Western culture has gone through a paradigm shift beginning with the scientific revolution of the 17th century and continuing into the modern era. The rise of science and the scientific method of exploration of reality shifted the ground upon which traditional Christian theology was founded. Traditional Christianity is based on a particular understanding of the world that is called “substance” philosophy.
The ideas of this philosophy go back to the ancient Greek thinkers, especially Plato and Aristotle. St. Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries interpreted Christian theology by using Greek substance philosophy and proceeded to work out Christian doctrines in light of this philosophical framework. Aristotle’s God was the Prime Mover, the one who gave the first push to the material world to set everything in motion. A theology based on substance philosophy became the dominant theology over the next several centuries and continues in many theologies today. It defines God’s power as coercive and manipulative. Traditional Christian theology, which has been based on substance philosophy, has been foundational for both Catholic and Protestant Christianity.
Traditionally, the world has been seen as a machine; that is, reality can be fully described as mass in motion. A popular way of expressing this metaphor is the “billiard ball” universe. This metaphor emphasizes external relations as the primary way the world works. God, then, functions as some sort of engineer, manipulating the machine with the use of external, coercive power, that is, power over others.
Unfortunately for traditional Christian theology, substance philosophy has been completely undermined and dismissed by modern science, which understands matter as energy. The newer model of “event” has taken the place of “substance” philosophy. Instead of the world being composed of inert matter in motion, we now see the universe as a vast web of momentary events. Each event is related to all other events in a dynamic unfolding of everything in the world.
“Event” philosophy, or process philosophy, was first definitively envisioned by Alfred North Whitehead in his bookProcess and Reality. Whitehead was a mathematician in England and, after retirement, came to Harvard to teach philosophy in the 1920s. It was during this period that he formed his ideas into a coherent cosmology based on modern science. He wanted to use the best religious thinking along with the best scientific thinking to envision a model of the world that accounts for all experience.
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Process theology envisions Creation using a different metaphor: that the universe functions much like an organism, where everything is related to everything else both externally and internally. Rather than a static universe where change is simply a rearrangement of matter, this metaphor envisions the world as continually unfolding. If the world is more like an organism, then how is God related to it and to us? A way of expressing this metaphor is to think of God as related to the world much like we are related to our own bodies. The Divine presence is involved at every level and at every step of the unfolding of everything. God’s life is tied up with the life of Creation. The kind of power God uses is power with, rather than power over. There are other terms for this kind of theology: Natural theology, or Organic Theology, or Relational Theology. Jesus often used images from nature to describe the power of God. The Apostle Paul used the image of a human body to describe the church: the church is the body of Christ. With this model of relationship between God and the world, power is a two-way relationship.
The God portrayed in the Bible is a dynamic God who responds to the world from moment to moment and receives the world into God’s own experience, which God then gives fresh possibilities back to the world. This is the way love works. God learns and adapts to the decisions creatures make. One aspect of God is continually changing with the unfolding of everything in the world. Another aspect of God remains unchanged, in how God receives everything into God’s own experience and weaves it into the divine life. This is a power-sharing model where we are co-creators with God. Because we are in a dynamic relational world, what we do matters to God.
For more information on process theology go to www.processandfaith.org