To understand this passage it is necessary to reflect back upon my last Whiteheadian 'translation', found here: http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/07/what-did-whitehead-mean-by-that_16.html
God retains the experiences of the world that increase value in the world. Any experience that can add to God's stock of value is remembered by God, God remembers what it is like, for instance, for a great musician to compose a new piece. It isn't just that God remembers the piece, though He does, it is that God remembers what it was like to be that particular person, at that particular time, composing that piece. He remembers the joy, the inspiration, all of it.
God does not only share in happy experiences, however. God also remembers the suffering of the individual who is accosted by various forces in the world. Suffering can lead to growth. One of the challenges of modern theology is to account for the experience so many have by which suffering becomes a way in which they become deeper and better people. Many have learned from their pain. I have met so many people in my pastoral work who have felt empowered and have grown through suffering. This experience often leads people to the conclusion that God SENT the suffering, in order to bring about the growth. Theology must reject this view, for it is inconsistent with our moral duty to alleviate the pain and suffering of the world, a duty we experience as divine in it's own right. Making sense of both the transcendent experience of the sufferer AND our moral experience of the need to end suffering, is one of the great challenges of theology.
Whitehead's system is something I believe in because it helps us make sense of the fullest range of our human experiences. This is an example of this Whiteheadian pragmatic value. For Whitehead can help us make sense of both sides of this equation. With the right character, suffering can be transmuted into something of value. If anyone doubts this, I suggest the book MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Viktor Frankl. I will not defend this conviction here, Frankl does it better than I, or anyone else, ever could. Whitehead recognizes the religious experience of the sufferer. But he does not thereby make suffering an end we should pursue, or a fact to which we should be indifferent. God's transcendent character makes it possible for Him to transmute suffering into something good. A good human character can do something of the same. But that does NOT mean that God wants us to suffer.
A man is shot by a criminal and ends up in a wheelchair. This happened, it is the fact of the matter once the event takes place. With God's help, this man may be able to do something positive with the thing that happened to him. He and God together can use that moment to make the world a better place. That man's suffering is not valueless. But this is not to say that a GREATER value wouldn't be available had the man never been shot. The experiences lost to the man are also lost to God, genuinely, and so the event itself is judged both by what was lost and what was gained. What was gained is shared by God, suffering is not lost to oblivion as evil is. Yet God calls the world to a place where such things do not happen, for the potential good that could be gained by such a world is better.
God calls me to donate a kidney to a friend. Fear keeps me from donating the kidney. God cannot then know what it was like for me to have donated the kidney. He cannot share the moral experience of such an act, for I negated that experience by not taking part in the act. God goes on to call me to share my story, to do good with my mistake. That good God can share it for it is a good that is actually done.
No one suffers alone. All value is retained by God. Suffering is a conditional value, it only has value in the right hands, but God's hands are ALWAYS the right hands, and so God's character transmutes all suffering into something of value. The person who causes suffering, when they undertake this act, their experience is lost. What takes place is a suicide of the now. Their joy, which teaches nothing, and leads to a degradation rather than gradation of the world, is the joy of oblivion. But God remembers their victim, what it was like to be that person, at that time, experiencing that thing. So all sin is visited upon God.
This brings us to another Whiteheadian quote that is related to the first. From RELIGION IN THE MAKING:
We do not possess a systematic detailed record of the life of Christ; but we do possess a peculiarly vivid record of the first response to it in the minds of the first group of his disciples after the lapse of some years, with their recollections, interpretations, and incipient formularizations.
What we find depicted is a thoroughgoing rationalization of the Jewish religion carried through with a boundless naiveté, and motived by a first-hand intuition into the nature of things.
The reported sayings of Christ are not formularized thought. They are descriptions of direct insight. The ideas are in his mind as immediate pictures, and not as analysed in terms of abstract concepts. He sees intuitively the relations between good men and bad men; his expressions are not cast into the form of an analysis of the goodness and badness of man. His sayings are actions and not adjustments of concepts. He speaks in the lowest abstractions that language is capable of, if it is to be language at all and not the fact itself.
In the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Parables, there is no reasoning about the facts. They are seen with immeasurable innocence. Christ represents rationalism derived from direct intuition and divorced from dialectics.
The life of Christ is not an exhibition of over-ruling power. Its glory is for those who can discern it, and not for the world. Its power lies in its absence of force. It has the decisiveness of a supreme ideal, and that is why the history of the world divides at this point of time.
Think about the process we talked about when speaking about God's imminence. God presents an ideal, and it passes away by the world's action. God then creates a new ideal based on that action. God, in a very real sense, is 'crucified' and 'resurrected' in every moment in this world. Further, the idea of God standing in the place of every victim also has deep affinity with the thoughts of people like Rene Girard, who see Jesus as standing in the place of the victims of sin and crime.
Indeed, Whitehead above tacitly admits the Christian foundations of his thought. For Whitehead, Jesus is no different than any other person ontologically speaking, but through reflection upon the "Jesus-Event" we can see an important truth about God. The Jesus Christ of the Gospels, then, plays an epistemological, not an ontological role for Whitehead. He shows us what God is, but the revealer is God. So the above is an explanation of the earlier quote: "God is the fellow sufferer who understands."
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