace that was and is present in the life of Israel.

  • Speak rightly of God

    I have one or two more posts on Williamson’s Guest in the House of Israel in the works, but if you’re interested in what I’ve been writing about so far you might want to check out this article–Speak Rightly of God: Clark M. Williamson as a Church Theologian–which provides an overview of his work. I haven’t read Wiliamson’s Way of Blessing, Way of Life, which is his attempt at a more systematic Christian theology, but I hope to get my hands on a copy at some point.

  • Israel and the church: co-witnesses to the love and kingdom of God

    I’m not going to blog exhaustively about the remaining chapters in Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel, where he applies the insights of a post-Holocaust theology to various topics (covenant, scripture, Christology, doctrine of God) with interesting results. What I thought I’d do instead is take a look at one area–the doctrine of the church–to see how his approach plays out. As the subtitle of the book indicates, Williamson is explicitly doing theology in the context of and for the church.

    The problem with traditional thinking about the church, Williamson says, is that it has been deformed by the insistence that the church replaces Israel as the people of God:

    What must first be taken into account in a post-Holocaust church theology is the underside of Christian teaching on the church, how the marks of the church were systematically distorted by the anti-Jewish, supersessionist connotations with which they were endowed. (p. 233)

    In its traditional understanding of the church as the “ark of salvation,” Christian theology has correspondingly downgraded the status of Judaism. “The more universalistic the doctrine of the church became, the more anti-Jewish it was” (p. 235). The idea of the church as the replacement people, the new Israel, was a popular theme among the church fathers. Later, Reformers such as Luther projected their criticisms of medieval Catholicism back onto 1st-century Judaism, a trend continued into the modern era by both “liberal” and “orthodox” theologians.

    In light of this, Williamson says, the Jewish “no” to the church’s claims is “a proper and faithful response to the church’s distortion of the gospel”:

    The Jewish “no” is quite real, but it was a “no” to a displacement ideology of the covenant; a “no” to a spiritualized and dehistoricized understanding of redemption emptied of its this-worldly promises of the end of oppression, war, and injustice; and a “no” to the claim that salvation was now the property of Gentiles and accessible to Jews only on condition that they turn their backs on the God of the Exodus and Sinai. (p. 243)

    Instead of seeing itself as the exclusive ark of salvation or the replacement people, the church should learn to “de-center” itself. It needs to move away from “ecclesio”-centrism and toward theo-centrism:

    The church needs to see that its reality can only appropriately be understood and stated in a way that takes the church out of the center of the picture and in place of itself sees there, instead, God, Christ, the neighbor, and God’s promise of what is to come. (p. 246)

    Accompanying the church’s distorted understanding of its mission is the relativization of the Kingdom of God. Since the church saw itself as the replacement people, it could see itself as the fulfillment of God’s promises. “Any sense of disappointment on God’s part, at having wanted the kingdom of God and having gotten the church instead, was missing” (p. 252). As the church gained more temporal power, it became natural to view the extension of that influence as the kingdom of God coming in fullness. This conflation of the church with the kingdom eclipses the sense of anticipation or expectation of God’s hoped-for kingdom where death, suffering, and sorrow are brought to an end. “With a loss of the sense of contrast between the present realities of life and the hoped-for kingdom of God, the church was free to aggrandize itself at the expense of Judaism and the Jewish people” (p. 254).

    Williamson proposes that the purpose of the church

    is to make known in the world the promise and command, the call and claim, of the God of Israel, to spread abroad the love of God and of the neighbor. It is to do this through words and deeds, neither words alone nor deeds uninterrupted by words, but both. Words separated from deeds are empty; deeds separated from words are blind. The mission of the church is one that it shares with the people Israel, not one that it is to take to the people Israel. Its mission is its call from God to bear witness before the world of the promise and command, the grace and task, of God. This mission is itself a gracious gift to the church from the God of Israel, as Israel’s mission of being “a light to the Gentiles” a gracious gift to Israel from the God of Israel. The relationship of the church to the Jewish people today is based on the fact that both have been graciously and irrevocably called and claimed by God. Hence, the church has no conversionary mission to the Israel of God. Its mission to the people Israel is one of service (diakonia), not one of proclamation (kerygma). Its service may be critical; there may be times when Christians will want to call Jews back to faithfulness to the God of Israel, but its service is never to call Jews to convert from the God of Israel. Jews, too, may serve the church critically by reminding it of what it is all too prone to forget, that it is called and claimed by the God of Israel. (p. 250)

    He emphasizes that “Christian mission is a shared mission, one in which both the church and synagogue are called to be witnesses of the God of Israel before the world and each other” (p. 251).

    Recovering this shared mission, along with a sense of eschatological expectation, will allow the church to recognize that it is not the final form of the people of God. Williamson envisions a “future changed relationship between the church and the Jewish people…when the first schism within the people of God will be overcome, when both church and synagogue will look different from the way they do now, when the church’s days of wandering in the wilderness of exclusivist anti-Judaism finally come to an end and we all enter into God’s promise to the children of Abraham” (p. 265).

  • By what authority?

    After surveying the issue of anti-Judaism in Christian theology, Clark Williamson proposes some criteria for a post-Holocaust theology:

    – Beware of unchanged “pre-Shoah” theological statements (i.e., we need to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to traditional formulations).

    – Do theology in conversation with Jews.

    – Say nothing that could not be said “in the presence of the burning children” (e.g., theological statements that imply that God willed–or permitted–the Holocaust to happen).

    – Stress discipleship (i.e., faith as a “Way of life).

    But if post-Holocaust/Shoah theology is to be a genuinely Christian theology, it also needs a Christian-specific norm against which it can be tested. What is the authority by which we could be justified in undertaking a reconstruction of traditional theology?

    Williamson rejects two contrasting models of authority. The first looks to the past, to some Golden Age of the church, as a perfected ideal against which to measure all subsequent theology and church life. Williamson identifies this with a “Roman” model of authority and quotes the early church historian Robert Wilken: “There never was a Golden Age when the church was whole, perfect, pure–virginal. The faith was not purer, the Christians were not braver, the church was not whole and undivided” (A Guest in the House of Israel, p. 16).

    The second model takes an opposite approach; it views authority as residing in present needs and experiences. The problem with this view is that there is no external criteria or standpoint for critically assessing theological reconstruction authorized by present-day needs. The so-called German Christians in Nazi Germany are an example of how badly wrong theology can go when it isn’t tied to such a criteria.

    Williamson argues instead that we can find the kind of norm we need by looking to the tradition itself–and its long history of self-criticism and reinterpretation. He calls this “canonical criticism”: “It stresses that at whatever historical juncture we encounter the biblical community of faith, we find it reinterpreting its faith” (p. 21).

    He identifies three “hermeneutical principles” that Israel used to reinterpret its faith:

    – a monotheizing principle: the struggle against and within polytheistic context to affirm God’s oneness (shades of H. R. Niebuhr’s “radical monotheism);

    – a prophetic principle: the call to widen the circle of moral concern (God is the God of all); and

    – a constitutive principle: the emphasis on God’s particular love for us (the community of faith).

    Williamson proposes that these three principles or emphases can be combined into a single “gospel norm” for Christian faith:

    The good news is that God is the God of a singular promise and a singular command: the promise is that God’s love is freely, graciously, offered to each and all, and the command is the twofold requirement that we are to love God with our whole selves and to love and do justice to our neighbors as ourselves. (p. 22)

    This is a Christian norm because “we find our sources of it and access to it in the testified-to Jesus and Paul” (p. 22). And because “the process of interpretation and reinterpretation did not cease in the Apostolic Age but continues and will continue throughout the history of the church” and “it is appropriate to interpret the tradition (including the canon) in the way in which it interpreted itself,” this gospel-statement can be a “standard of appropriateness in the light of which all interpretations of the Christian faith can be critically scrutinized” (p. 23).

    Williamson calls this norm of appropriateness “an ellipse with two foci” because it holds together God’s promise and God’s command. The promise is that God’s love is “radically free” and “unconditional,” but it also empowers us to do justice. Lose the radical nature of grace and you have works-righteousness; lose the command to love and to do justice and you have “cheap grace.”

    Too often, Christians have interpreted Judaism as promoting salvation by works, but Jews see God’s liberation and election of the people of Israel and the giving of the Torah as acts of radical grace. Living according to the pattern laid out by the Torah is a response to God’s love, empowered by liberating grace. (Just as for Christians, faith without works is dead.) Conversely, Christians historically have fallen into a form of works-righteousness when they set conditions on God’s grace. For example, saying that outside the church there is not salvation, or that only those who consciously accept Jesus as their savior can be saved.

    What this gospel-norm provides, according to Williamson, is a means of critiquing Christian exclusivism and anti-Judaism. Traditional doctrines of covenant, scriptural authority, Christology, God, and the church can all be scrutinized in light of the gospel norm. If, for example, they set conditions on God’s grace or require us to narrow the scope of neighbor-love, they should be modified or rejected. The bulk of the rest of Williamson’s book is an undertaking in just this direction.

  • What is Christian anti-Judaism?

    Brandon points out in a comment to this post that I haven’t really defined what Williamson means by “anti-Judaism.” So here goes. First, it’s distinguishable from, though obviously related to, anti-Semitism. Anti-Judaism refers more broadly to the notion that Christianity is superior to, completes, and/or replaces Judaism as an ongoing religious enterprise. Williamson’s argument is that Christian doctrine and practice have been shaped, in pretty fundamental ways, by this binary view of Christianity: good/Judaism: bad.

    Here are some quotes to fill out the details:

    As Rosemary Ruether analyzes the anti-Jewish ideology of the church, it turns upon two major themes: rejection/election and inferiority/superiority. According to the first, in rejecting Jesus Christ the Jews are rejected by God, and in accepting Jesus Christ the Gentiles are elected. The price of the election of the Gentiles is the rejection of the Jews. Gentile believers displace them in the economy of salvation and in God’s favor. This motif pays a lot of attention to the “two peoples” allegory, the elder/younger brother stories in the Bible, and the claim that Jewish history is a “trail of crimes” culminating in deicide. According to the second theme, everything about Jewish faith and life is inferior to Christian faith and life, which is, in all respects, better. Christian ethics, worship, and biblical interpretation improve upon Jewish “law,” worship, and exegesis. The Christian way of doing things “fulfills” biblical promises, which Jews, being blind to the meaning of their own scriptures, misunderstand. Only Christians can rightly interpret the Hebrew Bible, which they make over into an “Old Testament.” Jews fail to recognize that their covenant has been superseded and continue to presume patently invalid modes of commitment to it. (Guest in the House of Israel, pp. 4-5)

    He continues:

    David P. Efroymson’s somewhat different analysis looks upon anti-Judaism as a double-edged model, a model of and a model for. First, it is a model of Judaism, on which Judaism is a system and Jews a people “rejected by God, unfaithful to God, opposed to Christianity, and caught up in the crimes appropriate to their carnality, hardness, blindness, and vetustas [obdurate commitment to what is past and gone, oldness].” Jews are a people of oldness, Judaism a religion of oldness. On the same model, Christians, by contrast, are “a people and a system of newness, of fidelity, of spirituality, of moral vigor, and of universality.” At the same time, anti Judaism is a model for how Christians are to be Christians. It is [quoting Elfroymson]

    a model for action, for acting “ethically,” for praying or worshiping “spiritually,” for reading the Bible accurately–all in specific and clearly focused distinction from the Jewish way of acting, praying, and of reading the Bible.

    If we ask what Christianity is, the anti-Jewish answer is: everything new, good, spiritual, and universal that the old, bad, carnal, and ethnocentric Jews can never be. (p. 5)

    This isn’t just being critical of Judaism, it’s defining essential features of Christianity in terms of its opposition to Judaism. As Williamson says:

    Every Christian doctrine can be and was interpreted through the lens of this anti-Jewish hermeneutic. God is the God who displaces Jews and replaces them with Christians. Christ is the mediator on behalf of Christians who cuts a displacement deal with God. The church is the replacement people who displace Jews in the covenant. The covenant is a new covenant, replacing the old. The scriptures and their interpretation warrant these understandings. (p. 5)

    Obviously, Williamson doesn’t think that Christianity is irredeemably anti-Jewish (he’s a Christian theologian, after all). What he’s contending is that anti-Judaism has been a pervasive influence on Christian teaching and practice for the better part of its history. And the result has been, directly, a distorted view of what Judaism is (Williamson points out that Judaism is just as capable of talking about God’s grace as Christianity is, for instance), and, indirectly, centuries of Christian persecution of Jews.

  • Christianity’s constitutive anti-Judaism

    One of the most troubling things about reading Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel is realizing that anti-Judaism isn’t just some anomalous bug of Christianity that can easily be tossed out. It’s more or less a constitutive feature of the patristic-medieval-Reformation-modern Christian consensus. As Christianity gradually emerged as a separate religion, the church defined itself, in myriad ways, as the anti-Judaism. Jews were, according to this line of thinking, “carnal,” legalistic, hypocritical, particularistic, ethnocentric, unfaithful, etc., while the church was “spiritual,” grace-full, upright, universal, faithful, etc. This stuff is all over Tertullian, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, the medievals, Luther, Calvin (although, according to Williamson, Calvin actually comes off better than nearly anyone else in the tradition on this score), the anabaptists, liberal theologians, neo-orthodox theologians, liberation theologians–pretty much everybody. It infects the church’s view of covenant, its doctrine of the authority and interpretation of scripture, its Christology, its doctrine of God, its view of the sacraments, and its approach to mission. This is why Williamson thinks that a more radical re-thinking of the church’s theology is necessary in a post-Holocaust (or post-Shoah) context than most Christians have been willing to countenance.

  • Anti-Judaism as works-righteousness

    The claim that Jews lost the covenant because they were not worthy of it is simply works-righteousness. Works-righteousness takes a gift provided by the free and unconditional grace of God and turns it into a condition apart from which God is not free to be gracious. Works-righteousness has nothing to do with an entirely different matter, the question of whether we are to do works of love toward the neighbor. With regard to the covenant, works-righteousness contends that God is not free to covenant with whomever God pleases but only with those who deserve to receive it. It claims that we deserve it, Jews do not. Christian anti-Judaism reflects a reward and punishment mind-set. Jews are punished by losing the covenant; we are rewarded with receiving it because we deserve it.

    That’s from Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel (pp. 113-114), tracing the development of Christian anti-Judaism. I plan to write more about this very challenging book soon.

  • Brian McLaren: Conversations on Being a Heretic

    I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, and I get the feeling I’d disagree with him about a fair number of things, but this interview made me like him. I get the impression that the guy has to put up with a lot of b.s. from self-styled heresy-hunters.

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

    Link via I Think I Believe.

  • Summary thoughts on process theology

    Last night I finished Cobb and Griffin’s introduction to process theology, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on the general Whiteheadian perspective. I think the expanded name sometimes used – process-relational theology – is actually more helpful because both elements, process and relation, are key to understanding what this school of thought is trying to say.

    First, let’s talk about process. For Whitehead, the basic constituents of reality are not things (“substances” in much traditional philosophical parlance), but moments, or occasions, of experience. The things we encounter in the world–rocks, trees, birds, people–are actually collections of occasions spread out in space and extended through time. Each occasion is an event in which influences of past experience are incorporated and synthesized into a new moment of experience (Whitehead calls this a concrescence). So, instead of thinking of myself as a thing (whether it be a body or a soul, or some combination) that has experiences, I am a series of experiences, each of which has a “mental” and “physical” pole, with no underlying substratum needed.

    Whitehead’s view differs from that of, say, David Hume (who similarly characterized the human self as a series of experiences) in a few ways. First, unlike much classic empiricism, Whitehead’s view is that experience comes to us already value-laden. The elements of the past which are incorporated in each new occasion of experience come with certain affective or emotional tones. Second, the act whereby these elements are incorporated into a new occasion involves a genuine element of novelty or creative synthesis. Cobb and Griffin call this creative transformation. The present is influenced, but not determined, by the past; each occasion is an opportunity for synthesizing elements of the past into a higher harmony that reconciles seemingly opposed values into something new. In Whitehead’s terminology, each occasion prehends its environment, which is comprised of past occasions, and synthesizes the elements of that environment in light of its subjective aim of coordinating those elements into a genuinely new moment of experience. Reality consists of these ongoing processes of incorporating the past and creating novelty.

    Turning to relational, the important point here is that, because what we have, according to Whitehead, is not a world of independent substances bumping up against each other, but a world of porous occasions of experience, relationships are fundamentally constitutive of the entities that make up reality. Each occasion is influenced by, and in fact incorporates influences from, prior occasions. Not only is there no bright boundary between “me” and “my body” (because my soul and body are both streams of mutually influencing occasions), but there is similarly no bright boundary between “me” and “you” or “me” and “the environment.” (As has often been pointed out, Whitehead’s thought has affinities with Buddhism.) Because of the thorough-going relational character of existence, no one entity is able to exert unilateral unconditional power over others; we are all interpenetrated and influenced by everything else, at least to some extent.

    Which brings us to theology. According to Whitehead, although God plays a special role in the world, God is not exempt from the general metaphysical principles exemplified by other entities. This puts him at odds with a lot of theology, which has placed God beyond all human categories and conceptualizations. For Whitehead, God is the ground of order in the world and of novelty. This happens through God’s persuasive “lure” of occasions into new and better forms of creative synthesis. Whitehead calls this God’s initial aim, which correlates to the subjective aims of creatures. God contains in God’s eternal nature all conceptual possibilities; by presenting these to the world, God influences occasions into realizing new forms of existing.

    Cobb and Griffin describe the process of creation as God enticing very primitive elements into higher and more complex forms, eventually resulting in the long evolutionary development of the cosmos. Because God’s power is exercised in this persuasive fashion, it is also limited. Even God can’t unilaterally determine the outcome of events, a fact which plays a pivotal role in process thought’s response to the problem of evil. Nevertheless, God is present in each moment, as the lure that calls each occasion to higher forms of harmony and intensity of experience.

    According to process thought, God, like all other existents, is related to everything else that is and is genuinely affected by it. Contrary to the tradition, which holds God to be impassible, or unaffected by anything that happens in the world, process thinkers sees God as experiencing what creatures experience. Whiteheadian theism is sometimes referred to as “dipolar” because it sees God as having two aspects: an eternal aspect that Whitehead refers to as God’s primordial nature (and which, as mentioned above, includes God’s eternal apprehension of all the possibilities that can be realized in existence) and a temporal aspect that he calls God’s consequent nature. This consequent aspect is comprised of God’s experience of what happens in the world. As creatures realize new and higher forms of creativity, God’s life is enriched. As a corollary, as creatures suffer or inflict suffering, God suffers. (God is the “fellow-sufferer who understands” to use Whitehead’s oft-quoted phrase.)

    It’s difficult to assess Whitehead’s thought because it constitutes a unique metaphysical perspective, comparable in scope to Platonism or Aristotelianism. And I’m not familiar enough with the Whitehead corpus (particularly his magnum opus Process and Reality) to provide a particularly informed critique. But I think I can say a few things about its appeal and some possible limitations.

    First, Whitehead’s perspective allows us to see the universe as a unitary whole of interrelated and mutually influencing entities. This is more consistent with contemporary evolutionary and ecological thought than much traditional metaphysics and theology. It’s no coincidence that process theologians, and those influenced by process thought, have been at the forefront of the science-religion dialogue and the promotion of environmental consciousness in Christian theology. Second, the view of God propounded by process thought avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional forms of theism, particularly with respect to the problem of evil. And this view portrays a God whose character is in some ways more consistent with the God of the Bible, particularly in God’s nature as “creative-responsive love.” This resonance of process thought with the biblical view of God is the response of process theologians to accuastions that they’re more philosophical than theological. And Whitehead himself saw the life of Jesus as one of the pivotal events in history revealing a God of persuasive love rather than domineering power.

    As far as weaknesses go, two stand out to me. First, the Whiteheadian system, with its forbidding jargon and abstruse speculations, can be difficult for outsiders to penetrate, and one wonders about the usefulness of yoking Christian theology to a seemingly esoteric form of metaphysics. Second, the process-relational model of God has elements that seem to clash with what many have taken to be essential points of Christian orthodoxy. Primarily these are in relation to its views of divine power and passibility. Critics have wondered, for example, if the process God has the resources to ensure the ultimate triumph of God’s purposes–a victory that is indicated by the Bible and the consensus of Christian tradition.

    I’m not sure either of these weaknesses is fatal to the process-relational project, though. Regarding the first, it is possible to incorporate Whiteheadian insights without adopting wholesale process thought’s metaphysical apparatus. For example, the scholar of science and religion Ian Barbour has been influenced by process thought, but largely avoids the Whiteheadian jargon in offering a metaphysical description of the universe as an evolutionary process characterized by emerging levels of complexity and the interplay of necessity and creativity. Similarly, Keith Ward has incorporated elements of dipolar theism into his conceptualization of God, such as passibility and God’s responsiveness to what occurs in the world, without accepting in its entirety the process view of God’s power. In sum, I’d say that process thought has provided a helpful and necessary impetus to re-thinking inherited notions about God and God’s power and relationship to the universe, a necessity also imposed by developments in modern thought that theology hasn’t always been willing to seriously grapple with.

    References:

    Ian G. Barbour, Science and Religion

    John Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition

    Keith Ward, Pascal’s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding

    Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

    Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making

    “Process Theism” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

  • Whitehead on theological revisionism

    I don’t know why I’ve suddenly been interested in reading Whitehead, but after Adventures of Ideas I turned to an earlier work–Religion in the Making. Here you can see the germs of a “Whiteheadian” doctrine of God, particularly in his critique of traditional notions of omnipotence and transcendence:

    This worship of glory arising from power is not only dangerous: it arises from a barbaric conception of God. I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the bones of those slaughtered because of men intoxicated by its attraction. This view of the universe, in the guise of an Eastern empire ruled by a glorious tyrant, may have served its purpose. In its historical setting, it marks a religious ascent. The psalm quoted [Ps. 24] gives us its noblest expression. The other side comes out in the psalms expressing hate, now generally withdrawn from public worship. The glorification of power has broken more hearts than it has healed. (p. 55)

    And another passage on the notion of a completely “transcendent” God, which Whitehead refers to as the “Semitic” concept of God:

    The main difficulties which the Semitic concept has to struggle with are two in number. One of them is that it leaves God completely outside metaphysical rationalization. We know, according to it, that He is such a being as to design and create this universe, and there our knowledge stops. If we mean by his goodness that He is the one self-existent, complete entity, then He is good. But such goodness must not be confused with the ordinary goodness of daily life. He is undeniably useful, because anything baffling can be ascribed to his direct decree.

    The second difficulty of the concept is to get itself proved. The only possible proof would appear to be the “ontological proof” devised by Anselm, and revived by Descartes. According to this proof, the mere concept of such an entity allows us to infer its existence. Most philosophers and theologians reject this proof…. (pp. 70-71)

    Interestingly, Whitehead argues that Christianity has modified the pure “Semitic” concept of God by introducing a degree of genuine immanence in the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. The logos is a principle of God’s immanent presence in the world. “The Semitic God is omniscient; but, in addition to that, the Christian God is a factor in the universe” (p. 73).

    However, he says, the transcendent, omnipotent God gradually became Christian orthodoxy, albeit modified by “tri-personality.” He suggests that a more thorough rethinking of the concept of God is necessary, one that’s consistent with our best science and our best metaphysics.

    I think we see Whitehead struggling here to find a conception of God that is both intelligible and moral. (I read something suggesting that Whitehead’s loss of his son in World War I was one cause of his struggle with notions of omnipotence.) A God of absolute power and inscrutable will no longer makes sense to him.

    As it happens, Marvin recently posted on Gordon Kaufman’s revisionist theological project, which takes a subtly different course from Whitehead’s. Kaufman argues against a personal, creator God, on the grounds that it doesn’t seem to fit with a scientific understanding of the nature of the universe or our experience of evil. By contrast, theologians working in the Whiteheadian tradition have picked up on the latter’s critique of omnipotence and transcendence (criticisms echoed by the other most important “process” philosopher, Charles Hartshorne) and developed it into an influential school of Christian theology.

    It seems that Kaufman leans toward a more impersonal “ground-of-being” type of theism that is willing to jettison God’s personal and moral character, while process theologians sacrifice omnipotence and transcendence to uphold God’s nature as “creative-responsive love” (to use John Cobb and David Griffin’s term from their introduction to process theology). Granted, more traditionally minded theologians have tried to preserve God’s transcendence, omnipotence, and personal-moral nature, but they have a harder time dealing with the problem of evil. Maybe the best conclusion we can come to is that these are all avenues worth exploring, since it’s far from clear which is right–if any.