a comprehensive metaphysical philosophy which originated with Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).13 By the late 1950s process thought becomes central and crucial in
Pittenger’s theology, occurring simultaneously with a ‘renaissance’ of Whitehead’s thought in liberal theological circles in the US.14 At least one thinker considers that Pittenger is ‘usually identified as one of the leading process theologians of the twentieth century.’15
Whitehead’s process thought resists a separation between ‘the scientifically observable and the aesthetically experienced and deeply felt aspects of life.’16 He considers the unity which occurs within experience and within the reality of the cosmos to be the key to explaining the nature of existence, so that the cosmos has a richness which is greater than can be expressed through materialism.17 In opposition to the classical ontological idea
11 David Scott, "Anglican and Episcopal Theologians: A Usable Past for Post-Liberal Theology," Anglican
and Episcopal History 56 (1987), 10.
12 Blume, "The Legacy and Achievement of W. Norman Pittenger," 220.
13 Although the influence of process thought is increasingly acknowledged by Pittenger, some aspects of his thinking which have a commonality with a process metaphysic (for example panentheism) are seen as ‘essentially in place’ in Pittenger’s work from very early on: Michael Brierley, "Norman Pittenger (1905- 1997) and Panentheism," Theology 109 (2006), 434. It may be the case that rather than process thought altering Pittenger’s views, he readily accepted it because it corresponded with positions he already held. A full account of Whitehead’s process thought is found in Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1960).
14
Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology 1950-2005, 196.
15 Millard J Erickson, The Word Became Flesh (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 245. 16 Norman Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, ed. D E Nineham and E H Robertson, Makers of Contemporary Theology (London: Lutterworth Press, 1969), 6.
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that reality comprises substance, and consistent with the developing understandings of quantum science, Whitehead posits that the basic metaphysical reality is an ontology which is best described as a succession of occasions (also called events, entities, or experiences – terms which will be used here interchangeably).18
In process thought, all entities are dipolar, which means that they operate both physically and mentally. These entities ‘prehend’ other experiences, that is, they feel or grasp actual entities (both physically and conceptually) and react to them. All entities prehend to some degree: some do so in an extremely limited way, but the so-called ‘higher’ life forms prehend in a conscious or intelligent way. The entity’s physical pole feels or prehends the physical qualities of actual entities, and it is these physical qualities which differentiate entities from each other. The entity’s mental pole feels or prehends the ‘conceptual eternal objects’ of other entities. The process of prehending and reacting is one of free will, and the measure of freedom which each entity has is expressed in its ‘subjective aim’ which is the unification of past prehensions combined with something new. The ‘something new’ is the entity’s own creative contribution to the process of the universe, and it is this creative contribution which gives it satisfaction.19
Because actual entities can only be influenced by what is actual, therefore there must be an actual entity (God) who transcends the world and prehends values and possibilities and is therefore the permanent source of order, value and creative process.20 God, like the rest of reality, is dipolar, having a ‘mental pole’ or primordial nature which has a timeless, transcendent perfection, and which exemplifies the principles by which the cosmos operates: providing limitations to creativity, influencing values and aims, and perfectly prehending (and being partially prehended by) all that is.21 God also has a ‘physical pole,’ or consequent, immanent, nature: by prehending, God takes into Godself
completed experiences or entities and by valuing them, gives them objective immortality.
18
Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 21-24. 19 Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 48-50.
20 Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), Preface.
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As an actual entity, God enriches the cosmos by returning to it the data of the prehended experiences, thus ‘luring’ and persuading the world to value and intensity. An outcome of this view, for Whitehead, is that in God’s consequent nature, God suffers with the world and is open to growing or changing along with the world.22
Although Whitehead himself articulated some of the theological implications of process thought, process theology as such was extensively developed by Charles Hartshorne,23 John Cobb24 and other thinkers such as Pittenger himself. Pittenger’s own entrée to Whitehead (apart from attending an early lecture by Whitehead which he found unintelligible) was through the work of Hartshorne which he found to be ‘deeply Christian.’25
Hartshorne affirms that God is absolute in some abstract ways (always and eternally faithful, loving and related) and also relative or relational in some concrete ways (in the actuality of his actions).26 Hartshorne emphasises that God does not know how creatures will choose because they have genuine freedom, yet because God is perfect in love and goodness ‘he may be trusted completely; he will always bring the best out of any and every circumstance, although that victory must for him (as for us) be at the cost of pain.’27 Hartshorne was extremely influential for subsequent process theologians such as Schubert Ogden, Charles Birch, and John Cobb.
Pittenger draws on a number of theological ideas from Whitehead and Hartshorne: God suffers with the world; in his consequent nature God is open to growing or changing along with the world; God is supremely related in an active and living way; God self-
22 Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 140.
23 Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967). 24
John B Cobb, Jr, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Belfast: Christian Journals, 1976). 25 Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 10. Pittenger says that he owes his ‘theological salvation’ to
Hartshorne and Whitehead. Norman Pittenger, "Understanding the World and Faith," Theology 90, no. 735 (1987), 180. At the same time, Pittenger acknowledges that Whitehead’s thought needs translation to be thoroughly applicable theologically, and he has some disagreements with Hartshorne’s thought: W Norman Pittenger, God in Process (London: SCM, 1967), 89. Pittenger also notes his indebtedness to process theologians David Griffin, John Cobb, and Schubert Ogden.
26
Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 11. 27 Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 12.
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identifies with the world; God operates through faithful and inexhaustible love rather than coercive power; and reality is constituted by certain ‘important’ fresh or unexpected moments or events where there is ‘a particularly intense and vivid concentration of creative act and response’28 which compels people to see more deeply into ultimate reality.29 The notion that persuasive love is the mode by which God operates and the claim that relationship is central to who God is, are the themes which most specifically underlie Pittenger’s theology in relation to the Incarnation, which will be discussed in later chapters.
Perhaps the most central and often repeated image in Pittenger’s theology is that of God as the divine cosmic lover.30 This is an image which develops from the process
understanding (especially as articulated by Hartshorne) that God realizes Godself ‘through divine self-expression and the response which it secures.’31 The world is the object of God’s love because ‘God really is love’32 (Pittenger’s italics). The centrality of God’s love is not, in Pittenger’s thought, an accidental or incidental feature of the universe, neither is it the end-point. Rather, it is the beginning point, for, as Pittenger emphasises, interrelationship between the divine and the human begins with God who, as prevenient divine Love, takes the initiative towards people, offering them the initial aim or vocation of being open to God. When the human person responds to that Love or lure, they become ‘a lover’ who is then received into God’s life and thereby contributes to the enrichment of God’s life.33
The model of God as the cosmic Lover ‘commends itself to us because it is religiously relevant, philosophically intelligible, and scientifically acceptable,’34 so much so that the ‘theological criterion’ of Love is, Pittenger believes, increasingly coming to be viewed as
28 Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 48-50.
29 Norman Pittenger, God's Way with Men: A Study of the Relationship between God and Man in
Providence, "Miracle," and Prayer (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), 144. 30
Norman Pittenger, Picturing God (London: SCM, 1982), 107. 31 Pittenger, The Word Incarnate, 147.
32 Pittenger, The Word Incarnate 148. 33
Pittenger, Picturing God, 107-108. 34 Pittenger, Picturing God, 100.
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the test of Christian doctrine.35 Although the idea that love is at the centre of Christianity is by no means new, Pittenger argues that there occurred, during the twentieth century, a profound change in Christian thought in the way in which love was taken ‘with the utmost seriousness’ as being ‘the point of Christian faith’ and as making a huge difference to peoples’ attitudes.36
Specifically, the aspects or modes of divine Love which Pittenger sees as being at work in the world are those of: ordering (establishing a broad ‘plan’); initiating (within a continuing process the ‘divine drive’ provides the opportunity for what is genuinely new); luring (inviting entities to actualize their aim); receiving/harmonizing (God receives into God’s existence and harmonizes and purifies that which has been actualized); and responding (God gives back to creation the purified achievements).37 Pittenger emphasises that the working of the cosmos is explained by and expressed through interrelatedness or interpenetration, with actual entities continually impacting on (prehending) other entities, who in turn respond to their ‘rich and varied environment.’38 The idea of mutual prehension undergirds a number of Pittenger’s theological assertions: that human life is meaningful after death because ‘God remembers;’39 that God does not intrude into the world; and that prayer is not about changing God’s will to meet human ends.40 Receptivity and mutuality are essentially organismic or societal and resonate both with Trinitarian and ecological theology.
By asserting the model of God as unbounded love and as interrelated, he resists the idea that God is a philosophical concept, and that the cosmos operates in a way which is static, mechanical, conceptual, or grounded in coercive power.41 The notion of God as divine
35 W Norman Pittenger, Love Is the Clue (London: Mowbray, 1967), 2. 36 Pittenger, Love Is the Clue, vii-viii.
37
Pittenger, Picturing God, 79-83. 38
W Norman Pittenger, Christ and Christian Faith: Some Presuppositions and Implications of the Incarnation (New York, NY: Round Table Press, 1941), 81.
39 Norman Pittenger, After Death: Life in God (London: SCM, 1980), 58. 40
Pittenger, God in Process, 19. 41 Pittenger, Love Is the Clue, 6-7.
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lover undergirds both the understanding that sin is a refusal to become ‘a created lover who reflects the cosmic Lover, and acts for him in thought and word and deed’42 and the position that sin and evil are transmuted, by suffering love, into good.43
The influence of process thought and of the scientific ideas with which it engages
underlies Pittenger’s frequent discussion of the principle of emergent evolution, which he first encountered in Conway Lloyd-Morgan’s works Emergent Evolution and Life, Mind and Spirit.44The evolutionary process is described by Pittenger not just as a process of ‘reshuffling’ but as an ‘epigenetic’ one in which although there is continuity of process there is also a graded world-order (roughly resembling the ‘Great Chain of Being’) in which each higher level is more than the ‘resultant’ of what has gone before, being the emergence of something that is genuinely new.45 The engagement between evolutionary thought and theology is valuable because it sees the cosmos as both physical and
metaphysical. Further attention will be given to the relationship between evolution and theology later in this study, primarily in relation to the thought of Arthur Peacocke (who develops the theme in an especially strong way). Nevertheless, the significance of the concept in Pittenger’s work is also to be noted.
In his discussion of evolution, Pittenger emphasises that reality has a dynamic aspect. He often critiques the ‘static quality’ which has too often characterised Christian thought, and against this sees God as concomitant, that is, ‘alongside or with his creation.’46 Pittenger emphasises that it is only through what God does that a claim can be made about what God is, therefore God is to be seen as primarily doing rather than being:
Pittenger draws a parallel between Whitehead’s statement that: ‘a thing is what it does’ and the scriptural words ‘I shall be what I shall be.’ God is transcendent, therefore ‘there is always “more” in God than what we see of him in his observed activity ; but the more
42
W Norman Pittenger, Cosmic Love and Human Wrong: The Reconception of the Meaning of Sin in the Light of Process Thinking (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1978), 44.
43 Pittenger, God in Process, 16-17. 44 Pittenger, The Word Incarnate, 150ff. 45
Pittenger, The Word Incarnate, 150-151. 46 Pittenger, The Word Incarnate, 178, 229.
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is not a static “isness” but a dynamic life, utterly faithful to his purpose of love and labouring unceasingly and indefatigably to fulfil that purpose in the world.’47
Although Pittenger’s work is strongly underpinned by process thought, he adopts it in a critical way. He identifies what he sees as the ‘obvious differences, even contradictions’ between process thought as expressed by Whitehead and classical theism: for classical theism God’s essence is aseity,48 for Whitehead it is love-in-relationship; for classical theism ‘being’ contains ‘becoming’, while for Whitehead ‘becoming’ is the more inclusive term; and classical theism sees transcendence as ‘unconditionedness’ whereas Whitehead sees God ‘in terms derived from and relative to his creative activity in the world.’49 Pittenger considers that process thought can be theologically deficient because it does not contain (or have categories which can be restated to provide) a doctrine of the Trinity. Because Whitehead does not discuss Christology or soteriology, it is not possible, Pittenger says, for his work to be simply ‘taken over’ by Christian theologians; it must be worked through and adapted. Just as Augustine and Aquinas refused to compromise their Christian convictions to fit a neo-platonist or an Aristotelian worldview, Pittenger argues that process theologians also must resist an easy compromise:
we are Christian believers, first, last, and always; … our adoption of the Process conceptuality does not require us to become Whiteheadian, or any other kind of, scholastics who are determined to force everything into the Procrustean bed of some supposedly all-encompassing “system.” We are
using the insights of Process Thought; we are not its slaves.50
Process thought, in the form used and adopted by Pittenger, contains significant theological implications and challenges.
First, it posits a dynamic nature to reality. Because reality is a series of occasions, the cosmos must be seen as fluid, dynamic, and processive; thus process thought posits open,
47
W Norman Pittenger, "The Incarnation in Process Theology," Review and Expositor 71, no. 1, Winter (1974), 46
48 By which Pittenger means ‘self-contained existence’. Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 37. 49
Pittenger, Alfred North Whitehead, 37.
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rather than closed, systems and often focuses on autopoiesis (self-organizing systems).51 Although to some extent the cosmos unfolds in a pre-ordained manner (therefore reality has limits and order), nevertheless new things occur (therefore reality contains an element of chance). The emphasis of Pittenger’s process theology on all of reality as dynamic and open is compatible with some of the understandings of quantum science. This means that his revised theological understandings are philosophically plausible within a
contemporary worldview which does not hold to the claim that the universe comprises unchanging entities or substances which are subject to measurable mechanical laws and deterministic design.
Second, change is not only inherent in the created order itself; process thought also suggests that although God is constant in God’s primordial (abstract) nature, in God’s consequent (concrete) nature, God is also subject to change. Because God has a primordial nature, the change to which God is subject is not one which involves development or progress, thus Pittenger does not endorse the Teilhardian notion of ‘an inevitable and inescapable progress.’52 God as such does not “develop” since in his absolute nature God is supreme and unsurpassable: what can be said to develop is the richness of the divine life which receives contributions from the world.53 God grows and therefore changes not in his divinity but in the way he accepts, receives, and is affected by the creation.54 The idea of a God who is subject to change in any way contrasts with many of the understandings of classical theism and challenges Christian claims that God is static and always the same.
Third, in Pittenger’s process perspective reality is grounded in relationship. If, as process thought claims, there are no substances, then there is nothing (even God) which can be said to need nothing but itself in order to exist, and so the modus operandi of the universe is predicated on relationship and interaction. Because actual entities prehend one another,
51 Van Huyssteen, ed. Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, 235. 52 Pittenger, "The Incarnation in Process Theology," 44.
53
Pittenger, God's Way with Men, 154.
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they are not isolated or independent but are related.55 All occasions or experiences are influenced by prior occasions or experiences, and they themselves will in turn influence all future experiences. For Pittenger, God is immanent in all actual occasions thus God must be understood as being in the world and not separate from it. The idea that God is essentially present and related poses a challenge to those parts of Christian thought, such as Deism, which posit an isolated and essentially unreachable God.
Fourth, occasions have genuine freedom, thus God’s power is persuasive not coercive. God’s creative, persuasive love operates in partnership with the universe, in a continuous creative process of lure and response within which both the universe and God are in the process of becoming what or who they really are.56 Because each entity has its own subjectivity, it can be lured but not coerced: God offers possibilities, the entity chooses, in a process which involves freedom and risk, and the outcome is thereby taken up into God’s consequent nature. The process understanding presents a plausible understanding of freedom yet this also challenges a strong or unqualified understanding of divine omnipotence.
Therefore the theology which Pittenger (and others) develop from process thought portrays the world as dynamic, and sees God as subject to change and suffering, related, and as operating through persuasive love. It is the love of God, as claimed by the Gospel of John (‘God so loved the world’) which forms a core component of the thought of Pittenger.
The process perspective has had a strong influence on a range of theologies, including ecological theology. Gary Dorrien claims that:
Whiteheadian process theology became the leading liberal school [in the