“Divine Persuasion: A Look at Process Theology”
Rev. Lilli Nye
March 12, 2006
In the “Call to Worship” this morning, Victoria Safford describes a universe so awesome that it turns scientists into poets. She tells of a blue-green world exploding with diversity of life and consciousness. And she asks, if you saw such a cosmos, if you experienced such a world …
“what song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises…what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single day that you were in it?”
Looking through her eyes, the world and its inhabitants are so wondrous that life merits a sacred devotion. What she sees, what she believes, calls her to reverence, and she is sure that if you saw what she sees, there would be a song of praise in your mouth as well. This, then, is her theology, her felt sense and her belief about what is most real.
Although classically, the word theology means “the study of God,” it can be taken to mean any description of what one holds to be of ultimate truth and value. An Atheist, someone who rejects the idea of the existence of God, can still be said to hold a theological belief, one that professes nature to be the only ground from which existence springs, and human imagination to be the only source of meaning that we can know of.
In fact, Victoria Safford, whose praise of the cosmos we just heard, holds such a theology. She states elsewhere that she does not believe in any divine creator or unifying cosmic intelligence in the universe. This does not in any way diminish her experience of the sacred and the need for a religious response.
A friend of mine, Unitarian theologian Paul Rasor, explained that “Theology, at its most basic level, is about the way we understand ourselves in relationship to the world and to each other. And it is about the way we describe and relate to whatever we understand as ultimate or Holy—that which we experience as worthy of the highest devotion.”
Our theologies are the lenses through which we look and interpret experience. They shape the meaning we give to things, and the choices we make. And because of this, they are not simply abstract ideas.
When we back up and look at our own theology and try to put words to it, it will seem abstract. But, in fact, it is what actually motivates and guides us, it is what opens us up, or closes us down. A community of people who share a particular theology can become very significant force in the world, for good or ill, as current events are constantly revealing.
To be a religious community is to come together within some kind of shared theological vision, to relate within a theological framework, to stretch and reach out from a theological motivation. Even though as a community we all bring a wide diversity of theological belief—atheist, agnostic, mystic, Christian, Buddhist, humanist, nature-centered—there are likely some common underpinnings that allow us to connect and commune as richly as we do, and which provide a shared sense of purpose, a shared ethic toward the world.
I thought of sharing the ideas of Process Theology today because, it seems to me, these ideas may link many of our diverse perspectives and hold them in harmony. I’ll start with a story about how I came to appreciate the perspective of Process Thought.
I’ve probably shared with you before that when I was in my late teens, I took a summer job at the Star Island conference center, a UU conference center located on one of the little Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire. I came to Star like so many other young folks who, for generations, have flocked to the island like seabirds, to sweat and play and have life-changing experiences while doing all the grunt work on the island through the conference season. My first year I was a dishy, and my second year I was on the chamber crew.
Star Island isn’t much more than a big ragged rock totally exposed to sea and sky, with enough topsoil to support some grass and few small trees. The western side of Star Island faces the mainland. That side has the rambling old Oceanic Hotel and a few cottages and other buildings, manicured lawns, and gardens.
But if you go out the back door of the hotel and keep walking east, the path takes you beyond the cultivated areas, past the old stone chapel, through hedges of wild roses and groves of sumac. It winds its way around stone outcroppings and through flowering grasses and scrubby brush and eventually brings you out onto the cliffs that face the uninterrupted curve of the Atlantic Ocean.
Among the cliffs are caves and tidal pools and the nesting grounds of hundreds of big black-backed gulls. The gulls are gorgeous to watch as they ride the winds, but they can scare the b’jesus out of you if you get too near their babies.
I called that side of the Island “the wild side,” and I spent as much time out there as I could, much of it peering into the furry life-filled places where the sea and the land meet. (You have time for such things when you are 18—or at least you should have time for such things.)
On one such afternoon, I was in a deep reverie, watching one spot where the foamy waves were rhythmically filling and emptying a crevasse, sucking at the seaweeds and sloshing around the colonies of mussels and barnacles….
And as I watched, I saw that everything was changing at every second, that nothing was ever the same from one instant to the next. Every bubble and swirl and eddy was different because never for one moment were the forces exactly the same, and everything was constantly interacting in new ways, right down to the molecules, right down to the atoms that make the molecules, right down to the particles that make the atoms.
And I sensed that this is what the passage of time is. That time is this continuous irreversible change, this unfolding process and constant interaction, and that life is change and process and interaction. And I felt that there was a fantastic freedom and energy and joy and synergy in all of it, like everything was dancing with everything else.
And so years later, in seminary, when I was introduced to the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead and Process Theology, it was one of those moments of revelation and recognition, when you say, “Yes, yes! This is what I believe, this is what I already knew but did not have words to name.”
In a nutshell, you could say that Process Thought claims these things:
That every particle of existence, right down to the most infinitesimal quark, every particle of existence in some sense “enjoys” its existence, and in some sense has freedom and a range of choice. The universe is made up not of things but of these feeling events, these occasions of experience. And these occasions of experience endlessly interact and influence each other, making a cosmic net of mutually creative moments. Every moment flows toward its own purpose and fulfillment; and the final cause of the cosmos is beauty in action.
Now let me back up a little:
In Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes, Charles Hartshorne lays out the main errors that he sees in the classical, conventional ideas about God, three of which I quoted in the reading [the reading is included in full at the end of the sermon]:
1) That God is perfect, and unchanging, complete in itself,
2) that God is all-powerful, willing all things to happen according to some
plan,
3) that God is all-knowing, seeing past, present, and future in one eternal
now.
These ideas are alive and well in mainstream faith. It is common after a tragedy for people of religious faith to reconcile the horrible event by trusting that it was God’s will, and even an expression of God’s superior love and wisdom.
Or, on the flip side, sometimes a tragic loss will cause someone to utterly reject God. They will continue to believe in this omnipotent, omniscient and transcendent Being, but will refuse to have anything to do with “him,” the way one would reject a friend that had done something unforgivable.
And as for omniscience, I once had a really interesting theological conversation with a guy at a cocktail party (it’s true!) who was a very faithful and very thoughtful and good-natured Calvinist—meaning he believed in Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. Predestination claims that God already knows, has always known, who would be saved and who would be damned.
This guy explained it to me that because God comprehends all time simultaneously, and because God already knows all beings more intimately than they know themselves and knows the trajectory of their choices, God already sees the outcome of everything. As Hartshorne put it, “there is no open future” for such a God.
So, Process Theology refutes all of these ideas. Process Theology allows that God is not a person, a being, but is the collective of all experience; God exists right within the creative, unfolding events of time and space, and is always being changed by this unfolding process. God may even BE creative change itself. God cannot “know” the future because the future is open, the future is subject to the real creative freedom of the cosmos.
Why do process theologians even speak of God? Why not just let it go all together? Hmmm. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Henry Nelson Weiman was a process theologian. He started out as a Methodist, but in his later life came on over to join the Unitarian Universalists. Weiman’s main core idea was “creative interchange.”
His ideas were founded in the metaphysics I described above—that all things are not things but occasions of experience, mutually influencing one another. But he applied this to the human realm, the social realm.
For Weiman, creative interchange was that process by which we are constantly learning and growing through our interactions with others. He saw this dance as the action of God in life. As another theologian, feminist Mary Daly, once said, why does God have to be a noun? Couldn’t God be a verb? Creative interchange is God as a verb.
He described creative interchange as happening in four stages: First, as we open ourselves to another we receive their perspective. We get their perspective more, or less, accurately, depending on how open we are to that encounter.
Second, we take that new information into ourselves, often subconsciously, and we connect it to, integrate it with, our prior conceptions of things.
Third, this integration of new ideas widens our perception of the world, it expands our awareness and understanding, it enriches our knowing and valuing, and it gives us more choice, more freedom, more capacity to act, more potential for self-expression and fulfillment
Fourth, this expanded understanding deepens and widens our community with others; it allows us to relate to more people with greater mutuality. That increased mutuality opens us up to further creative interchange, which continues the process of ever-unfolding creative expansion and fulfillment.
For Weiman, as for other process theologians, the belief in God is a belief that there exists in us, in all beings, in all the cosmos, a longing for fulfillment, a longing toward fullness of being, toward full self-expression. This is the Divine power, persuading all things, coaxing all toward abundance of life and toward beauty. God is the pole of attraction, calling forth the greatest fulfillment for the greatest diversity of beings.
Weiman would say that our spiritual and social challenge is to open ourselves to creative interchange. We should create the conditions that encourage it to happen. At the same time, he would say that we cannot really grow ourselves, we cannot cause our own unfolding. That comes with divine grace.
Nor can God will our choices. They are our choices, and sometimes they are destructive and move us farther away from all that is our good. God can only whisper to us, can only persuade us to turn toward freedom and fulfillment.
Now this has important implications for justice. What is oppression? What is violence? To oppress another is to insist on their diminishment, to severely limit their freedom, their experience, their potential for self-expression. Violence is the most extreme expression of that diminishment of another’s life.
Oppression is kept in place by a refusal to experience the reality of the oppressed being. By that refusal to open to the reality of another, the oppressor is also diminished, and true creativity and possibility is suppressed for all.
I want to connect these ideas to a parable in the New Testament Gospel of Luke, because I think it illustrates the link between creative interchange and justice. I also hope this story helps to connect what might seem like two very different theological frameworks.
In the context of Luke’s account, Jesus is taking a meal in the household of a wealthy citizen, and he tells this parable, here paraphrased:
A wealthy householder makes an invitation to a number of guests and prepares a great feast for them. When it is ready, the master of the house sends his servant out to call the guests to come. But one by one they all give ridiculous excuses for why they can’t make it and send their regrets. The master of the house is angry, and he says to his servant, “Well then, go out into the streets and neighborhoods of the city and call in all the poor, the lame, and the blind, invite them to come in and enjoy the feast.”
So the servant does this, and comes back and says, “I’ve invited all the poor and disabled, and there is still room.” And so the Master says, “Well then, go out onto the highways and byways, and call them all in so that my house may be filled.” (Although the story does not tell us, we can only hope that the servant himself got a place at the table.)
Now this story is traditionally interpreted as an allegory for salvation, for eternal life in heaven—the idea that salvation is available for all who will come into relationship with God.
But this can also be a parable of redistributive justice in the world, the creation of the kingdom of peace here in the world, the creation of the beloved community. This creation becomes possible with the opening up of new relationship where there was none before, a genuine interaction where there was none before.
In Jesus’s time, all people were born into very rigid social classes. They lived, worked and died within those classes. The interactions between social strata were very rigidly controlled and very limited, with no relationship between the wealthy and the poor except one of economic exploitation—very much like it is today.
According to the gospel accounts, Jesus’s way of relating to others flagrantly disregarded this social stratification. His interactions were a teaching in and of themselves. He ate at table with the maligned of society one day and with the wealthy and powerful the next. He interacted freely and respectfully with those groups that social codes would try to prohibit him from relating to—lepers, the poor, women, prostitutes.
The story of the Great Banquet is a story of the breaking open of rigid social divisions. The master of the house, who lives in abundance, opens his doors, his house, his table to the very least of society. In so doing, an entirely new range of relationship is possible, and an entirely new world. Creative interchange begins where none was possible before.
The idea of creative interchange insists that salvation does not occur at the end of time, as is the doctrine of orthodox Christianity, but within time, within history, and within this world. Salvation, if you want to call it that, is the greatest fulfillment of the greatest diversity of beings.
Whether we understand this in terms of social justice or environmental justice and sustainability, we are called to courageously encounter others in their fullness. We are to allow ourselves to be changed. We are to share ourselves, and to live in full mutuality. We are called to open ourselves to that force which creates the new, which creates freedom, and which tugs the great diversity of beings toward their beauty.
I’ll end here with the words with which we lit our chalice:
May it be so!
CLOSING WORDS:
Love yourself, love others, love God, love life, It’s all the same. Wear
your faith like a beacon, your love like a torch unfolding, your light caressing
everyone and everything.
Amen and blessed be.
THE READING: This quote is drawn from Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne [return to sermon]
First mistake: God is absolutely perfect and therefore unchangeable. In Plato’s Republic one finds this proposition: “God, being perfect, cannot change”—not for the better, since “perfect” means that there is no “better,” not for the worse, since the ability to change for the worse, to decay, to degenerate, to become corrupt, is a weakness, an imperfection….
Obviously, the ordinary meanings of “perfect” do not entirely exclude change. Wordsworth wrote of his wife that she was a “perfect woman” but he certainly did not mean that she was totally unchangeable.
In many places in the Bible, human beings are spoken of as perfect, and yet the exclusion of change could not have been intended. And where in the Bible God is spoken of as perfect, even here the exclusion of change is not implied. Where God is spoken of as strictly unchanging (as in the verse “without a shadow of turning”) there is still the possibility of ambiguity. For example, God might be completely unchangeable in righteousness, but changeable in ways that are compatible with…or even required by this unswerving…righteousness.
If “perfection” is taken to mean maximum value in every conceivable aspect, it may turn out that an inquiry into this idea of perfection cannot make sense and is contradictory. In that case the argument of the Republic is an argument made from absurdity and proves nothing….
Second mistake: Omnipotence. God, being defined as perfect in all respects, must then, it seems, be perfect in power [omnipotent, all-powerful]. Therefore, whatever happens is divinely made to happen. If I die of a disease this misfortune is God’s doing. The question then becomes, “Why has God done this to me?” Regarding the idea of omnipotence, here too, there are possible ambiguities, as we shall see.
Third Mistake: Omniscience. Since God is unchangeably perfect, whatever happens must be eternally known to God. Our tomorrow’s deeds, not yet decided upon by us, are yet always or eternally present to God, for whom there is no open future. Otherwise (the argument goes) God would be ignorant, imperfect in knowledge, waiting to observe what we may do. Hence, whatever freedom of decision we may have must somehow be reconciled with this alleged truth that our decisions bring about no additions to the Divine Life. Here perfect and unchanging knowledge, free from ignorance or increase, are the key terms. It can be shown that they are all seriously lacking in clarity, and that the theological tradition resolved the ambiguities in a question-begging way….
It is interesting to note that the idea of unchangeable omniscience, covering every detail of the world’s history, is not to be found definitely stated in ancient Greek philosophy…. It is not clearly affirmed in the Bible, and is inconspicuous in the philosophies of India, China, and Japan. Like the idea of omnipotence, it is largely the invention of Western thought of the Dark or Middle Ages, yet it still goes unchallenged in much of current religious thought.