Ted , and fellow ASA members -
Let me be first in line (or 2nd, or 3rd, whatever) to thank you for that
exposition of Process Theology. I had learned from Burgy that it
pictured an evolving God, but you have helped so much, as a knowledgeable
theologian to fill in details, and the resultant effects on our view of God as
Creator, and of the Nature that He created. You have done us all a very
important service, and done it in a cool, collegial way.
Larry Johnston
-------------------------------------------------
Ho, every one who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Isaiah 55:1 Revised Standard Translation
================================================
Lawrence H. Johnston home: 917 E. 8th st.
professor of physics, emeritus Moscow, Id 83843
University of Idaho (208) 882-2765
Fellow of the American Physical Society
http://www.uidaho.edu/~johnston/ =====================
> 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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