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Process Theology Revisited
By Norman Pittenger

In several recent essays I have called attention to H. H. Price's description of theism as "a metaphysics of love." This seems to me a remarkable insight, but I am not at all sure that all varieties of theism merit the description. Some of them would appear to be much more a metaphysics of power, or of will, or of static being. Indeed Charles Hartshorne is correct in saying that "classical theism," as he styles it, has consistently stressed God's independence, absoluteness, and aseity, to the neglect of his relatedness to the world; one might say that a good deal of theism, in this mode, has been closer to a metaphysics of divine indifference than to one of love.

When we hear about reactions against theism, then, we ought to inquire just what sort of theism is being rejected. The American writers who have been called "death of God" thinkers are obviously in very violent reaction from concepts of God as power, as inert substance, or as ruthless will. They have identified such views as providing the only possible picture of God; it seems not to have occurred to them that there are other ways of thinking about God-ways which do not entail the denial of human freedom, of the importance of creaturely decisions, and of the effects which the world might have upon whatever-it-is that men have sought to denote when they use the term "God." Had they considered these alternatives, they might have been less ready to announce so confidently that God is dead. What is dead in fact is their inherited concept of God, which they have erroneously assumed to be the one and only concept. Their "atheism" is a protest against false models in theism.

The process theology to which some of us subscribe is based upon a quite different type of thought. It may properly be styled "a metaphysics of love," precisely because it takes with such utter seriousness the fact of relationship, seeing God not only as the chief (yet not the sole) cause in the cosmos but also as the supreme effect,

Norman Pittenger, for over thirty years on the faculty of General Seminary in New York, is now a member of the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge. Of his many books, the most recent are Process Thought and Christian Faith, God's Bay with Men, and Christology Reconsidered.

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and insisting on sharing, participation, giving-and-receiving as the very heart of deity himself and the essential character of a world which is in creative advance. Whatever else may be said about this type of theism, it does not fall victim to the charges made by so many contemporary thinkers, from so many different backgrounds and representing so many different schools of thought, that the notion of an absolutely unchanged and unchangeable deity makes no sense to people today. Something of what is meant by this view of God as supremely relational will emerge in the course of our discussion here.

God in his concrete actuality is nothing other than Love-in Wesley's words, "pure, unbounded love." So says process theology but so also ought all Christian theology say. Yet alas! this same theology too frequently has begun by saying something else and has added love only as an after-thought. But for those Christians who take the process approach, as we might phrase it, everything said about God is to be understood either as an abstract way of affirming that he is and he acts consistently in his faithful loving or as an adverbial expression indicating significant aspects of that loving. Thus it can be said that cosmic Love is such that it is everywhere active-and hence omnipresent; that it is able to face everything and still remain Love, able to secure finally the free consent of all creatures with no coercion exercised upon them-and hence omnipotent; that it is aware of and sensitive to all possible, as well as all actual, opportunities and occasions for loving-and hence omniscient. It can be said that cosmic Love is present in all creaturely occasions, enfolding them in its concern and working to bring them to actualization-and hence immanent; and that such Love is both indefatigable and inexhaustible, with the promise of victory over all opposition to it-and hence transcendent.

For the process theologian, the simple believer's conviction that God is the tender Lover, "the fellow-sufferer who understands" (in Whitehead's words), the participant in all human experience both joyful and painful, is taken with the most complete seriousness. There is that in the universe which can be trusted; there is that of God in every man, indeed in every creature, which will never let go-and the "that" is what we mean by God, who patiently and faithfully acts by lure, persuasion, solicitation, and attraction to secure the free consent of the creation to his purpose of good,

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which is at the very same moment and by its very definition the proper actualization of the aim or purpose of that creation in its every particular occasion.

The reason that process thought appeals to me, as to a growing number of other Christian thinkers, is that such a vision of God and of the world seems to offer an intelligible conceptuality for Christian faith and a suitable context within which Christian theology can be done. If I did not believe that this general line of thought was true, in the sense that among all possible generalizations from concrete experience which may be verified by reference back to a very large number of instances it is the most adequate, I should not be prepared to adopt it. And if 1, as a Christian, did not think that it fitted in with the deepest insights of Christian faith as I am grasped by that faith, I should not accept it either. But I am convinced that it can stand up in both respects and that it is as true a vision as we can get (at present, anyway) of how things go in the world. Of course I should not wish to claim complete finality for it; no responsible thinker could claim such finality for whatever vision he may see. But I believe it is our best present insight into what an older philosophy liked to name "reality."

Now the father of process thought, as I accept it, was Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician-turned-philosopher who ended his days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947. Whitehead never thought of himself as a theologian; indeed he had much fault to find with theology as he had read it. The best-known living exponent of this conceptuality, Charles Hartshorne, an associate of Whitehead's at Harvard University who has developed his own version of the philosophy, is no theologian either. It is not possible, therefore, for a process theologian to take over a ready-made theological system advanced by either or both of these men; there is no such thing. What such a Christian theologian is able to do is to use the pattern of thought which they, and others, have worked out. That pattern may require modification at various points; I think that it does, but with no serious distortion. A process theologian will take as his starting-place the conviction which as a Christian he holds: that Jesus Christ, known in his totality through participation in the community which emerged as part of the event of Christ, is "the disclosure in act of God's nature and his agency in the world," as Whitehead put it. With this as his

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master-model, so to say, he will read experience and the world in which experience is had. This means that he will see that "life in love" is the deepest meaning of "life in Christ"-and he will work from that basis. He finds that process thought is not only compatible with that conviction but provides a proper setting for it.

Let me take an example. In process thought there is no doctrine of Christ, for such a doctrine is not an inevitable part of a philosophical conceptuality. Yet the insistence, in that philosophy, that there are mutual "prehensions" or "graspings" as between God and man (and between all creaturely occasions, too); that we must begin with "the important" as the clue to what is going on, a disclosure through events in the process; and that we should accept the notion of an "initial aim" for each entity which by free decision of the entity becomes its own "subjective aim"-all this can be of assistance in constructing a viable doctrine of Christ. It can be useful to the Christian theologian as he seeks to give some intellectually appropriate statement of the abiding affirmation that in the Man of Nazareth-and perhaps above all in what Whitehead so beautifully described as "the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair"-there is the unveiling, with the authentic note of triumph, of the very heart of God, an unveiling which is not in theory or speculation but in a genuine human act with all its historical context and in all its stark reality.

Or, once again, the emphasis in process thought on persuasion or love as more profoundly indicative of the dynamic drive in the creative advance than coercion or sheer power, however strong these may seem, and with this the stress on the use of what happens in the process to further the prehension of good and its growing increase, can be of great help to the Christian theologian as he seeks to interpret what is meant by the saving work of Christ. For this conceptuality sees not only the centrality of persuasion and the use of every occasion towards growing good, but also emphasizes the societal quality of the world, with its inter-penetrative and relational manifestation. The. Christian conviction that through Christ God has achieved something which can be shared by others is illuminated by such a world-view. To be "saved" is to find "the life which is life indeed," life truly in shared Love.

One of Whitehead's best-known aphorisms tells us that God "is not the exception to all metaphysical principles, to save them from

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collapse, but their chief exemplification." I should urge that precisely because the world, as we know and experience it, is processive, dynamic, social or organismic, with genuinely novel emergences or new occasions, we must see that God himself is living, active, self-revelatory, and self-giving. The faith which proclaims him to be such is given a certain validation for the human mind by a philosophy which speaks with Whitehead. The divine who is supremely worshipful is just that because he is supremely relational. Hence he is Love, unsurpassable by anything not himself, and hence truly supreme, yet open to enrichment in his own life by what goes on in the world. If this is an assertion which process thought can and must make, it has its peculiar importance for the Christian thinker. As an intelligible way of speaking about deity, it accords with the Christian declaration that God is Love-a declaration based on the faith that God has acted lovingly in Jesus Christ. To think. and to live, in terms of such a belief is therefore not sheer irrationality which has no regard for facts and remains in the realm of wishful speculation.

In other words, there is what I have styled a "fit" between process thought and the articulation of Christian faith which we know as theology. This sort of conceptuality has appeared within a Christian-or post-Christian-culture, as Brooks Otis (another of Whitehead's former pupils and assistants at Harvard) has correctly pointed out. That does not invalidate it , however. Every conceptuality must occur somewhere; and the real question to be asked is whether it can stand up to criticism, take account of the facts, relate them in a coherent fashion, and help us to understand ourselves, the world, and (it may be) God himself.

Some critics have said that process theology does not take evil with sufficient seriousness. I should deny this charge; it cannot be made against Whitehead, especially, nor can it be sustained against Hartshorne's conceptuality-or, for that matter, against Teilhard de Chardin, who (while he seems not to have read any process writers) is a slightly idiosyncratic representative of the school. It is indeed true that the way in which evil, as a known fact of experience, is defined and described differs in process thought from that which has become conventional. But that is not to say that evil is minimized or disregarded.

For every process thinker known to me, notably for Whitehead,

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evil is very real indeed. It is a horrible but inescapable fact. In Whitehead it is one of the elements which enters into his vision of the world-process and of God as marked by high tragedy. This is no light-hearted dismissal of evil; on the contrary, it is the taking of the consequences of evil with such profound seriousness that they enter into God's own life in what he styled God's "consequent nature"-God as affected by the world in his eminent temporality. Thus one might claim that here evil is given a much more profound recognition than in conventional theistic schemes in which its effects have no place whatsoever in the divine life.

Evil is a surd in the creative advance. It is a refusal to move with the process. It is a freely chosen refusal, coming from creaturely decisions in their varying ways and at their different levels. God's purpose for the world is to secure a field for the expression of love-his own and that of the creatures; he is "in the world" for precisely that end. He secures that expression, but not by arbitrary imposition or interference, but by eliciting the amen of the creatures to the enormous good that is offered them. That good is nothing less than the actualizing of their potentiality, the making-real of their freely chosen "subjective aim." This occurs in ways that vary according to the creatures and with differing intensity of conscious apprehension. In the creative advance a radical freedom obtains, so that the given entity may decide not to realize its potentiality for good. This is evil, for it is a violation of the purpose of the whole process; it is always a possibility and it may become, it has become, an actual fact. With men, there is the chance to decide for or against advance; the decision to stay put, to refuse relationships, to reject the aim which makes for genuine fulfillment, may very well be taken. That decision has been taken time and again in the history of the race; the resulting situation, in which we find ourselves, makes new decisions for good more difficult, sometimes nearly impossible. This is what Christian theology has described by the not altogether happily chosen term "original sin," while the particular decisions (worked out in act) which are made against advance, against relationship, against the fulfilling aim, constitute what that theology styles "actual sins." The kind of self-centeredness which rejects the creative advance, so understood, is the basic fault in man. Biologically and psychologically, man must have a center in identifying selfhood, but he can have it in

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the wrong way-that is, he can deny the part he is intended to play, the part which alone will truly fulfill him; and then he is indeed in sin and a sinner. This is damage to himself and to his fellows; it is also damage to God, for God is the Love in which all creatures are intended to participate through their creaturely relationship of love.

Certainly no process theologian minimizes evil or sin. Nor does he minimize God's capacity to deal with these. In receiving into his own life, in what Whitehead (as we have seen) names his "consequent nature" or God "affected by the world," God does several things. First, in all the "perishing of occasions" by which the creative process is marked, God uses everything available to him for his purpose; he knows it and he keeps it. Second, whatever is in fact useable is positively prehended by God and made to serve love's ends. But third, God can use that which has evil ingredients in a manner that will secure good ends. He "turns even the wrath of man to his praise," as we might say; and for process thought God's praise signifies not some self-glorification of deity, but the outgoing action of love in ever wider circles of expression. Anything that is thus available may become an occasion for further advance. But in the fourth place, if there is some surd evil which is not assimilable, God will negatively prehend it; it has occurred and it cannot be annihilated, but it remains as a moment from which all possible good has been extracted by the alchemy of the divine loving persuasion. Thus, as a Christian would claim, Calvary in itself is an evil thing; yet as that inescapable evil, God has used it for a greater good than any man could have conceived. At the same time, there is a Cross planted in God's heart; he suffers in and because of the horror of that historical event, while at the same time he triumphs over it through his employment of it precisely to declare his love for his children. Easter day does not cancel out Good Friday; what it does, as the deepest insight of Christian faith has always known, is to suffuse the hill of Calvary with the light of God's victory over sin and death. It would be silly sentimentality to talk, as some popular preachers have done, of Easter as the reversal of Good Friday; on the contrary, it is the deepest realism and the ultimate optimism to see the Easter victory as the validation, not of human wickedness in killing Jesus, but of God's indefatigable love in using that murder for bringing good to his children.

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So far we have been speaking of the doctrine of God and of the related doctrine of Christ and his salvatory accomplishment. But we may also claim that the doctrine of man is illuminated by process thought. Man is a dynamic becoming; in Robert Browning's words, "he never is/ but wholly hopes to be." Man is on the move, bound together with his human brethren in one bundle of life and organic to the natural order of which he is a part. He is able to transcend that natural order, because he knows what it is up to and, while open to influence from it as well as to influence from other men and from history, he is responsible for his own decisions in respect to his drive towards fulfillment. He may make, or he may refuse to make, his proper contribution to the creative advance which is the purpose of God. Above all, man is made to become a lover in the mutuality which is giving and receiving in respect and tenderness. For love means and is relationship, fellowship, participation, and union in which both terms are distinguishable yet inseparable.

But man, alas, is a frustrated lover. For that frustration, insofar as it is the consequence of his given situation, he cannot be held responsible; but to the degree that he freely chooses what is not for his own true good in community with others, he is responsible and here, as we have already said, he is in sin and he commits sins. It is through those decisions that he determines the course or direction of his existence; either he is moving towards fulfillment or he is moving away from it. His sin is his violation, not so much of law as of love, of a loving relationship with his deepest self, his brothers, and his God. "With his deepest self," I have written; by this I mean that sin violates the intentionality given man by God as his "initial aim" which he may by choice make his own "subjective aim."

Man is always with men; his being on the road to what Coleridge styled "personeity" is his sociality. We are all in this life together. Thus any redemption must be of men, not simply of an individual (and supposedly isolated) man. But to say more about this would lead us back to a discussion of the significance of atonement, for which there is no place in this paper. I may suggest that a most discerning and helpful treatment of this subject will be found in a recent book by one of America's outstanding process theologians, Daniel Day Williams (The Spirit and the Forms of Love).

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I conclude this paper by admitting that I am more than a believer in the conceptuality which I have discussed; I am fairly close to being an evangelist for it! My reasons for this position are readily stated. In the first place, I am sure that the older types of Christian orthodoxy will no longer serve us. In the second place, I am convinced that conventional classical theism will not serve us either. Third, I do not think that we can do without some extra-biblical conceptuality. We cannot eschew all philosophical views. Indeed, as it seems to me, those who advocate such a strictly "biblical theology" in fact often smuggle into their studies a vast number of philosophical assumptions which, because they are uncriticized, are often dangerously naive. Fourth, I cannot be happy with so-called "secular theology," since it minimizes or rejects the "God-dimension." What we require is no such minimizing or rejection, but re-conception of that dimension. It is this which process thought helps us in achieving. In the fifth place, while I find much that is interesting and valuable in the various attempts to use existentialist insights (whether those of Heidegger or those of Kierkegaard) for Christian theological purposes, I miss in these attempts an adequate wrestling with the world, with nature and cosmic process as a whole.

Against such a series of considerations, I find for myself that the conceptuality known as process thought is both illuminating and helpful. What is more, it seems to me to be true, so far as this can be said of any metaphysical vision of the world. It fits in with the deepest deliverances of Christian faith. This, then, is why I am an "evangelist" for it, not as if it were some final and complete system but because it can do the things I have suggested. At the very least, I urge, it demands the most careful study by Christian thinkers.