Thursday, January 17, 2013

A Process Pneumatology- From My Unpublished Book BREATH OF GOD


Process Theology & The Holy Spirit

            Another vital theological movement of the 20th century, one I reflected on in a limited way in my last book that will play a significant role in my own thinking, is process theology. Process theology began as a philosophical movement started by Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician and philosopher. Alfred North Whitehead was an agnostic before he began his quest to develop a comprehensive worldview that could make sense of the scientific revolutions taking place at the turn of the century. Whitehead thought that the mechanistic model of reality, seeing the world as a giant clock whose workings could be perfectly described through math and science, had about run its course. It no longer served to push the cause of science and humanity forward, and some new thinking was going to be required if we were to engage in the big paradigm shifts that the future looked like it would be forcing on us. Whitehead thought the line between life and non-life, as well as the line between the world of the mind (the human condition) and the world of the mindless was blurry, at best. Rather, the world and the things that make it up are lifelike and mindlike, and all of reality could be modeled this way. The world by Whitehead's lights was a realm of freedom, and the laws of physics were descriptions of the regularities in the behavior in the use of this freedom. What's more, all things are themselves only societies of other things, all things are organic and societal, and this is one reason why his philosophy is often called "The Philosophy of Organism". Strange as this may sound, not long after Whitehead's theorizing about metaphysics, physics itself started to turn in this direction. Quantum mechanics changed our view of the world as something hard, fast, material and determined. Later, influenced by Whitehead and others, a new field of science called systems theory started to permeate all branches of science, from biology and chemistry to physics and even social science. Systems theory very much treats reality and the things that make it up as lifelike and often even mindlike. I personally believe that in time, Whitehead's influence in science will be as great or greater than even Albert Einstein.
            Whitehead was taken aback when he realized that the implications of his theories, which are laid out in his writings in ways far more complex and yet precise than what I've said here, pointed the way to the existence of something very much like the God spoken of in the world's great religions. What shocked him was the way free beings, over and over again, on an unimaginable scale, constantly added up to not just aggregates but real wholes, wholes that often expressed an increasing aesthetic value. Whitehead wanted to understand how it was that value is produced, and how a progression of value in the universe took place. It seemed obvious to Whitehead that things moved in the direction of being more complex, and more beautiful. Why should this be so? From his point of view, increasing physical zeal and zest were a reflection of a mental pull towards increasing depth of being. Things were trying to be the 'most' of themselves they could be, to impress deeper upon the world. This action was ultimately self-centered. But from this self-centered action of free beings, a whole, coherent, ordered, and beautiful world resulted. Things, trying to be fully themselves, did so by trying to produce a better, ordered and more beautiful whole. This tendency in things to 'choose' to live for others, in order to fully live for themselves, indicated to Whitehead that Something was impressing upon them something like the human experience of meaning and value.
            This led him to take a close look at the broadest range of religious experience throughout human cultures. What he found was something similar going on in religious life. A common religious thread, the one that he thought had the strongest evidentiary force, was the view that I only really find self-fulfillment in my fulfillment of the widest possible human community and moreover, in reality as a whole. I try to be the 'most me' I can be. But I find that I can only truly do this if I live for the whole of things, for all of reality. We live most of the time with an atomized vision of self, where we think we are this singular experiencing center, and we find fulfillment by satisfying that center. But such a life is ultimately self-defeating, unless it includes in it a wider circle that we also try to fulfill: familial, cultural, societal and so on. I only find my own real good by fulfilling these larger wholes. Who I am, is only discovered in my relationship with others. Religion at its best, thinks Whitehead, opens us up to an even larger sense of self, one that is only found when we completely lose that sense of an atomized 'me'. If I find my life I lose it, and if I lose my life I find it (Matthew 10:39). This paradoxical insight is yet the foundation of all that truly seems to be 'the good life'. Whitehead thought that this human insight was something that applied to all reality. Whitehead's philosophy is ultimately an attempt to take the reality of individual things seriously. Individuality, novelty, and freedom are real, for Whitehead, and yet they are only fully expressed in and through community. Individuality in community, and community through individuality, is the very nature of the universe, for Whitehead. He says this explicitly in RELIGION IN THE MAKING, I apologize for the technical language, but if you do the work to understand Whitehead, the profundity of the message is real:
"The actual world, the world of experiencing, and of thinking, and of physical activity, is a community of many diverse entities; and these entities contribute to, or derogate from, the common value of the total community. At the same time, these actual entities are, for themselves, their own value, individual and separable. They add to the common stock and yet they suffer alone. The world is a scene of solitariness in community.
The individuality of entities is just as important as their community. The topic of religion is individuality in community." (emphasis added)
            Whiteheadian philosophy posits a dual natured God as the source of the physical world. The primordial nature of God is a non-physical reality, a "best possible" image of the whole world. The consequent nature of God is the world, which expresses that "completed" image to some degree. Each individual 'thing' is imaged in God's primordial nature as the best it can be, adding up to the best possible world given the facts of the world as they are now. An object in the world, possessed of some kind of mental capacity, has a basic ability to respond to this image, and it uses its freedom to 'lurch' towards it, actualizing it less or more. God then re-orders His primordial nature, to produce a new ideal image, which is respondent to the actions of the objects that make up the world. T       Think about how it like this: a friend of mine needs a kidney, and I happen to be a match. God presents to me the ideal of me donating my kidney to my friend, within His primordial nature. Through religious and moral experience, and more so through true self-awareness (awareness of myself in and through the whole of things, an awareness Whitehead called 'prehension'), I apprehend this 'ideal possibility', this best possible image of myself within a best possible image of the world. But because of fear or distrust I procrastinate and my friend passes away. This ideal image is now gone, a new one replaces it. God may, say, call me to tell others my story to encourage others to have the courage I did not. This is the new ideal image, the new primordial nature of God, for me. What is true for me is true for every thing in the universe, and the universe as a whole. All things, from the cells in my body which are called in each moment to behave according to biological rules and yet still have the freedom to go cancerous to weather systems which are called to continue the dance of life and beauty but can become destructive, have some imaged reality in the primordial nature of God. To the degree the individual things express the primordial nature in the physical world, God exists along side us, and that is what Whitehead calls the 'consequent' nature of God. Whitehead says in that same book 'all acts leave the world with a greater or fainter impress of God'.
            It didn't take long for Whitehead's philosophy to get appropriated by Christian theologians who thought it presented a new and exciting way for us to reconcile science and Biblical religion. Charles Hartshorne was the first to really get the ball rolling. He started by simplifying Whitehead's system into a Divine Personalism, whereby the universe is treated as the Body of God and God as the mind of the universe. The Divine Mind could set the goals and imagine the ideals to which the things that make up the body respond. This was a simpler and more personal way to express the same truths. A flurry of thinkers developed an important school of thought known as process theology, and it has had a wide influence in Christianity. There are many process theologians, and even more traditional theologians who have been influenced by process thought. It is an exciting and important field. Process Pneumatology has been sorely lacking, unfortunately. Process theologians have tended to identify the Holy Spirit with the primordial nature of God, guiding the universe forward through inspiration, and Christ with the consequent nature, the good things in the world expressing the Spirit. Jesus is usually seen as a paradigmic example of this kind of intersect. As Clark Pinnock points out in his wonderful work of Pneumatology "Flame of Love", this is not concomitant with the experience and worship of the Christian community as a whole, and will not do as it stands. For this reduces the Spirit and the Son to parts of God, aspects of God, and not God Himself. This aspectism is not personalism and it is three Persons of God that we need, we need the sense of the Spirit as a Person, not an idea, not an abstract part of the whole. That said these ideas will play important roles in my own Trinitarian vision and Pneumatology. I think that the material here can be brought into conversation with tradition and we can reach a whole new height in Pneumatological and Trinitarian reflection. And that is a big part of what I will be doing in this book: giving tradition a much stronger voice alongside process theology than it does for almost any other process thinker. I have explained before why I think honoring tradition and the church experience is important, and it is important for me, just as process theology, too, is important. That is why these ideas will play a role, but the role they will play is to give form and function to a Pneumatological project.
            One last thing needs to be said about process theology and Pneumatology. I said before that Greek philosophy tended to weaken the church's ability to talk about the Spirit and the Trinity. One of the things Whitehead did for theologians was give them a philosophical framework that freed them of the substance vision that so limited their ability to talk about God relationally. This God, the God of Whitehead, is essentially relational, as all things are. Objects are their relationships, and so is God. As such, we have a language which will make it possible to talk about God in and through the relationships of three distinct persons. Whitehead's greatest gift to us was to give us a way to talk about God AS love. For that reason, if for no other, all Christians owe him a great debt of gratitude.


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