Process Theology
from 1940
A God who persuades rather than compels, who is affected by what happens, and who therefore cannot be blamed for failing to prevent it.
- Active
- from 1940
- Where
- Chicago and Claremont
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Christian
The claim
God is dipolar: eternal in character and temporal in experience. Divine power is persuasive rather than coercive, and creatures have genuine self-determination that God cannot override.
What it held
The problem of evil has one standard shape: a God who is all-powerful and all-good would prevent suffering, and does not. Process theology answers by denying the first term — not because God is weak, but because coercive power over free beings is held to be incoherent rather than merely unexercised.
Hartshorne's dipolar God follows Whitehead's metaphysics. In character God is unchanging; in experience God is affected by everything that happens, and takes it in. That is a direct rejection of divine impassibility, the classical doctrine that God cannot be affected by creatures, and it is the school's most significant departure from the tradition.
The consequences are attractive and costly. God suffers with the world, which many find religiously compelling. God cannot guarantee any outcome, which removes the traditional grounds of hope.
Hartshorne also revived the ontological argument, and his modal version — that a necessary being either exists necessarily or is impossible — is taken seriously by philosophers who reject everything else in the system.
How it argued
Constructive theology built on Whitehead's categories, with the problem of evil as the organising test.
What it was arguing against
Classical theism's omnipotence and impassibility, and the assumption that a God who does not determine everything is diminished.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether a God who cannot guarantee anything is worth worshipping. Whether dipolar theism is the God of scripture or a philosophical construction.
Common misconceptions
That it makes God finite in a diminishing sense. Hartshorne argues that being affected by everything is a greater perfection than being affected by nothing, which inverts the classical intuition rather than weakening it.
How it began
Whitehead's metaphysics arriving at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where theologians recognised what it offered on evil and freedom.
What became of it
Living, mainly in North American liberal theology, and with a substantial presence in interreligious dialogue.
Lasting influence
Liberal Protestant theology. Ecological theology, since a God internal to process fits an ecological picture better than a designer outside it. Open theism, which reaches similar conclusions on different grounds.
Why it still matters
Its account of divine power is the most developed alternative to omnipotence, and the problem it addresses is the one that empties churches.
Put another way
A conductor who can persuade an orchestra and cannot play the instruments.
Where to start
Cobb and Griffin. It was written to be the way in and it is.
The surprising bit
Hartshorne was also a serious ornithologist who published a study of birdsong across the world, arguing that birds sing partly for the pleasure of it.
In their own words
God is the fellow sufferer who understands.
Omnipotence as usually conceived is a mistake, indeed an error of the most disastrous kind.
Connections
- Answers
- Process Philosophy
The verdict
The most rigorous attempt to make a good God compatible with the world as it actually is.