How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

         Part VII: Process Theology

 

 

It was in Chicago at the Lutheran School of Theology that I was exposed to the work of Jurgen Moltmann, which led me into both the Theology of Hope and The Crucified God (my last two blog posts). However, when I transferred to Luther Seminary in St. Paul, I discovered that in the Systematic Theology Department there the new theology that was creating a good deal of excitement--and controversial discussion--was Process Theology, a unique creation of American philosophers and theologians, based on the process philosophy of England’s Alfred North Whitehead.

At that point in my theological journey, I was still working hard on the Theology of Hope, including writing a 200-page paper on it at Luther Seminary, and I did not have time to dig into Process Theology. However, I was captivated by what students were saying about it, and put it on the back burner.

 

After I graduated from Luther and took my first call at Faith Lutheran in West Fargo, ND--especially as Pauline’s health continued to deteriorate--my mind and heart were again thrust into reflection on the relationship of God to human suffering. 

 

As I explained earlier, I was raised to believe that everything that happens, good or bad, is God’s will. This theology grows out of the philosophic desire to prove God by assuming that, if there is a God, this God must be the greatest and biggest and best of all things. So, God is omniscient, knowing all things ahead of time. God is omnipresent, able to be at all places at all times. God is omnipotent, having power over all things. Throw all this together, and you come up with a portrait of a God who knows everything that is going to happen, is in charge of everything that happens, and can be everywhere at the same time to make sure those things happen. To label this view, it is the God of Supernatural Theism that we have been discussing.

 

This is far more a Greek view of God than a Hebrew one, and really does not coincide well with what we discover in scripture. And, as I had already experienced, this view of God can lead to anger at God for deciding when and where and how we suffer.

As I became more comfortable in parish ministry and felt closer to God again, I decided to tackle this theological issue head on. One of the reasons for this was that, if Pauline were to die, I did not want to experience the same kind of separation from God I felt after my parents died.

 

I decided to head back to Luther Seminary for a continuing education seminar on this very subject, with the speaker being one of the brightest and most profound professors at Luther, Dr. Paul Sponheim. Just as my traveling companion, Marcus  Borg, had turned to Sponheim for more profound ideas of how God is connected to the world when he was in college at Concordia, so did I now. [See Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this blog series]

 

Dr. Sponheim classified evil in three main categories. The first is natural evil, such as earthquakes and floods. The second is moral evil, caused by human sin, such as holocausts and genocides. The third, which is the most obtuse, is metaphysical evil, which is part of the structure of reality as created by God. We may not think of it as evil, but mortality, for instance, means we will die, and being finite means we are limited in our power to do good, both of which may come to us as forms of suffering.

 

Now, of course, if God is indeed the creator of our present reality, then, in a sense, you can blame God for everything: Why a creation with natural evil? Why the limits on human freedom through mortality and being finite? Why create humans with a free will that allows them to do unspeakable forms of cruelty?

 

However, what if God is not omnipotent and omniscient. Process Theology asserts that God’s love is greater than God’s power, and love, as St. Paul puts it, does not insist on its own way. God, rather than controlling human behavior, gives us free will and then tries to guide us, to “woo us,” to do the good and the right. However, we have the freedom to refuse to listen and to be disobedient.

 

C. Robert Mesle explains this view:

 

In process theology, God is constantly, in every moment and in every place, doing everything within God's power to bring about the good. Divine power, however, is persuasive rather than coercive. God cannot (really cannot) force people or the world to obey God's will. Instead, God works by sharing with us a vision of the better way, of the good and the beautiful. God's power lies in patience and love, not in force. 

      [Process Theology: A Basic Introduction]

 

Most of the great evil in the world is moral evil, caused by human beings. God does not cause mass shootings in schools. Humans choose to do that. God does not bomb people. Humans do that.

 

God also does not decide when someone will die. Sometimes that can be found in moral sin, as, in the case of my father, who chose to smoke most of his life. Sometimes it is just the mystery of the universe, as when a child is born with a terminal illness or gets cancer at an early age.

 

In Process Theology the future is not pre-determined. Humans have a part in what happens, and the good happens when we follow God, and the bad happens when we rebel against God, which has been the case since Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.

 

Bruce G. Epperly puts it this way: “God does not determine everything but presents a vision of beauty and the energy to achieve it for every moment of experience.” [Process Theology: Embracing Adventure with God]

 

He then goes on to describe what this process of God and humans working together looks like:

 

God is source of energy and possibility in each moment of experience and over the course of a lifetime. God supplies the initial aim, or vision, that orients and energizes each moment of experience as it arises. While God is one of many factors that shapes our lives, moment by moment and day by day, God's vision constantly presents us with the most life-supporting and ethically-grounded possibilities, given our particular communal and cultural context. Accordingly, spirituality involves orienting our lives creatively towards God's vision for ourselves and our communities. [Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed]

 

From a pastoral and spiritual point of view, this theology makes it possible to view God, not as the cause of our suffering, but as someone, demonstrated most clearly in Christ, who is with us in our suffering, crying with us.

 

Some people just seem to know this intuitively, as was the case with Pauline. She never blamed God for her illness, and she seemed always to feel that God was with her in her suffering.

 

I, on the other hand, had to take the academic route. I had to find a theology that gave me hope, and brought me closer to God rather than driving me from God. 

 

It is one thing to come to this conclusion in the classroom or by reading a book. It is another thing to see if a theology “works” in the midst of reality. It if does work, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily true, but (and this will surprise a lot of people), the church has always asserted that if something “works,” that must be considered—along other factors—as evidence of a possible truth. 

 

Theologically and spirituality, I was now in a very different place than I had been when my parents died. Process Theology gave me a new way of seeing how God is at work in the world: God doesn’t control everything that happens and is not the source of all our suffering. The Crucified God gave me a new vision of the presence of the suffering God who chooses to be with us in our pain and suffering. The Theology of Hope helped me to trust that God would always help me find a way through the loss and grief I might experience.

 

Part III of my book, When the Northern Lights Went Dark: My Journey through Loss and Grief to Healing and Hope [Amazon] describes in detail the painful journey that followed Pauline’s death. And I can now report that my new understanding of God’s relationship to the world really did change my experience of God and grief. This time, thank God, I felt God’s presence and unrelenting love every step of the way. Rather than finding myself driven away from God, my spirituality grew deeper and deeper as I allowed God to be with me step by step, day by day, guiding me into the future, trusting that my life was not over but would find new beginnings.

I experienced what Dr. Sponheim describes in his book, Faith and Process: “The wholly-other is wholly for us! God grants freedom and seeks service. What we do matters to God directly and personally. Without denying our sin, we can affirm that we are God’s creatures. We are called to serve God and to enjoy God forever!”  [266]

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

Part VI: The Crucified God

In April 8, 1966, just in time for Easter, Time Magazine published its first non-pictorial cover, with only words in the form of a question: “Is God Dead?” What a stir that created in the church! As is typical with new theological ideas, people reacted before they even tried to understand. I was only 16 years old, but I remember at that time hearing in a sermon this: “God is not dead. He just seems to be silent to those who refuse to listen.” Well, there is truth in that statement, but that was not what this was all about.

 

There were many different theologians with many different ideas in this movement, but I believe it is fair to say that at heart this was theologians saying that the God of Supernatural Theism [see Post III] is dead in the sense that in the modern and postmodern world it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that there is a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-controlling of whatever happens in the world. I remember hearing someone say about that time that either that view is not true, or, if it is true, then God must be incompetent. In a world that now knew Auschwitz and Dachau, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how do you square those events with the view that an all-powerful, loving, caring God is in charge in any meaningful sense?.

 

This now takes us deeper into the theology of the cross discussed in the last post. If the cross is the most important event in the Christian journey, what happened in and through the crucifixion of Jesus? Where was God? Was God there? If God was there, what did God do or not do? Most importantly, is there any sense in which what happened is that God died on that cross? Was God crucified? To consider these ideas, we turn to Jurgen Moltmann’s seminal work on this topic, The Crucified God.

 

Moltmann clarifies the task before us in light of the atrocities of the modern world:

 

Behind the political and social crisis of the church, behind the growing crisis over the credibility of its public declarations and its institutional form, there lurks the christological question: Who really is Christ for us today? And rooted in the christological question about Jesus is ultimately the question of God. Which God motivates Christian faith: the crucified God or the gods of religion, race and class. [Crucified, 201]

 

He then takes on Supernatural Theism, much in the same way that Process Theology does (which will be discussed in the next post).

 

For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either.

 

Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being. What sort of being, then, would be a God who was only ‘almighty?’ He would be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore a richer being than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. [Crucified, 222, 223]

 

Moltmann then describes the relationship of God the Father to Jesus as the Christ on the Cross:

 

In spite of all the ‘roses’ which the needs of religion and theological interpretation have draped around the cross, the cross is the really irreligious thing in Christian faith. It is the suffering of God in Christ, rejected and killed in the absence of God, which qualifies Christian faith as faith, and as something different from the projection of human desire. . . Even the disciples of Jesus all fled from their master’s cross. Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way. [Crucified God, 37-38]

 

God was not silent and uninvolved in the cross of Jesus. Nor was he absent in the godforsakenness of Jesus. . . . In the passion of the Son, the Father himself suffers the pains of abandonment. In the death of the Son, death comes upon God, and the Father suffers the death of his Son, in his love for forsaken humans. [Crucified God, 192]

 

What is so powerful about this understanding of the death of Jesus, and its effect on God, whom he called Father, is that it goes against the traditional views of redemption (the saving work of Christ), which view his death as a substitute for our death, or as a ransom for our sin, or any approach that pictures God as a distant power that somehow needs to be appeased in order that we humans can be forgiven and “saved.” Rather, God, whose love is greater than God’s power, is fully involved in the crucifixion, experiencing the pain and loss of God’s son, and the death of God’s hopes and dreams for us and our world. The tomb is not only the death of God’s Son, but also the death of God’s plans for our world. In that, we as humans are truly lost and abandoned, having decided to kill the very one who came to show us the way, the truth and the life.

 

And yet, in nearly every culture and religion, there is something redemptive about one person giving his/her life for another. In a later post we will discuss the resurrection of the Christ, which is the rebirth of God’s vision for the world, and the hope that sustains us as we move into every future.

 

For the moment, we stay with the crucifixion, and what it means for us today. First, we realize what I had been longing to experience, that suffering is not God’s judgment upon us, but the place where we realize at the deepest level God’s tears and presence with us in our suffering. Moltmann puts it this way:

 

Anyone who suffers without cause first thinks that he has been forsaken by God. God seems to him to be the mysterious, incomprehensible God who destroys the good fortune that he gave.  But anyone who cries out to God in this suffering echoes the death-cry of the dying Christ, the Son of God. In that case God is not just a hidden someone set over against him, to whom he cries, but in a profound sense the human God, who cries with him and intercedes for him with his cross. [Crucified God, 252]

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer also affirms this understanding:

 

Mark 8:35 reads not that the disciple should take up “his,” that is Christ’s cross, but “your” cross. Jesus suffered and died alone. But those who follow him suffer and die in fellowship with him. . . Within the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, suffering is overcome by suffering, and becomes the way to communion with God. And, therefore, to follow Jesus is joyful. [Crucified God, 55-56; quote from Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 81]

 

Indeed, in her dying journal entries Pauline wrote about feeling the presence of God through God’s tears and, as she put it, that “was enough.” This did not take away my, at times, debilitating fear of Pauline dying, but a seed was being planted that, if she did, I would not feel alone, distant from God, as had been the case after my parents’ deaths.

 

Secondly, building theology and church around the focal point of “the crucified God” gives us a path forward in our broken world built upon mercy, love, reconciliation and hope. Moltmann puts it this way:

 

God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God—that is the basis for a real hope which both embraces and overcomes the world, and the ground for a love which is stronger than death and can sustain death. It is the ground for living with the terror of history and the end of history, and nevertheless, remaining in love and meeting what comes in the openness for God’s future. [Crucified God, 278]

 

“Is God dead?” Yes, the omnipotent and omniscient God of Supernatural Theism is dead. But the always loving, crucified God is alive, showing us the path forward to abundant and eternal life.

 

The death of the Son is not the ‘death of God,’ but the beginning of that God event in which the life-giving spirit of love emerges from the death of the Son and the grief of the Father. [Crucified God, 252]