I entirely agree with George Murphy's point, directed to Howard Van Till,
that process theology makes it difficult (I think George understates the
case here) to speak of God "gifting" the creation, in the quite meaningful
sense that Howard apparently meant when he spoke this way several years ago.
I would say that process theology can't consistently speak about God
"gifting" anything in this way, that the process God lacks the power or the
will to determine the nature of nature.
In short, a process God isn't the maker of heaven and earth, in any
meaningful sense. In reading Howard's lengthy quotation about omnipotence
from Hartshorne, I am reminded of a passage from Robert Bolt's A Man for All
Seasons, a terrific play about Thomas More that became a terrific film many
years ago. Near the end of the play, when More is faced in court with the
testimony of Richard Rich, the snake who perjures himself for Wales, Rich
relates a conversation they had had, concerning the power of parliament, in
which Rich relates how More had countered one of his examples:
RICH I said to him: "Supposing there was an Act of Parliament to that I,
Richard Rich, were to be King, would you not, Master More, take me for
King?" "That I would," he said, "for then you would be King."
CROMWELL Yes?
RICH Then he said--
NORFOLK (Sharply) The prisoner?
RICH Yes, my lord. "But I will put you a higher case," he said. "How if
there were an Act of Parliament to say that God should not be God?"
Rich drops this like a hot potato, but Hartshorne in my view has picked it
up again and dropped it in our laps. The question of "God" vs "demiurge"
(Plato's word for the divine craftsman, the same word used incidentally to
refer to God in Hebrews 11:10) is in my view absolutely fundamental to
biblical theism, one of the small handful of questions/issues on which
genuine monotheism differs from "paganism".
If the nature of nature is not in the nature of God to determine, then in
my view God is not God. As best I can determine, the reason why process
thinkers reject genuine monotheism (see above) is, that they feel so
strongly the problem of theodicy, and resolve it by denying God the power to
determine the nature of nature. A more acceptable and more genuinely
Christian response, in my view, is to take the high road of the incarnation,
to leave theodicy formally unresolved but existentially softened by
accepting--indeed embracing wholeheartedly--the fact (at least what I take
for a fact) that Jesus actually was God in the flesh, the maker of heaven
and earth suffering in and through the creation to redeem it. As George
Macdonald put it, "The son of God suffered unto death, not that men might
not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his." Or something
pretty close to that, I don't have the book in hand.
And why is this incarnational response not really available (in my view) to
process thinkers? Simply put, process thinkers accept the "modern"
theological premise, popular in this country since the Chicago school of the
late 19th and early 20th century, that God should not be God. For Shailer
Mathews and many other modernists, "God" becomes only a social construction,
and there is no "being like other beings" (Paul Tillich's language here) who
laid the foundations of the world. Thus there is no "God" to become
incarnate: the maker can't redeem what he didn't make.
I think Howard's earlier language about God "gifting" the creation was
wonderful and eloquent. But I doubt very much that it can be reconciled
with the frankly Arisototelian (even more than Platonic) notion of "God" as
the eternal process of becoming. Indeed it is not clear to me that process
thought can even make the claim, suggested by Charles Kingsley, that God can
make all things make themselves, since the process God does not have the
power to give natures to things.
To make matters worse, the process notion muddies the intelligibility of
nature as well. I've gone on a while already so I'll make this part short.
As R.G. Collingwood argued many years ago (in The Idea of Nature), the
biblical notion of divine omnipotence is what transformed classical
Platonism (in which our only true knowledge was of the pure mathematical
forms themselves, not of the poor copies that make up physical nature) into
Renaissance Neoplatonism, the belief that mathematical forms had been
perfectly embodied in the creation by the omnipotent creator, thus making
possible a mathematical science of nature and not simply of the forms. I
should like to think that Howard's own career in science owes a good bit to
that very idea, and I would be interested in how he might respond to this
thought.
I thank Howard and George for delving deeply into this, for I have long
harbored thoughts about the inadequacies of modern ideas about the doctrine
of creation (as I see it) and have rarely tried to articulate them. One
might say that Howard has moved me out of my dogmatic slumber...
Ted Davis
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