Re: [asa] on TE and deism

>>> "David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@gmail.com> 1/23/2008 1:49 PM >>> asks me:

Query: does this world necessarily get "replaced by a new world," or does
the existing world get repaired / completed -- as in some Reformed
eschatologies or as in someone like Ted Peters' notion of "proleptic
co-creation"? Does Peters lean towards panentheism? Are panentheism and
process thought linked?

****

Here is my reply:

I agree here with John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, p.
22: "The 'matter' of the world to come, which will be the carrier of this
reembodiment [of our own bodies], will be the transformed matter of the
present universe, itself redeemed by God beyond *its* cosmic death. That
resurrected universe is not a second attempt by the Creator to produce a
world *ex nihilo* [out of nothing] but it is the transmutation of the
present world in an act of new creation *ex vetere*. [out of the old]"

As for Ted Peter's present beliefs, I haven't caught up with them as yet,
though I'll be visiting CTNS in a few weeks and I hope to do some catching
up. Ted wrote a terrific essay many years ago, "On Creating the Cosmos,"
(I've often praised it and quoted it on this list) in which he links very
closely--and correctly, IMO--creation ex nihilo with the bodily resurrection
of Jesus. Panentheists generally don't accept either part of that link. I
would not see Ted as a panentheist, at least based on this essay.

Is there then a link between process theism and panentheism--which are not
quite the same thing? Yes, there definitely is. As panentheist David
Nikkel writes (see my earlier posts for a citation), "The fullest explicit
development of panentheism in the 20th century came from process thought."
etc.

Ted

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Received on Thu Jan 24 12:14:55 2008