I was very pleased to find that the professor we have for the doctrine of God is in tune with process theology. He is the first professor I've had that is a fan of Whitehead or truly grasped process THEOLOGY in all of its subtleties. It was very refreshing. The class quickly took to the idea of a changing, dynamic God, and saw this as illuminating what they already believed all along.
But quickly the turn towards a processual God seemed to leave something vital out. It seemed to some in the class that we had turned towards the idea of a God that was somehow essentially in flux. Again, Whitehead comes in to help clarify what good theology should actually be saying. God for Whitehead is dipolar. God has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The primordial nature is the ideal image of what the universe should or rather could be at its best given all of the facts on the ground as they exist in this moment. This primordial nature is indeed ever-changing, in terms of EXPRESSION. But content is always the same.
The upshot of this is that God is not in all ways changeable. If He were, He could not be a ground for our faith and trust, or rather our faith and trust would be groundless. For a truly essentially changeable God could be faithful one day and fickle the next, He could be loving one day and hating the next, and He could be classically omnipotent one day and totally impotent the next. Such a God could not command our faith because we could not trust in him. The ancients, for all the mistakes they made in positing an in-all-ways changeless God were right on this score. They sought a ground of stability in the sea of change that could actually ground our trust and faith. If we fail to capture the truth of this insight, our faith is truly pointless.
And so changelessness, and indeed impassibility (the idea that God cannot be affected by anything external) are not completely without merit. But what must be changeless and impassible is God's CHARACTER. God is always love and always loving, always good and always righteous, always merciful and always just. God transcends humanity qualitatively in this way: what happens to us can affect our character. God's character is never affected by what happens to Him. I can be tortured to the point that I can be brainwashed. My suffering can lead to a loss of trust, and a loss of moral rectitude. People are affected by what happens to them not only in their experience or their emotions, but in who they are. You can hurt me so bad you change me.
This can never, ever happen to God. No matter what God suffers, it never changes who God is. God's character, His goodness, is the eternal stability in a sea of change. God is indeed the same yesterday, today, and forevermore, for God's goodness is truly eternal. The ideal image God manifests as may change with the facts on the ground, but what never changes is that this image is the image of the best possible world, for it is an image infused with the character of God, with the goodness of God. God always guides us towards the good.
Whitehead, then, was simply pointing out something that should have been apparent all along to Christian theologians, that God's changeless character demands that God NOT be in ALL WAYS changeless. For a God who is always love will always feel for His creation. A God who is always compassionate will always empathize, and thus share in the joy and suffering of, other free and sentient beings. Such a God's experience must always be changing, for such a God must always reach out in the most personal of ways to the other. That is just what love, and indeed goodness are.
Thus God's changelessness and impassibility are not at odds with God's dynamism and His passion. They are part and parcel of the same fact: God's goodness. Whitehead's dipolar nature helps us make sense of many of our theological intuitions.
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