After 1960 CE, as the influence of neo-orthodoxy waned, a number of theologians turned to Whitehead and Hartshorne as philosophical sources for a contemporary expression of Christian faith. Theologians at the United Methodist affiliated Claremont School of Theology (Claremont, CA) established the Center for Process Studies in 1973 CE and launched the Journal of Process Studies with the intent of expanding the philosophical and theological thought of Whitehead and Hartshorne into Christian theology. Works such as John B. Cobb’s A Christian Natural Theology (1965) and Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975), Lewis S. Ford’s The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (1978), David R. Griffin’s God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (1976), God and Religion in a Postmodern World (1989), and Evil Revisited (1991) were influential works in shaping the Christian process theology movement in the late twentieth century. Unlike Whitehead and Hartshorne, whose natural theologies excluded appeal to special revelation, the latter process theologians were confessing Christians in the tradition of liberal Protestant theology.55 Cobb and Griffin (1976:96) described their vision for a Christian process theology thus: “We judge that Christian meaning can best be made alive today through a truly contemporary vision that is at the same time truly Christian”. Therefore, the Christian Process-Relational theists sought to utilize process philosophy to recreate the Christian message in a contemporary, scientifically sensitive, and metaphysically comprehensive way. Aligning with Hartshorne, Christian theologians such as Cobb, Griffin, and Suchokki agreed that Whitehead was incorrect by describing God as a single, everlasting actual entity. Cobb and others were persuaded that Whitehead’s doctrine of God could find coherence only by making God a “personal society” of actual occasions. As Whitehead conceived “temporal perishing” in the world,
55 It should be noted that there are many other process theologians that followed Whitehead and Hartshorne in many other traditions including the Jewish and Buddhist traditions. However, for purposes of this research project, I will focus only on Christian theologians.
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Christian process theologians proposed the same activity in God’s nature. Beginning with the doctrine of God, such theologians as Cobb, Ogden, and Pittenger sought to demonstrate that the Process-Relational view of God was more compatible with the biblical view of God56 than the traditional Christian view of classical theism. Like Hartshorne, the Christian process theologians contented that the monopolar conception of God as timeless, immutable, impassible, and in every sense independent was more Hellenistic57 than biblical (Viney 2008:8). Ogden (1967) argued that Hartshorne’s neoclassical theism expressed the relevance of Christian faith to secular society. Cobb (1965) concluded that Whiteheadian process philosophy was a viable basis for Christian natural theology. Williams (1985) analyzed the biblical, Christian theme of love and argued that Whitehead’s metaphysics was useful for explaining the means of God’s love outside of traditional theological constructs. Further, Cobb (1969:80) explained the Christian Process-Relational perspective of God and the universe as such:
… in a sense, we are all parts of God. But we are not parts of God in the sense that God is simply the sum total of the parts or that the parts are lacking in independence and self-determination.... the world does not exist outside God or apart from God, but the world is not God or simply part of God.
Whitehead emphasized the importance of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Whitehead maintained that the essence of the teaching of Jesus was that God’s power is not coercive, but persuasive, and that the reality of divine power is revealed in the “tenderness and subtleties of creative and responsive love”. The message of Jesus, in Whitehead’s view, focused on the “tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (Whitehead 1929:520). Whitehead’s sensitivity to Christian ideals opened the door for a creative synthesis between process philosophy and Christology.
56 That is, God’s interaction with history as dynamic rather than static in the biblical accounts. 57 I emphasize the word“pre-Socratic”, as I have demonstrated that Heraclitus in particular
contributed to Whitehead’s philosophy.
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Process theologians concentrated on Christology in the 1970s. Beginning in 1959, Norman Pittinger (1906-1997) authored several works integrating the process view with Christianity. Christian Whiteheadians maintained that traditional formulations of Christian theology ultimately denied the full humanity and historicity of Jesus. Whitehead’s concept of “spatial inclusion” (that all actual occasions “ingress” all other actual occasions in their becoming, including the actual occasions of God) permitted a more coherent conceptualization of “incarnation”. It was argued that Jesus was not unique in that God was “incarnate in him” or that he was God embodied in flesh. According to Christian Whiteheadians, God was ontologically present in Jesus in the same way that God is present in all creatures.58 However, Jesus sustained a unique relationship to God that made the divine incarnation in his “becoming” a special case (Pittinger 1970:7). The initial aims of God in the society of actual occasions known as Jesus of Nazareth were fulfilled to satisfaction.
For Pittinger the uniqueness of Christ was seen in the way he actualized the divine aim for his life. Pittinger argued that sin is “deviation of aim”, the tendency of humanity to deviate from the initial aim of God by means of a subjective aim. Christ actualized the ideal aim of God in his own subjective aims with such intensity that he became the supreme human embodiment of “love-in-action” (Pittinger 1959:149). Pittinger did not affirm an eternally preexistent person to define the divinity of Christ, but referred to Jesus as a universal example of God’s creative love at work in the world (Pittinger 1959:172). Further, David Ray Griffin suggested that Jesus actualized God’s decisive revelation; God’s eternal character and purpose were exemplified in Jesus Christ as a universal vision for reality.
Process-Relational Christology was essential to the development of a Process-
58 This argument follows the panentheistic view that “all things are in God” rather than the pantheist view that “God is in all things”. The two views should not be confused in Process-Relational Christology.
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Relational theology of love. Cobb and Griffin (1976:35) expanded Whitehead’s conviction concerning Jesus by arguing that “if we truly love others, we do not seek to control them”. Whiteheadian Christians, especially Cobb, applied basic insights about Jesus to the doctrine of God. Accordingly, the divinity of Jesus is found in the “creative love of God” (Cobb & Griffin 1976:95). Christ as Logos was one of Cobb’s major contributions to twentieth century Christian theology. Cobb’s “Logos Christology” was a significant development in Christian Process- Relational theology. According to Cobb (1975), the “Logos” could be conceived as the primordial nature of God present (incarnate) in all things as the initial aims for creatures. For Cobb, Jesus was the fullest incarnation of the Logos because in him there was no tension between the divine initial aim and his own self-purposes or subjective aims of the past (Cobb & Griffin 1976:98). Jesus prehended God so accurately that God’s immanence was “co-constitutive” in the selfhood of Jesus (Cobb & Griffin 1976:99-100). Thus, Cobb suggested that Jesus was unique among other entities, not merely by degree but in kind, in his “structure of existence”. Further, Cobb asserted that “Christ is most fully present in human beings when they are most fully open to that presence” (Cobb & Griffin 1976:99). Lewis S. Ford emphasized the resurrection of Christ as the basis for a Process- Relational Christology. According to Ford, the resurrection was an encounter with a “nonperceptual reality made perceptual by hallucinatory means”. Thus the resurrection was for Ford a spiritual event that perpetuates a new emergent reality, the “body of Christ”, by which humanity may be transformed into a new organic unity (Whitehead 1978:21). Further, Ford suggested a process view of the Trinity. Ford contended that the Father as the transcendent unity of God, who by a creative “nontemporal act” generates the Logos (the primordial nature) as the eternal expression of divine wisdom and valuation, and the Spirit as the consequent nature in the sense of the immanent being and providential power of God.
Christian Process-Relational theology gained influence in the intellectual world of seminaries and graduate schools but did not gain wide acceptance among laity or adherents of mainline Protestant denominations. Nevertheless, some theologians have argued that Christian Process-Relational theology offers a viable vision of
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God’s unconditional grace and acceptance, compatible with Christian tradition that also interfaced well with science and philosophy.