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God Without Theism
By Nels F. S. Ferré

". . . If by espousing theism one means merely that one is neither a deist, a pantheist, nor a denier of God in some humanist or naturalist sense, then obviously a Christian is a theist; the Christian faith stands or falls with its worship of the living God who is more and other than the ordinary world and who is yet present in it and working through it. But the term theism has become so identified with substance philosophy, that it is best now to insist that the Christian faith is not theistic."

I AM going to reject "theism" as an unchristian term, but in order to do so I must first assign definite meaning to the term. In fairness to numerous theists who use the word in a wider sense than I, one must admit that a good deal of historical usage is on their side. Throughout its history, however, "theism" has been so often connected with a certain philosophy that it has become difficult to think of one without the other. Because of this nearly constant association, while granting that others have a right to use "theism" in a broader sense, I want to dissociate myself from the term.

I

The traditional ideas of God can roughly be grouped under four headings: deism, pantheism, atheism, and theism. Deism holds God to be a separate, self-sufficient being who has created the world but has since left it alone. If such a god enters the world or works in it, he must necessarily interfere in the world's now self-sufficient workings, and intrude there as an alien power, Such an understanding of God has never been a real option for the Christian faith, with its view of incarnation and providence.

Pantheism maintains that God is the spirit of the whole universe.

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He is no separate being creating the world or entering into it, for he is the world bethinking itself, the process directing itself. The pronoun "he," in spite of common usage, is meaningless, because according to pantheism God is not a personal being distinct from the world or process. Pantheism cannot be limited to one narrow view; like all other views of the whole it is a mood and a method as well as an ontology. Whitehead and Tillich have at times both told me that they would prefer to be called pantheists rather than theists.¹ Pantheism can be a high and holy view of God. It does not have to approach the caricatures of it that charge that the god of pantheism is equally manure and rose, good and evil. The process can even be alive, seeking to further and to enhance existence from within its dimension of depth. Nevertheless, pantheism is not a Christian position, lacking as it does God the creator, a doctrine of personal providence, and capacity for incarnation. "Panentheism" is a variation of this and tries to understand God as within the total process and yet as somehow distinct from it. At times Tillich has preferred this view. But panentheism is in fact a misnomer. Unless God is in the world in some sense, we have deism; if God is more than the world and therefore other than it, we have theism.

Strictly speaking, atheism merely rejects theism; it is a-theism. If theism conceives of God as a general category, to be an atheist is simply to deny entirely the reality of God. But if theism stands for a particular view of God, then a person can call himself an atheist and still believe in God who is not theistically understood.

The basic tenet of theism is that God is the supreme being, not only distinguishably more and other than the world who yet works in the world, but also who is a separate being. Of course, if by espousing theism one means merely that one is neither a deist, a pantheist, nor a denier of God in some humanist or naturalist sense, then obviously a Christian is a theist; the Christian faith stands or falls with its worship of the living God who is more and other than the ordinary world and who is yet present in it and working through it. But the term theism has become so identified with substance philosophy, that it is best now to insist that the Christian faith is not theistic.

¹ But in 1965 Tillich in a personal discussion disowned pantheism as unsuitable for his system.

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Substance philosophy holds that reality consists of discrete or separate substances or things, whether static or dynamic, that are real in themselves and need no explanation in terms of anything else. When applied to God, as has been the practice with theism, this philosophy speaks of him as being, the supreme being; and in such practice, being or God has itself been made into an ultimate category in terms of substance. But defining God in terms of some such philosophical ultimate as being gives us in a final sense two ultimates, God and being. We are faced with a choice. Either we take our direction from this philosophy with an ultimate ontology, in which case the living God of the New Testament who is spirit, love, cannot be ultimate; or we say that God is God, using the inevitable tautology in defining the ultimate, in which case we must define being in terms of God, not God in terms of being. If God is love ultimately, he cannot ultimately be being. I reject the theism that defines God in terms of being. In this sense God is not the supreme being. God is God who cannot be defined in terms of any category that would permit him to be finite.²

In the same way, Tillich dismisses theism in the sense that God cannot be "a" god because if he were, the supreme being would be conditioned either as outside the world by being related to it or as inside the world by being confined and made relative by it. With regard to the kind of theism that is based on substance philosophy, Tillich is quite right in his analysis; but with regard to the Christian faith itself that espouses the living God in terms of spirit who is both more and other than the world but who is yet in control of it and working within it, Tillich takes the wrong path. He dismisses not only theism but the living, personal God.

II

The god of process, moreover, is no more God than the god who is supreme being. Disgusted with the contradictions and pseudo-problems of a theism based on substance philosophy, many especially among our younger thinkers are turning to process philosophy as a vehicle for Christian theology. The fundamental distinction between theism as the philosophy of substance and the theism of cosmic process is that in the former, God is the supreme being who needs

² For more sustained analysis of this topic, the 'reader may wish to consult my Reason in Religion or The Christian Understanding of God.

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nothing else in order to be, whereas in the latter, God is created as well as creative and is as much dependent upon the world, in fact, as the world is dependent upon him. In the former, God can give man of his own eternal life, whereas in the latter God alone, by the very analysis of what is, can be eternal. What is at stake in process philosophy is whether God is more than the process with final power over it and whether God can give eternal life, or life beyond death.

Two originating prophets of process philosophy stand out today, Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Without going into the systems of either man in detail we can garner their main harvests. Whereas Whitehead's philosophy is mostly process, Teilhard maintains a definitely Christian background that always amplifies and deepens his process thinking. Process theologians either take what they like of his thought and leave the rest, or, as Teilhard himself does, they remain closer to Christianity itself. In the case of Whitehead, some like this thought unaltered because they really mean to develop straight process theology; others try to say that he could have meant, or at least that his system allows for, something far closer to the Christian faith than he intended. Such claims, as I know from personal conversations with him as well as from his writings, are mostly in the nature of wishful thinking. Whitehead himself had considered and deliberately discarded near-Christian choices.

Process philosophy is a direct protest against substance philosophy. In reality, it holds, there are no substances which need only themselves in order to exist. In science we may speak of seven dimensions which describe the way things interact and are interrelated according to our best present knowledge. Not only do we have the dimension of time-space, or the dimensions of time beyond the usual three dimensions, but we also have gravitational, magnetic, and electrical fields in which things "are" and "exist" since nothing is inert and merely passive and all things are interdependent and interacting. In Whitehead's thought all things are mutually immanent. They both include all else (except for certain possibilities or "eternal objects") and in turn are included by all else, i.e., by all other things, or "events," "actual entities," or "occasions of experience." God himself, as the mind and lure for satisfaction of the whole process, is also an actual entity. He himself is an accident of creation. God

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is as much created as creating. The drive to creativity in all things is fundamental to the process. This drive is, so to speak, prior to God and drives him. God sees all possibilities for the total process and for each actual entity in it. His job is to direct the total process with a view to achieving both the greatest possible total harmony and also the fullest possible creative satisfaction for each actual entity in the process. These possibilities are not real in themselves, but neither are they merely the creation of God. They are, rather, most consistently part of the creative process, and as such neither independently real nor dependently deficient, but interdependently both real and deficient. As a matter of fact, the thoughts create the thinker as much as the thinker the thoughts. There are no real, abiding selves but each self is a locus of actual entities or occasions of experience. Reality comes in drops of experience. In one sense these alone are real and all things are to be explained in terms of them; but this "ontological principle" has to do only with the resulting satisfactions that the drops of experience finally feel, and not with their process of becoming, which is explainable only in terms of the interaction and interdependence of the total process.

The point is that there is in process philosophy no self-sufficient being. There is no being as such or in itself, no eternal being, no permanently real, as opposed to deficient, being. Nor is there eternal ground or goal of cosmic process, since reality itself is process in one of its basic aspects. The reality of satisfaction is momentary. God is almost entirely the reality of the total process in becoming and of the total satisfaction in being, felt moment by moment, but preserved beyond all moments within the resultant satisfaction of his eternal vision, or "envisagement," which as objectively eternal, provides the concrete possibilities for every future guiding of the process. For all intents and purposes we can say that God, on this scheme, is supposed to serve the purposes of eternal being in classical western thought, although he is constantly created as well as creative. God alone is eternal in any sense of reality, but he has no eternal purpose either for history or for man.

III

In order to escape substance philosophy, must we land in the inadequacies of process philosophy? Is there not a way of truth which possesses in itself the truths of process philosophy without its limi-

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tations? I believe that the Christian faith's understanding of the living God as the spirit who is love, has all the capacities of both these philosophies without their deficiencies. For this reason I am confident that when the Christian faith is Tightly understood, we shall see it reborn to a new vigor.

Christianity is the religion of the spirit. When everything is understood spiritually, when the category of spirit is taken with full seriousness, ultimates are no longer "things." What can it possibly mean that God is nothing and nowhere? Is spirit merely a way of saying that we know God only negatively, in terms of what he is not? We have said that God is not substance, not bounded personality, not an aspect of process. But mere negatives do not give us a claim to knowledge; and in order to avoid the via negativa which is the way of agnosticism, we must go on to the positive task.

God is spirit, personal life (Our Father), love. These New Testament categories-spirit, life, love-are primary descriptions of God; they are permanent distinctions or functions within the unity of the ultimate reality, God. When we say that God is spirit we say that he is everywhere without being anything. The God of nowhere is everywhere, the God of nothing upholds everything. All locations are finite creations of the God who is prior to and beyond all space. Even such expressions as "prior to" and "beyond" are false because they make finite existence determinative for our definitions. The creative being, the spirit who is love, creates a pedagogical medium for pedagogical purposes. Spirit is not spatialized nor subject to spatialization. Neither are finite Spirits spatialized as spirits, but they are under the conditions of creation.

God may be nothing and nowhere, but finite spirits in creation are something and somewhere for the sake of learning. They are given bodies under the conditions of physical existence in order to become real through choices. Finite spirits can learn indirectly from their choices by observing and having to live the consequences. Thus they can learn in freedom. They can learn indirectly from the results of choices in the medium of space and time. Space relates spirits to other spirits in the process of learning extensively or coordinately; it makes it possible to live alongside others to learn from and with them. Time relates incarnate spirits to the results of the past as the process brings to fruition the consequences of choices.

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The God of nowhere and nothing is thus everywhere and responsible for everything. Out of the indescribable depths of spirit comes creation in time and space. God there deals out such responsibility as is commensurate with our freedom. He puts us in control of our choices. Since he is, according to our modes of thinking, nowhere and nothing, he can withdraw in such respects as further our freedom. His presence can become only indirect, or non-personal, in the sustaining of the created order and in the ripening of the consequences of our choices. The nature of spirit, in one dimension, is to be eternal, indestructible, ultimate reality; in spirit, therefore, we have the eternal reality which characterizes philosophies of substance or personalistic philosophies, but which is lacking in process philosophies. But spirit, in the other dimension, has the capacity to be present in and with creation as is needed, under whatever conditions spirit is needed, because spirit is the reality that can be at the same time nowhere and everywhere.

With respect to creation, spirit is not present as its self-being; and creation, for its purposes, is therefore real. God can be absent especially to allow men privacy and freedom. The God who in himself or as spirit is nowhere, can thus be both present and absent at the same time. With God, presence and absence are not contradictory but are actually co-ordinate predicates. The spirit is capable of being with the new of creation, sustaining it and directing it in such a way that apart from such co-existence the finite, the created, could not be, while also becoming absent in the direct personal sense.

IV

Spirit is the category of self-transcendence. Only spirit can go beyond self as self. Self-transcendence alone brings genuine freedom from self and others. The self transcends as spirit not only his body, and not only his mind, but his very self. He finds the freedom of the spirit, the reality of God. Such a self is free in God and therefore, while completely for and with others in their deepest reality and purposings, quite free from them in their partial limitations or their misdirected drives or desires. To be free is to know God, to be spirit in spirit, to reach the goal of selfhood which is ever fulfilled by being transcended.

Spirit is man's ultimate. The eternal purpose behind cosmic

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process is spirit, focused by love, the true nature of creative being. The eternal purpose is not some unknowable and superfluous being itself which sanctifies substance philosophy, not some personality with only external relations to the world, not some extremely refined aspect of cosmic process. Rather, the living God who is unconditional love, the eternal Spirit, is our wisdom, truth, help, hope, direction, and destiny. God is not the supreme being of theism but the living God of the Christian faith.