Process Relational Thought and God
Beyond the bastard
dualisms: How to do better than Radical
Orthodoxy
Dr Gregory J. Moses
International Process Network
STRUCTURE
OF THE PAPER:
Quotation from Radical Orthodoxy
to
set the scene and explain the title.
Introduction:
a certain deep binary involved in the
early construction of modern culture, and why
thinking about this might be important
Part
1: An Introduction to Process Relational
Theology (overheads)
Part
2: Stepping Back: How We Got To Where We Are (more or
less)
Part
3: A Renovated Process Relational
Theology, on the other side of Blumenberg, Dupre
and Gauchet: restoring the continuity without
collapsing everything.
Conclusion
Process Relational Thought and God
Beyond the bastard
dualisms: How to do better than Radical
Orthodoxy
Dr Gregory J. Moses
International Process Network
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to
re-construe what�s normally thought of as a form
of �naturalistic� theism in a new frame, beyond
the nature-supernature binary altogether and the
other binaries which depend on this. It taps
into research done in the last thirty years of
last century into the early stages in the
construction of modernity, relying particularly on
the work of Hans Blumenberg,
�And just how is it radical? Radical,
first of all, in the
sense of a return to patristic and medieval roots,
and especially to the Augustinian version of all
knowledge as divine illumination � a notion which
transcends the modern bastard dualisms of faith
and reason, grace and nature. Radical,
second, in the sense of seeking to deploy this
recovered vision systematically to criticize
modern society, culture, politics, art, science
and philosophy with an unprecedented boldness. But
radical in yet a third sense of realizing that via
such engagements we do have also to
rethink the tradition.� (Radical Orthodoxy: A
new theology, edited by John Milbank,
Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Routledge, London and New York, 1999,
p. 2.)
Introduction
This paper is a story about a
research program having to do with such binaries
as faith and reason, grace
and nature, what they should no longer mean and
what they might mean. It has
to do mostly with a certain deeper
�binary�, namely that between the positivistic
interventionist supernatural on the one
hand, and the purely natural on the other. The
positivistic interventionist supernatural and its
binary counterpart, the purely natural, are the
notions deployed in the 18th deistic
definition of miracle, but also in a lot of
thinking and speaking about faith and reason, grace and nature, sacred
and secular, prayer and sacraments and revelation
and biblical inerrancy and authoritative papal
teaching as involving or potentially involving
interventions from another realm, seemingly
magical, albeit often secretly so. It
suffuses the self-concept and the real practice of
late medieval and post-medieval and even some present day Church
authority and structure generally. It used to
suffuse the sacred authority of late medieval and
post medieval emperors and princes.
This notion of supernatural
presupposes another notion, that of the purely
natural. Indeed they are a true
binary, mirror images, they live off each other,
and they emerged together to start with, for
religious and sociological reasons initially
within theology, in
There are some indications that this
binary is in a process of historical (with a small
h) deconstruction, with what happens next yet to
be determined.
The indications, moreover, seem to
transcend the divisions between the learned world
and mundane everyday life. For
example, there is the growing phenomenon of Religious
Naturalism crossing the Science-Religion
divide, as in Ursula Goodenough, Philip Clayton,
Willem Drees, Michael Cavanagh
and other such contributors to the journal Zygon,
and even Gordon Kaufman. There
are also the partly overlapping Anti-Supernaturalist
Theisms as in Peter Forrest, God without
the Supernatural (Cornell, 1996), also
strong in contemporary Process Thinking
(especially David Ray Griffin, Religion and
Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts
SUNY, 2000) and Reenchantment
without Supernaturalism, Cornell, 2001). There is
the emergence particularly in Western cultures of
�spirituality� and �spiritual care� etc. beyond
the religions.
And on the cutting edge of theology there
is Radical Orthodoxy itself, and
also the God as Gift people.
But the main point is that, it would seem that
the modern bastard dualisms are of fairly recent
construction historically and that movements in
high to late medieval theology had a lot to do
with them. In
these End Times of Modernity
we ought not to feel especially bound by them,
though there are certain achievements of the modernity to which they
helped give rise which we will definitely want to
keep. It�s
time we dispensed particularly with the deeper
binary. This
ought to mean, I propose, that like the Radical
Orthodoxy people we dispense with both sides. But what
to do in the aftermath? What
kind of theology?
What kind of Church, serving what kind of
society?
Radical Orthodoxy puts itself forward
as offering one way through the thicket beyond the
binaries. I
wish to argue in this paper that Process
Relational Theology of which I am a part-time
proponent is well equipped to offer another way, a
way more in touch with ecological concerns and the
survival of the planet, with feminist and other
liberation concerns and with inter-cultural
dialogue, and with certain amendments possibly
even a superior way.
It is, as well, surprisingly enough, a way
on the other side of the liberal-conservative
dilemma, both within our culture and within our
churches.
Most of my work lately, however,
itself a follow-up to previous work on Faith and
Reason another of those bastard
dualisms, (where I wasn�t quite sure of what I was
doing), has been dealing with a preliminary
question, namely How We Got to Where We Are? Rather
than Where to Go From
Here? In other
words, it is a work in Historical (with a
capital H) deconstruction, charting the history of
the emergence of the natural-supernatural binary
and its life-cycle in
the modern age.
Work so far on this question has involved
quite a mass of reading: books mainly by Hans
Blumenberg, especially The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age;
For this general audience, the rest
of the paper will need to have three parts:
1)
An Introduction to Process Theology
(making use of some already prepared overheads);
2)
Stepping Back: a look at two of the
four main players in the research so far;
3)
A Renovated Process Relational
Theology, on the other side of Blumenberg, Dupre
and Gauchet: restoring the continuity without
collapsing everything.
Part 1: An Introduction to Process
Relational Theology (see overheads)
Part 2: Stepping
Back: Blumenberg, Dupre, Radical Orthodoxy and
Gauchet
(A) Hans Blumenberg, The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age, M.I.T.,
1983 (from 2nd revised German
edition, 1976).
- omitted
(B)
For Dupre, Modernity seems to have
had its origins, more than anywhere else, in a
�fateful separation� towards the end of the middle ages between the
supernatural and the natural, with the latter
itself dividing up into the knowing and acting,
meaning-constituting autonomous human subject on
the one hand and the totally objectified,
de-sacralized natural world on the other.
The story starts already with
Aquinas. For
Aquinas however, �nature� is a remainder concept,
a purely theoretical entity, in the way of a
counter-to-fact speculation which never ever
existed, what would have been if God had not
called us, from the
beginning, to intimacy with God-self. The word
�nature� in the natural desire for the vision of
God on the other hand is as in Augustine, human
nature as it really is, in its full existential
reality, human nature in the concrete, the only
nature there is.
Healing and intimacy with God requires the divine grace,
but it is a grace which is very much in touch with
nature as it really is. Grace
heals nature, restores it to its true integrity,
rather than grace builds on nature. �Supernature�
is as with the Fathers, another name for God the
�Super-Natural� source of the �Natural�, reality
apart for God, rather than a realm within our
world, built on top of the natural, the second
layer of a two-layered cake (cf. PM, 171). Indeed,
the term �supernatural�, according to Dupre, �did
not begin to refer to a separate order until some
sixteenth-century theologians clearly
distinguished a natural human end from humankind�s
revealed destiny� (PM 171.)
Aquinas also makes what looks to be a
fairly clear
distinction between philosophy and theology,
recognizing the autonomy and integrity of each. However,
in Aquinas himself, philosophy, including human
science, is taken up into the very heart of
theology, for the sake of the achievement of its
goal, namely the salvation of human beings, the
same as preaching.
But this does help to sow the seeds for a
more serious split.
The story continues with Duns Scotus,
with his theology of the Incarnation, including
his invention of a notion of human nature neutral
between being taken up by a divine person or a
human person called to grace, a kind of natural
nature to which something then gets added.
But it really gets going with post
Ockhamist nominalism with its theological
voluntarism and its overpowering emphasis on the
omnipotence of God � as in Blumenberg, but with a
twist. Moves in theology get to be positively, not
just negatively, related to the emergence of
modernity. Having
put so much emphasis on the omnipotence of God, a
distinction is then made by the theologians
between God�s absolute power and what God has in
fact willed.
In natural science, this leaves us with a
nature of divinely imposed laws irresistible
except by the power of God and knowable to some
extent by human reason, which, among theologians
in the sixteenth century, eventually turns into a
doctrine of pure nature. The supernatural, grace,
revelation etc. is now read as an addition to and,
where it seems necessary, an intervention into or
suspension of this purely natural realm. The notion
of a purely natural realm of course has to be presumed in order
for the positivistic interventionist supernatural
even to make sense � which is what makes them a
true binary. Whatever
about this, the relation between God and creation
is now reduced to no more than a contingent,
increasingly external relationship of efficient
causality and the human being ceases to be a kind
of microcosm at the heart of the real and now
becomes its human, increasingly objectifying interpreter and actor. Finally this gets combined
with Renascence human self-assertion for an
explosive mixture which eventually gives rise to
modernity, in spite of various late medieval and
renascence attempts to keep it all together.
The early Renascence religious
naturalist pan-en-theistic visions of Nicholas of
Cusa and Giordano Bruno, rather than events on
either side of a threshold as in Blumenberg, are
now interpreted as final attempts to keep it all
together. Renascence
humanist religion (e.g. Erasmus), the early
Reformation and Jansenist theology are then to be
read as three major attempts to overcome the
theological dualism modern culture inherited from
late medieval thought; with the devout humanism of
people like Ignatius and Francis de Sales and the
Religion of the Heart of the Reformation, as
providing for people a provisional synthesis in
practical spirituality though not yet in
theological theory, and even the Baroque as a kind
of last gasp.
But then it is all over bar the shouting, a
mechanistic world picture, a classicist aesthetics
and an increasingly irrelevant theological
scholasticism all going their own way.
Conveniently for us, Dupre himself
gives us a two paragraph
summary, as follows (see M&C pp. 43-44):
The kosmos
had functioned as the integrating factor of Greek
culture. It
included physical nature as well as men and gods. The
Christian worldview, though more strongly
emphasizing divine transcendence and thereby
separating the divine from the human and cosmic
counterpart, nevertheless achieved a new synthesis
through the idea of creation. At the
end of the Middle Ages nominalist theology
transformed this relation. The
Creator appeared as an inscrutable, inaccessible
God withdrawn from a nature with which only a bond
of efficient causality continued to link Him. The
intrinsic intelligibility of such a creation could
no longer be taken for granted and the task of
conveying meaning to it fell entirely upon human
reason. The
source of meaning became the mind, rather than the
objective order of reality. Henceforth
it depended exclusively on that mind to define the
limits of the intelligible and even of the real.
The impact of this intellectual
revolution here so briefly sketched (footnote
reference to Passage to Modernity) did not
fully appear until much later. The
unity of the integrated culture on which Western
metaphysics once rested became fragmented into
isolated spheres: nature, the meaning-giving mind,
the inscrutable God.
The transcendent component gradually
withdrew from culture. That
process now appears to have become completed. It is,
of course, not the case that contemporary culture
denies
the existence of God or of the divine. But
transcendence plays no vital role in the
integration of our culture. The
fragmentation, it ought to be noted, has not
halted at the ultimate principles. Once the
human subject became solely responsible for the
constitution of meaning and value, tradition lost
its former authority. Each
group, if not each individual,
eventually felt free to advance a cultural
synthesis of its own, ransacking the tradition for
spare parts��
So what�s the solution? Dupre
points us in the direction of two strategies which
seem at first sight to be somewhat opposed but
which Dupre himself manages to combine together.
On the one hand we can accept and
maintain the division, recognizing and affirming
the legitimate autonomy modernity has gained for
the three components of culture, but trying to
bring the ingredients into a better balance with
each other. From
this perspective, �the modern program appears not
so much obsolete as unfinished. Its
completion will require a more equitable
recognition of the meaning-and-value-giving
function of all three of the component factors
than the absolute dominance of the subject has
hitherto admitted� Nor ought the one-sidedness of
its past realizations discourage us about its future prospects. That
one-sidedness may in the end matter less than the
autonomy modernity has gained for the three
components of culture: the spontaneity of a
freedom recognized as an ontological principle,
the sufficiency of a self-supporting cosmos, and
the distinctness of a transcendence perceived as
wholly encompassing the finite realm while
intrinsically sustaining its autonomy.� (PM 251)
On the other hand we can strive to
develop a comprehensive vision (351: �a
comprehensive synthesis�) which restores
transcendence and overcomes the split, but in a
modern way following the example of Cusanus, Telesio, Bruno and later
Spinoza (PM 352), also Erasmus and the Baroque
philosophers such as Pascal and Malebranche
(M&C 58-59) and lately some major thinkers of
recent times from Hegel to Whitehead (PM 253!, the
last page). We
need �to revise the accepted idea of transcendence
in a way that transformed the concept of power
hierarchically transmitted from beyond
into a source of power within
the universe whereby God�s presence permeated all
parts at once� (PM 352), working towards the
recognition of a more fundamental givenness
that includes the creative subject itself with its
central, meaning giving role (M&C 56-57) while
also recognizing that the physical cosmos contains
more meaning than a reduction to pure objectivity
reveals.
This is in addition to a strong
emphasis on modern and contemporary versions of
devout humanism as a holding pattern while we wait
for other strategies to take effect.
Thus Dupre, all too quickly. The two
strategies can move in different directions and
even be elaborated in opposition to each other;
but I also provisionally opt for a mode in which
they can well combine and re-enforce each other,
namely deploying a version of the second which by
both its non-totalizing and non-dogmatic manner
and self-conception and its content enables us to
do the first.
(C) Radical Orthodoxy: see Radical
Orthodoxy: a new theology, edited by John
Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward
(Routledge, London, 1999). Cf. Post-Secular
Philosophy: between philosophy and theology, edited
by Phillip Blond (Routledge, London, 1998) �
seems to be a radical orthodoxy project, but
includes also e.g.
Jean-Luc Marion and Kevin Hart.
Radical Orthodoxy seems to be
consistent with and possibly to have absorbed the
Blumenberg and Dupre diagnosis of our current
predicament and its causes in late medieval times,
but with rather more emphasis on the role played
by Duns Scotus rather than Aquinas who now gets to
be almost completely exonerated. This is
partly as a result of
Aquinas being given a more neo-Platonic
interpretation than is usual in 20th
century literature.
The problem, it seems, starts with
Duns Scotus with his univocal notion of being, a
form of idolatry in so far as it puts God and
creatures in the one category, this reinforced by
his definition of metaphysics as concerned with
being which comes in two varieties finite and
infinite. Over
against Scotus and with Aquinas, we need to affirm
the created world as continuing gift, as still in
Aquinas, otherwise God is brought down to our
level, just a matter of more
or less.
And when this is conflated with power as in
Ockham it becomes an arbitrary will, opening the
path to modernity�s demand for human
self-assertion (thus Blumenberg). (Post-Secular
Philosophy, pp. 6ff., introduction by Blond,
cf. RO pp. 5, 7).
God is now a supreme, untrammelled
individual Will rather than that esse ipsum in
which mere existences come to share. With the
Ockhamists, this is then conjoined with the pious
conjecture that God might so dispose things
that what appears to humans has no connection to
the truly real itself, which opens the space for
the emergence of the modern �epistemological�
focus. (Cf. RO, pp. 5-6)
In response the Radical Orthodoxy
people seem to be going for yet a third strategy,
similar to the second
but both more aggressive or bold and
self-confident and more conservative. It seems to
be an exercise in the hermeneutics of recovery or
of critical retrieval of the patristic and
medieval vision, including the neo-platonic and
Augustinian themes of knowledge as divine
illumination, beyond �the modern bastard dualisms
of faith and reason, grace and nature�, and the
Christianized platonic notion of participation
which refuses any reserve to created territory
while allowing finite things their own integrity.
(RO 2-3) It
is however a critical retrieval to the extent of
admitting that we do have to rethink the
tradition, �to �re-envision� a Christianity which
never
sufficiently valued the mediating participatory
sphere which alone can lead us to God�, to correct
some of its late medieval �otherworldly piety
upholding a centralized tyrannising
politics�, this itself being the result of late
medieval theological deviation. (RO, pp. 2-3), to
recover the historic roots of the celebration of
exactly what the moderns value in a participatory
philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it
can acknowledge that the pre-modern tradition
never took this celebration far enough. (RO 4). Beyond
this, having recovered the vision in this critical
fashion it then seeks �to deploy this recovered
vision systematically to criticize modern society,
culture, politics, art, science and philosophy
with an unprecedented boldness.� (RO 2)
Their scholarly time is thus deployed
in two directions, towards a critical recovery
of the past in the tradition of the
great Christian critics of the Enlightenment, and
towards a critical boldly and explicitly
theological overcoming of the inadequacy of
secular rationality in the present. However,
in spite of the
orthodoxy or even because of it, they have no time
either for either Protestant Biblicism or post-tridentine Catholic
positivist authoritarianism: �both Protestant
Biblicism and post-tridentine
Catholic positivist authoritarianism are seen as
aberrant results of theological distortions
already dominant before the early modern period.�
(RO 2).
Thus Radical Orthodoxy, equally inadequately. It is
all very interesting, and lots of hard scholarly
work has been going into
it. The
important
thing for us to acknowledge is that they are
already operating in a post Blumenberg post Dupre
space, where I argue process theology and indeed
the rest of theology also has
to go.
Whether it is also post Gauchet is yet
another question.
(D) Coming to terms with Marcel
Gauchet
Marcel Gauchet, The
Disenchantment of the World: A Political
History of Religion, translated by Oscar
Burge, with a Foreward
by Charles Taylor (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, N.J., 1997, from a 1985 French
original).
- omitted.
Part 3: A Renovated Process
Theology, on the other side of Blumenberg, Dupre
and Gauchet: restoring the continuity without
collapsing everything.
By way of a first comment: there is
no reason a priori why people in the tradition of
�the last of the Cambridge Platonists� (Dorothy
Emmet) can�t do as well or better than people
trying to revive the medieval variety. For
example, process people can already do the radical
orthodoxy return to illumination theory and
participation if they want to and the overcoming
of the distinction between faith and reason, by
way of Divine initial aims and the Divine Lure
(both thoroughly Platonic), the Primordial Nature
of God and the projective or Superjective
nature of God etc., and in a way which is
contemporary science inspired. In spite of some
scholarship to the contrary, as I and other people
(esp. Roland Faber from
Still, the Platonic stuff does solve
one point. The
essential point of undoing the binary is the
restoration of continuity, in the direction of one
existential nature, though if possible
in such a way as not to lose the achievements of
modernity in respect of human autonomy and the
integrity of nature.
The element of continuity was achieved in
the patristic era and in medieval theology up to
and including Bonaventure, in epistemology by the
doctrine of divine illumination, alternatively a
neo-Platonised Averroistic nous poetikos (which
constitutes a kind of link with the Continental
stuff deriving from Kant via Fichte apparently);
and in ontology by the ontology of differentiated
participation of everything natural, human,
sacred, in the beauty and loveliness of the Word,
the divine Wisdom, the concretion of the Divine
Ideas, the Nous or Demiurge thinking the Forms in
which everything participates to greater or lesser
degree. The
point in respect of epistemology is that Divine
Illumination (or divine initial aims, the divine
lure, the primordial and superjective
nature of God) is working as well in the
mathematician and the physicist and the historian
just doing their job, as in the ethicist and the
statesperson, as in the philosopher or the
theologian, as in the philosopher or theologian or
mystic or prophet. It�s
not big deal, a
natural part of life, within the realm of the
familiar. This
allows even for variable divine influence (also
David Griffin!) in accordance with the receptivity
of the person whether natural (prophets) or
trained (philosophers generally) and even
according to the divine initiative. But even
in the latter case it is all
of a piece with the rest of the deified
cosmos and our knowledge of it: what takes place
comes across as a localized intensification of
normal, usual processes, a localized shifting of
probabilities, like with all divine influence, all
inside one layer, all continuous weaved together,
just one cake.
The consequence of this is that e.g. when we experience the
determined attempt at the achievement in new
situations of new wide reflective equilibria
whether in our personal decision making or in
astronomy or one of the other sciences or in our
churches, what we see is all that is there, we see
the lot, the whole lot. The
Spirit is dispersed right through, flavouring the whole. It is
not as if there is a natural us co-operating with
the supernatural Holy Spirit � that�s still binary
talk. It looks like a �naturalism�
(
The Whiteheadian recovery of the
Platonic inheritance has the same effect, then, as
the Medieval variety, once again enabling
continuity in both epistemology and ontology,
while as we will see some more also affirming and
grounding human and cosmic autonomy. It�s
�radical� enough in its recovery. But
because it is not quite radical enough in its
critique it also has some defects.
Amendment 1: The Scope of Human
Freedom: Replying to the Humanist Critique
A first suggestion for amendment is
by way of a response to atheistic humanism and has
to do with the Process notion of God as principle
of possibility and of novelty that sets us free
from the past and from the crowd. This is
great for affirming human freedom and avoiding any
opposition or competition between what God does
and what we do, and already goes some way towards
preserving and affirming human autonomy in the midst of continuity
of divine operation. The problem is that the
normal Whiteheadian process notion still has God
as determining what�s good, though more
sophisticated than the usual divine illumination
theory stuff (Whitehead is updated 20th
century version of the same). God sets
forth, or lures us by
means of a particularized �initial aim�, = the
best way forward, all things considered, in this
situation taking all the circumstances into
account. This
is a target we either get or miss, though we may
miss it by varying degrees. Why this
sets us free is that the lure opens
up possibilities not contained in the
past, a kind of �mental supplement� (need not be
conscious) to the �physical pole� freeing us from
domination by the latter. God thus
emerges as Principle of Possibility and of
Novelty. Meanwhile,
this is something that happens all over the place,
so continuity between humans and nature is also
restored.
As in Aquinas, in
spite of making God the supporter of
rather than a competitor with human freedom, this,
however, still gives God the first initiative for
good, whereas we have genuine initiative, it
seems, only for evil. Needless to say, I�d long
ago worked myself beyond this, following a certain
interpretation of Hartshorne in fact though I
think I creatively imagined it myself before I
found it in Hartshorne. The lure
of the Spirit is towards a more generalized
Beauty, Goodness and
Truth. Though
particularized to what the actor(s) are capable of receiving in
the circumstances, otherwise it is just the
�primordial nature� not yet the �consequent
nature� expressing itself in the �superjective nature�, it
remains a circle rather than a point, like
Hartshorne�s circle of beauty where anything in
the circle counts as beautiful. This
means that two people in exactly
the same situation
even if genetically identical could produce
themselves as saints and different kinds of saints
so to speak and as saints each as good in their
own way. The
bottom line is that we have a part in working out
what is good and not just in receiving or not
receiving, implementing
or not implementing, a pre-existing package. (I�ve
seen this since among other process people.)
Interestingly, according to Henry Dumery (with support from
Thus, it seems, Plotinus already
takes the Forms outside God and makes them
constructions of created Intellect or Nous in
which we also participate. The
Forms of Goodness, Truth and Beauty are eventually
our constructions also, self chosen, for which we
are responsible a la Sartre, though drawn into the
continuing construction thereof by the Pure Giving
of the One or the Lure of the Divine. This
pushes the critique and amendment even one step
further. It
is not even a circle of possibilities, but the
stimulus to the construction of such a circle, and
a stimulus not to be caught up in any particular circle of
possibilities we construct.
This brings a considerable deepening
to the Whiteheadian notion of God as a Principle
of Possibility and Novelty, a somewhat stronger
way of having God as ground of human and cosmic
freedom and autonomy, �the distinctness of a
transcendence perceived as wholly encompassing the
finite realm while intrinsically sustaining its
autonomy� (PM 251).
Precisely.
Amendment 2: God as
not-a-being-amongst-the-beings
On the other hand
I think the Radical Orthodox and indeed some of
the old-style Thomists and countless other people
may be right on one point: we do need to avoid
making God just a being among the beings, a
competitor with other items in the Cosmos such as
human beings and higher animals. This
seems to me to be a genuine problem with some
versions of Process Theism. God does
seem to end up as just another player in the
Cosmic Process, albeit affecting all and affected
by all and that without which the Cosmic Process
would be inconceivable chaos. Nor is
this problem just a matter of whether or not we
should pay God some �metaphysical compliments�. It is
rather a matter of whether or
not our coherent, logical, necessary
system of general ideas can find an acceptable
interpretation of a strong element within
religious experience down through the ages,
particularly in its more mystic versions.
My approach here is to make a move in
the direction of the
Prof. Jan Van der Veken and his
colleague Prof. Andre Cloots
from the
This is a distinction that Van der
Veken and Cloots put
forward under inspiration from Whitehead himself,
chapter on God in Science and
the Modern World (Whitehead 1925 213-4), which
rendition they prefer to the last part of Process and
Reality.
In Part V of Process and
Reality Whitehead
is himself overtly dependent on the particular
experiences of particular people, namely the brief
Galilean vision.
In
Process and
Reality Whitehead goes too far, much
further than is legitimated by his own speculative
cosmology.
For Jan and Andre, God as the
name given to the religious appropriation of the
Primordial Qualification of Creativity is to
be distinguished on the one hand from Creativity
itself, the Whiteheadian metaphysical absolute, and also from other
purported metaphysical absolutes such as Being
itself, whether in the Thomist or in the
Heideggerian sense, or such other metaphysical
absolutes as the Buddhist
Sunyata/Emptiness/Nothingness. On the
other hand, God as Primordial Qualification of
Creativity is also to be distinguished from an
actual entity or a series of actual entities: God
is neither actual entity nor a series of actual
entities but an element, alongside Creativity, of
that without which there are no actual entities,
let alone the free, autonomous, relational process
we experience.
�What further can be said� is
metaphysical speculation or in process practice
speculations, albeit better than most past
speculations, disclosure language, useful in its
way but susceptible like all God language to the
traditional discipline of Affirmative, Negative
and Superlative Ways and medieval and modern
doctrines of analogy and modern talk of more or less useful, more
or less applicable metaphysical models. After
all, even the Forms are our creations.
The �tiny step back� is to realize
that the Primordial Qualification of Creativity as
experienced even in the general run and certainly
in the particular concrete
is not only Primordial, but also Consequent. It takes
us where we are, and it keeps changing, keeps
moving, and keeps us moving.
And so we
can keep all the theological part: it�s
experience-based after all. It�s
just that we take our philosophizing about who
or what God is or might be like a little less
seriously.
Conclusion:
Even big books are not infallible. But from
what we�ve seen it would seem
that the modern bastard dualisms are
fairly recent constructions and that movements in
high to late medieval theology had a lot to do
with their construction. In these
End Times of Modernity
we ought not to feel especially bound by them;
though there definitely are certain achievements
of modernity that we want to keep. Radical
Orthodoxy may offer one way through the thicket
beyond the binaries.
I�ve argued in this paper that Process
Theology is well equipped to offer another way,
more in touch with what we�ve picked up since
medieval times, and with certain amendments even a
superior way.
Process Relational Theology can well be a
participant within a 21st Century
Devout Christian Ecological Humanism beyond
Conservative and Liberal grounded in a strong
comprehensive background theory which restores the
continuity of culture while maintaining the
autonomy and integrity of its components.
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Blumenberg, The
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of the Modern Age, M.I.T., 1983 (from 2nd
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