Philosophy and theology have anciently exhibited a difficulty in harmonizing the temporal and eternal, the ideal and real, the phenomenal and noumenal. The rationalists and empiricists of early modern thought intensified the bifurcation of reality with Kant providing a compromise, an experience based epistemology with an ideal based morality. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, et al. seized upon his idea of ego in transcendence, abstracted it, and elevated it to the prime principle of reality. The pragmatists deflated it to the level of the merely utilitarian. Man became again the measure of all things, soon however, man himself was lost to the mere act of measuring with science and logical analysis, technology and mathematical order excoriating both practicality and artistry. But there was concomitant with nineteenth century transcendental idealism and pragmatism other visionary forces: existentialism and evolution, both of which would prove the invigoration of the artistry of philosophy.
At the turn of the century we hear Herbert Spencer chime of the mystery of reality, its unknowable base which may, none the less, be considered the cause of the phenomenal world. Bernard Bosanquet looks to reason as the reflection of reality, resuscitating an Absolute as the totality of all experience, the only true individual. Whereas Fichte had made the Absolute fundamentally moral, Hegel fundamentally rational, Bosanquet makes the Absolute fundamentally an artist, incorporating dark and light, suffering and joy, good and evil into a drama of cosmic proportion, leaving all the world a stage, every man an actor seeking to acquit himself as notably and nobly as possible in his role. Rudolf Lotze also looks to an Absolute as organic whole of which each man is but part. Josiah Royce finds every experience yearning for and grasping after a wider field of experience, revealing in this thirst for more, an absolute mind within which every experience and idea has its satisfaction. William James addresses the subliminal presence of the idea of God and its practical nature as a power sharing in man’s experiences, both positive and negative. Henri Bergson underscores the continuity of subject and object, flux and stability, matter and motion. Reason can dissect these each, but thereby it hollows them out, removes the spirit, vitality, spontaneity, freedom and joy that endures at the base of reality. Benedetto Croce envisions reality as spirit developing in a conflict of opposites, but his is not a Hegelian dialectical world process so much as an evolution of an organic whole with every part open one to another, moving through time and history, seeking out a unity in plurality. All these movements of thought attempt to enunciate a new understanding of that ancient tension twixt the visions of Parmenides and Heraclitus, being and becoming, the substantiality of the world we experience and the fleeting nature of experience. They are in the umbrage of new ideas about progress, utility, and evolution. They stand under the exorcism performed by Hume and his fellow empiricists, that great exile of the idea of “substance” from the life of philosophy, an execration that to the minds of many meant an end to any viable metaphysics despite our connatural habit to think in terms of things as concrete entities. This progress of ideas forms a cyclorama of incremental clarifications at the forecourt of which stands Alfred North Whitehead.
Whitehead had collaborated with Russell to produce the Principia Mathematica, a proposed perfect language for philosophy. However, Whitehead was himself not oriented toward a logical atomism, a world-vision shrived of all but technological precision. The world itself is not thus. Philosophy ought to be open to and cognizant of the workings of the sciences, but it is not itself a science bounded in a special field of investigation. There exists no science which can address the perfection of human life, engender wisdom, and nurture a sapience for goodness, truth, beauty, adventure, art, and peace. Philosophy’s role is not merely to give an ordered and unified vision to the sundry fields of facts but to weave into their consideration the harmonics of values and ideals that carry man creatively forward, and to therein determine the metaphysical character of the forward process.
While Hume and company had dismissed the idea of substance, Newton had entrenched another type of substantiality. He brought forth the machine that is the cosmos, a world of material bodies extended in space and moving through time. That world ended when the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics plunged below the surface understanding of cosmos and shattered the veneer of concreteness. There exists no absolute space, no unique instant of time. The location of a body in time and space is now understood to be relative to the point of observation. Time marks the passing of one event relative to another, it exists not in a line but “droplets”. Motion is known to be not a continuous line, but a matter of discontinuous and detached presences. Mass and extension may be primary to the understanding of things, but all those qualities that make things appealing or repulsive to us (colour, sound, smell, texture, taste, etc.) are dependent upon the mind, upon our particular mode of experiencing and interpreting. Between this cosmos as it is and as we perceive it stands the mind. Philosophy has for centuries confounded itself by dividing this cosmos into reality and appearance, noumenon and phenomenon, the in-itself and the as we know it, segregating mind and matter, or making mind subservient to matter or matter to mind, turning abstractions of reality into concrete entities. Reality is a whole, a living organism, and the function of philosophy is to present this organism in its fullness.
Matter is pure energy. Energy is action. A thing is that which it is doing. A thing is a happening, an occurrence, an “event”, a momentary “actual occasion” spread out over time and space and other events, forming a web of events, a living organic unity wherein every event is related, weaving, and being woven into every other, conditioning every other, seeking out available possibilities, moving toward a completeness. The world is a process. There is in this process an “experiential” aspect. Everything pulses toward its fulfillment, its transcendence, and that pulsing, that grasping, that aiming toward something “more than the now”, that “lure”, that forward thrust of being to become and continue to become evolves eventually into those forms with which we navigate: the varied levels of sensation, consciousness, thought.
No event or occasion is permanent. Everything is continuously moving. As Heraclitus had claimed, the world is a continuous flux, and change the observed relation of an event present to an event past. We apprehend the passage of events, and each is unique. We also recognize certain features in events replicate or repeat themselves, and these we call “objects”, be they sensible qualities or the substantive things of everyday experience. The world is thus a world of events and objects, the first exposing the fluidity and novelty of nature, the second its permanence and uniformity.
All objects have their existence within events. Events come into being by “concrescence”, the gathering together of a number of suitable objects into a unity. This act of grasping that which is suitable to itself reveals a sense of purpose, an aim, a striving for realization. Whitehead goes so far as to opine the event is a process of “feeling” data toward reaching “satisfaction”, at once the “sub-ject” of experiencing and the “super-ject” of its experience, a self-formation and a self-transcendence. Human consciousness, as with James, is itself such an action, a self-creation. Kant had it that the subject creates the objective world; Whitehead contends the subject arises out of the world by discriminately apprehending the world, world and self in a mutually in-forming process of becoming.
The soul, the psyche, the “I”, is a concrescence of experience in time. We may tend to think of the psyche in terms of a concretized moment, in terms of a constant base, but it is a process of becoming as is every event, every object. The dualist division of man into a body and a soul is fallacious, at best, a logical dissection. Man is a becoming, every part weaving into the other, a psychosomatic organism interconnecting with other psychosomatic organisms, constituting quite literally a living society, for a person exists only as person-in-community. We have here that which de Chardin designated the hominization of the biosphere toward the noosphere, the mind sphere (Cf: Part 10).
While every entity is an organic process of becoming, a power of prehending (grasping), apprehending (consciously, cognitively grasping), selecting, concrescing (weaving together), innovating, and conjoining into greater unities to make a Universe, the creativity at the root of this cannot be explained. Being inexplicable has, however, never been a deterrent to philosophers, theologians, mystics, or for their parts, poets and artists of all manner. Indeed, their work is precisely to give expression to that which is beyond definition. Thus, Whitehead goes on to speak of the divine, or more precisely, the role of God in the creative process.
God cannot be concretized or abstracted into an Unmoved Mover (Aristotle), an Absolute (Spinoza, Hegel), the One (Plotinus), or the Creator (Judeo-Christian theology). God is not the ultimate principle. God is not omnipotent. God is the guide of the unfolding process. The world depends on God for its order and meaning, and God depends on the world for the divine “enjoyment” and “satisfaction”–for fulfillment.
God is he who envisions the field of possible forms for actualization, who inspires goals. God is the categorical condition underpinning the unfolding of the creative process. As every becoming occasion in some way incorporates and so objectifies every past occasion, there must be an entity that brings possibilities into effective relationship with the becoming actual occasions of the world. God functions at the outset of every new occasion to give it aim toward a self-actualization compatible with the greater order. This efficacy requires God be actual like all actual occasions, but as relatable to all actual occasions he cannot be momentary as are they, but must be the one actual who is eternal. God is the eternal harmonization of creative freedom and the plenum of form-al possibilities, the a-temporal actual occasion necessary for temporal actualization, the font of the world’s aims and forms. God is he who beholds, “feels”, all possible “essences” that can “ingress” (enter into actualization) into the world. Thereby every occasion carries into the world an impress of God, and either enlarged or diminished by that impress, God passes into the next interchange with the world. God and world are bound to each other in the creative process.
Akin to Plato’s eternal ideas and like unto language that exists before the individual to actualize the individual as a social being, the formal possibilities which God envisions, do not arise as abstractions from the thinking process; they are external to objective thought. They are the eternal possibilities that await release into creative freedom. They are power precisely as they are envisioned by God. (In a sense, the world has a voice because God holds the vocabulary and the grammar, or in more traditional terms, because in God are the Logos [Word] and the Spirit [directionality]).
God may be considered the efficient and final causes. God can therein be said to have two natures. In his “primordial nature” God is eternally open-ended. God is free, open to relating, to unfolding. He envisions all possibilities, all probabilities, the limits of possibilities according to their relevance for vitality. The vital most probability, the “ideal aim” remains a probability, and so accommodates for variance, making every event a unique interplay twixt aim and freedom. In and by the ingression of the eternal possibilities into the world, God enters the creative process, becomes immanent in the world, effects it, and is in turn affected by it. This is the “consequent nature” of God. It is determined, conscious, everlasting, fully actual, yet ever incomplete. It infolds every experience into the divine unity. As the eternal enters into the temporal, the eternal “saves” the temporal. It abstracts evil in the world while retaining everything of positive value. Neither God nor the world, however, reach static completion, both are in the grip of the creative advance into novelty, each weaving the other into the unfolding process.
In Whitehead’s vision we reach a new synthesis of occidental thought, if you will, a prehending of that gone before toward the novelty of the present in search of satisfaction. We hear echoes of Erigena’s four-fold unfolding of the divine into nature, albeit shrived of any static conclusion. We hear echoes of Plato’s world of the ideas and the role of the demiurge. There is a sense of Aquinas with the appeal to the analogy of person in reference to the divine, and in the feel for the unity of being. There is, despite its differing dynamic, allusion to the unfolding of an absolute. There is recognition of pragmatism’s God in the idea of God “feeling” the world and the world “feeling” God, that conscious subliminality of God, the guiding presence of God within the world process. Whitehead presents us the present actual moment of occidental thought, a concrescing of things past oriented both to the primordial eternal and the unfolding everlasting.
A note on theology in light of process philosophy: Hartshorne, Cobb, Ogden, and Panikkar
Whitehead’s vision, as marked above, has affinity to Hegel’s dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Idea, but for Whitehead the cosmos, the real, is a vital, organic interplay comprising of both God and world, the ultimate ground of which is a “creative advance into novelty”. His absolute is not God but creativity. His enunciation of an organic process wherein God and the world are locked into each other’s delight, echoic of Judeo-Christian scriptures, has effected the presentations of sundry theologians from Karl Rahner to Jürgen Moltmann.
While embracing the ideas of Whitehead regarding the process of reality, Charles Hartshorne makes some notable refinements regarding God. God remains the “di-polar” actual occasion with a primordial “abstract” nature which is eternal and unchanging, and a consequent “concrete” nature that changes within the creative dynamic that encompasses reality. His reflections augment this with two ideas we find amongst the mediaevals: the transcendence of God coupled with the world’s being contained within God, and the “ontological argument” wherein God is understood as the perfection of being, the one who must be because “no greater can be conceived” (Cf: Anselm, in Part 11).
Hartshorne contends, however, that the ancient understanding of perfection is deficient. The idea of perfection as an unchangeable pinnacle disallows God the ability to surpass himself, to relate and in the relating to change. From the ancient Greeks forward there has existed an evaluative prejudice that change implies imperfection, and a concomitant philosophical misconception that there must exist the unalterable maximum of every quality: goodness, truth, beauty, etc. But if there exists the maximum, the “no greater can be conceived”, the unsurpassable, we must ask in relation to what or whom is it maximum, by what or whom is it unsurpassable? May not one surpass oneself? Ought it to not be said that God is the ever self-surpassing? Indeed, if God be understood as love, love requires a capacity to interconnect (prehend, apprehend), to empathize, to sympathize, to feel, to under-stand another, and to embrace, to engage, to walk with another. The mediaevals spoke of God as really related to creation, but creation merely logically related to God. Such a disjointed relationship follows from God understood within the confinement of a rationalist logic, a being capable of making reasonable room for the care of his work within his work, but in himself unaffected by its comings and goings. It must substitute the idea of divine providence for love. It is a vision contrary to scripture in general and Christian gospel in particular. Providence cannot rise to the demands of love: to be there with another—be it in suffering, tragedy, triumph, or joy.
The way of negative theology (God is not finite, therefore, God is infinite; God is not contingent, therefore God is necessary, etc.) is also deficient. Such thinking presumes a simplistic contrast between logical extremes. There are valuable attributes at both ends of such contrasting positions, and God ought to be, in differing respects, considered to be both finite and infinite, contingent and necessary, changeable and immutable, passible and impassible, eternal and temporal with the caveat that these fundamentally metaphysical terms applied to God can never be taken as unassailably equivocal. All talk of God remains analogical, symbolic, metaphoric.
This does not mean theology and talk of God are deadlocked in paradox or contradiction. Talk of God is always within a context, and such contextualization may be reduced to three logical vantage points: existence, essence, actuality. When we speak of the existence of a thing we are concerned with the factuality that it is. When we speak of the essence of a thing we are concerned to denote what it is. When we speak of the actuality of a thing we are discussing a particular state in which it is. Existence and essence are abstract, and actuality is latent with information regarding existence and essence. When we turn this tri-focal on talk of God we are equipped to make distinctions within God. We may say it is necessary that God be omniscient, but the actuality of God’s knowing is contingent upon the field of actual occasions. God knows all that is, all that was, but only the potentials for the yet to be determined, the un-actualized future. (The mediaeval mind would have had God in full and necessary knowledge of himself, and within that plenum knowing all creation in its every moment and part. The mediaeval world vision is not a process but a fait accompli within the eternal mind; it contrasts the unfolding world of man in time and the timelessness of God’s mental grasp. Hartshorne, following Whitehead, ejects the time and eternity dichotomy and replaces it with a God and world in organic interconnectivity.)
Hartshorne’s tripartite division of logical types allows him to speak of the dual transcendence of God. God transcends the world in being the supreme instance of both immutability and mutability, necessity and contingency, etc. God is immutable in respect to his existence and essence, in respect to that he is and what he is, but God is mutable relative to his actuality, to his embodiment of the actual occasions in time, in his “love of the world”. God is necessary as regards his existence and essence, but contingent in his actuality, in his being-with-the world. God is perfect in his existence and essence, but only temporally perfect as regards his actuality, perfect in and for the moment. God is infinite in his capacity to relate, but finite in respect of the finite number of actual occasions, for only what comes to be, comes to be for God and becomes for him his everlasting experience, becomes a part of his everlasting memory, and so becomes in him objectively immortal. All things, all sins and virtues, joys and sorrows are held within the everlasting experience and memory. This exposes the metaphoric nature of the commonly held visions of immortality, those post-card pictures of heaven and hell with some blissfully traipsing amongst putti-laden clouds and others encauldroned in darkled fires and ceaseless pain. The tendency to apply a sense of “substance” to “I”, soul, or psyche is transcended by an understanding of the self as a series of events or actual occasions, a flow and concrescence of experience, constantly taken up into the divine actuality. That which we do is everlastingly so. (Cf: on Heaven, January 2013, [immortality being at heart a falling into or out of the eternality of the Holy One])
Hartshorne rejects the idea of a creation ex nihilo, and any notion of divine omnipotence. Creativity arises in the relationship of one item to another, not “out of nothingness”. (However, there are here three aspects of this statement I find questionable. First, this is a faith statement no more provable or disprovable than creation ex nihilo. Second, it is a tad out of orbit with process philosophy’s focus on “novelty”. Third, while process philosophy begins with the admission that the findings of science must be integrated, it seems here uninformed about the vistas Dirac’s work, at least theoretically, open.) As in Whitehead’s vision, at a most fundamental level God and the world may be said to “feel” each other. God and world are agents one of another. God guides, inspires (“persuades”) the world, but God also folds the world within himself, preserving it, giving every actual occasion its everlasting value. God beholds the ideal, and acts as the persuasive force urging forward everything to ascend to its perfection, or in “process” terminology, to achieve an “intensity of experience” appropriate to its complexity to reach its “satisfaction”. This is the nature of divine power. This is love moving the world forward. Hartshorne adds God not only guides the process, not only is part of the process, but encompasses the process. He refers to his understanding as pan-en-theism [from the Greek for: all-in-God]. The universe is the body of God, and God is the mind, the soul, of the world.
While Hartshorne’s focus is upon the nature of the divine, John Cobb, Jr., also subscribing to the process system of Whitehead, is concerned to spell out the specific place of Christianity. Patently aware of the precarious position of religion in this pluralistic world, he opines that the term religion itself is problematic, and that Christianity might be better served were we to return to that ancient practice of speaking of itself as “the way”.
An Excursus: Patently, sadly, unabashedly astounded by the number of people who ask me a question about religion in general or some point of Christianity, and when I begin an answer scream at me [literally!] that they do not want to hear anything about God or religion, I deeply doubt rebranding “religion” to “way” will effect a difference. At the risk of being cheeky, something more organic and process oriented is required. I cannot speak for all religions, but Christianity has certainly an issue of image compounded by ritualism, clericalism, hypocrisy, mass spiritual immaturity, fundamentalism, denominational insularity and interdenominational acrimony. In more than one pulpit there is inscribed a verse from John 12: “Sir, we would see Jesus”. This ought to serve as an aide-memoire not merely for preachers but for all who would speak under the name Christ-ian. Unfortunately, too many misinterpret that verse as a call to present the world not the unfolding presence of creative love but the wrath of that singular occasion Jesus took up a whip (Matthew 21, John 2). We need to stop shouting at the world and simply accept it lovingly and creatively. More flies are caught with honey than vinegar, and more “sinners” are “saved” by forgiveness and embrace than castigation and condemnation. The requisite is something organic and circuitous, an openness to walking, growing, concrescing together; it is “the way” of both Jesus’ preaching and actions. There would be no rebranding required were we a people of love rather than self-righteousness, for a righteousness claimed is never divine or about the God in whose gifting alone it resides; it is unfailingly about a deep-seated anger at self rooted in spiritual denial, the callithump of a psychic golem, all mindless noise and loveless inhumanity (Cf: Part 8, endnote iii).
Given the above detour to express my exasperation, I remain in accord with Cobb that Christianity must be fundamentally a way of understanding, acting, being-with—as long as the provision of lovingly so is added. Cobb, however, prefers to work under the concept of wisdom. He speaks of Christianity as the way of wisdom, a wisdom present in all times and all places, a wisdom accessible to all, a wisdom incarnate in Jesus (Cf: Rahner in Part 21). Jesus is the Christ in that he derives from God’s primordial nature as the transformative power within the world. Jesus is the Christ in that he represents the Logos, the mind of God, revealing the aim given the world—its self-transcendence. Wheresoever there is transcendence, transformation toward the good of the world and the wellbeing of men, God is there in his Christ.
The preaching of Jesus was about being open to God’s gifting, to new possibilities. It did not demand the past be denied; it called for the past to be opened to transformation. The activity of Jesus was about openness to one’s neighbour, to a constancy of critique regarding morals and mores, beliefs and practices. In this sense, Jesus can be spoken of as standing at the centre of history, the locus wherein history’s root becomes exposed as a vocation to openness, to freedom for the world and other—in and under, as the Apostle Paul would say, “grace”. The world is, thus, Christocentric, moving radically forward in freedom “of spirit”, in hope, pursuing that community whose ideal is the Kingdom, that moment which radiates peace and harmonizes differences, that moment wherein the love of God is become the “enjoyment” of all events. The doctrine of the trinity captures this: the primordial transcending divine nature that inspires the world, the immanent divine that materializes, actualizes the aim of the world, and the spirit as the divine in its consequent nature.
Christianity is that holy wisdom of which the ancient fathers spoke. It is a way compatible with human reason, and as such its theology, its doctrines and dogmas can never be closed minded, exclusivist, or barricaded behind a pseudo-self-satisfaction. Christianity must confess it cannot contain all knowledge. It must undertake to carry the world’s responsibility to grow in wisdom, understanding, grace, and graciousness. It must be cognizant that this entails dialogue, a concrescence toward transformation. In brief, Christianity must be open to the world, to, in particular, other religions, in order to discern the differences between that which is accidental to itself, that which is cultural accretion, and that which is authentic to its creative, transformative power. Only in this wise will dogma and ritual not become idols, and the witness of the faith be free to be effective.
To understand itself in the context of the world’s religions, Christianity must be open to the capacity of other religions to enshrine a truth it has not. The mission of Christianity to become the universal faith entails infolding into itself the truths others have realized, not the execration of all other religious expressions. No entity can live if it is delimited to its past, to its history and traditions, and so the dynamic that must play out is not to convert or to be converted, but to effect a mutual enhancement. This has root in Jesus himself, in his openness to others. Cobb does not shy from the radical consequence of this conception. The question of a religion-less Christianity becomes something more rudimentally put: if such openness should displace Jesus from the centrality of expressing the experience of salvation, then that is in itself an act of faithfulness to both Jesus and the God he reveals. “The way” potentially displaces both religion and Christianity.
God, in Cobb’s vision, is the God of process philosophy, the God who makes not a self-regulating machine, but who ceaselessly calls forth every moment to its fullest possibilities, its most intense “satisfaction”. God and the world are engaged in a mutual act of creation. The omnipotence of God resides not in unilateral control but in his empowerment of the world, his liberation of the world, his gifting into the world the power to self-determine. It emanates from him as the persuasiveness of his love and freedom, his grace, his Christ who is the divine transformative power present in the world. This is the God who takes a risk on the world he loves, a God who in his love of the world is ever open to self-surpassing himself for the sake of the world.
The meaning of life, the end of man, ought to reflect this dynamic of grace. The idea of salvation, like that of the individual, cannot be approached from the ideology of “substance”. The entire cosmos is interconnected. To be a person is to be a person-in-community. Salvation and morality are not ideas that can be “substantialized” into saved or not saved, right or wrong. Morality is not an end; it is a means, a journey of contributing to the well-being of the world. It is not an adherence to a list of rules or a book; it is an artistry of living, an openness to new possibilities, to creativity, lucidity, depth, love, and peace. Salvation is the continuous transformation of the world for the well-being of the world in its every manifestation—political, economic, social, religious. It encompasses every relationship to other and to the environment. Sin is the exact opposite of this, an exsecting of self from interconnectivity, a rejection of the lure of transformation and creativity.
Shubert Ogden stands between Whitehead’s process system and existentialism. Existence pulses with a certain confidence, a trust-laden thrusting into the environment in order to successfully incorporate it and be incorporated into it. In the human this becomes conscious, reflective, rational. All reasoning is exemplification of this primitive purpose-oriented dynamic, or in theology’s classical terminology, it is a faith seeking understanding. Because, as in Whitehead, God is the primordial font of ordering, the knowledge of God is latent in every actuality. Various religions bring that latency to enunciation in various ways. Christianity drawing, as all religions do, on this primal font cannot add to the latent content. It can simply add a novelty of possibility, a new actuality for authenticity. The centrality of Jesus Christ resides not his message per se but the factuality, the actual event of his message and its capacity for apprehension, for infolding into authentic living.
Ogden does not place all actual events on the same footing. Some are “special”. They denote a type of event that bespeaks the character of the actor, revealing or representing the inner being of one to another. Among these some are “decisive”, revealing not merely the character but the norm, the normative, the core value of another. Such decisive events are the occasions for embrace, for the infolding of another into oneself. Jesus Christ is the decisive event in that he re-presents the creative and redemptive action of God revealing the norm of God, his love.
Jesus Christ, as God’s decisive act, reveals not only God as love, but in that the possibilities for human existence—openness, orientation toward the future, freedom from bondage to the past, freedom as a divine creative gift, as a divine redemptive gift, as the “grace” toward novelty poured into the world and given “flesh” in the Christ event and its proclamation in the church. Only when one has encountered this freedom as a given, accepted it in trust as a gifting, can one look back to a place before such faith and name it sin. The primordial freedom of God toward the world and the freedom of man in the world are inseparable. They express the openness of God toward the world and man toward the future, a future in which God infolds all past and present.
Ogden, however, seems to teeter on the decisiveness of the Christ event. It appears something more than the protestant divide between grace and faith, gift and reception. It is rooted in the process vision of God as the fundamentally relational, acting by persuasion in all events, making all events potentially revelatory of God, evoking in all events authentic existence, an existence he equates with Christian existence. This latency is open to and discoverable by all in philosophical reflection (Cf: Rahner). As the Apostle Paul had contended, all men are morally responsible because all men have been by nature given access to the truth. The possibility of authenticity is inherent in human nature. Man is not under fate in any guise; he is made free and responsible. He can surrender himself to the world. He can negate himself in the masses. He can bind himself in guilt, destiny, death, inauthenticity. He can “embrace the grace of God”, in “faith” he can choose his transcendence, the power of God, the holy love that opens the future and releases the grasp of the past. Such activity constitutes a surrender of self, but it carries a positive orientation, a liberation from the world and into freedom for the world, futurity, and other. Such faith is not about creedal subscriptions. It is about an understanding of the highest human good, about “satisfaction”. It is as open to all as it is provable by none, and were this not so, conversion would be a meaningless concept.
Christianity, however, must abide in the faith that only the Christ event reveals the primordial love of God. While scripture and the apostolic witness provide the norms for the faith, the propositions of theology need to conform not simply to these but to reason and the criteria for truth as set out in philosophy and science. Furthermore, they need to be open to the truth possible in other religions, for wheresoever there is truth about God it will manifest the truth revealed in Christ: the God of universal love. Again, as with Cobb, we find Christianity open to something transformative, something some might claim is its demise, others its transcendence.
Ogden insists theology cannot base itself in the act of faith, but in the reasonableness of the faith propositions. This may be a valid reflection, however, I cannot but feel Ogden is forever getting lost in search of that synaptic arc twixt faith and reason, the act of God and the act of man. It may be resultant of his existentialist reliance on the human and its potentials combined with his adherence to process philosophy’s interminable dynamic of God-world in joint becoming. We may deconstruct a painting down to the minutest aspects of geometry and spectral analysis, but at some point we must accept there exists a difference of perspective and valuation between the technology and the artistry, amongst the gestalts of “existence, essence, and actuality”. Reason cannot grasp faith even in its most fundamental form as a base positivity toward existence simply because it is faith that keeps the horizons of reason open and ever in search of something more. Therefore, faith speaks of “creation”, the making of something where there was naught.
Not surprisingly, Raimon Panikkar, having been nurtured in a household encompassing both Catholicism and Hinduism, brings to his theological reflections a concern for dialogue amongst religions. God is the One who reveals himself only to the open heart and mind, to the one open in freedom and love. Religious pluralism is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift from God expressing the richness of human nature, the depth of the truth, and the profundity of God.
In accord with Hartshorne and Whitehead, God is spoken of under the guise of analogy to the human. God is revealed in human nature, and human nature is to be understood to have its existence within God, the guide of the world, the power behind the unfolding of the world, God immersed within the world, God revealed in the world at those limit horizons of experience that startle life and infuse it with inspiration and aspiration. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity was a mode of presenting this fullness of interconnectivity, the dynamic of God-man-cosmos–the primordial transcendent God, the immanent God-presence (the God-man made present in Jesus Christ), and the cosmos caught up in the freedom-giving Spirit at once of God and of the Christ. This dynamic, according to Panikkar, is a manifest of God’s own being as the centre of reality, a reality he dubs “cosmotheandric” (from the Greek for cosmos [world], theos [god], andros [man]). As with Cobb and Rahner, salvation is about acquiring a holy wisdom regarding life in this world, in its vital and vitalizing interconnectivity. In concert with the spirituality of both East and West, this wisdom resonates in simplicity of life, quietude, and silence.