Louisville Process Theology Network

Who is God, I

Nov 03, 2005

Traditionally, God is the creator, redeemer, provider, sustainer, judge, and king. These roles seem to be based on our needs more than our understanding of God's nature. Yet, this view of God's nature seemed to make good sense in the time of Aquinas and Augustine. Their faith was compatible with their understanding of the world. The world seemed much smaller then and God appeared much closer and more involved in everyday events.

With the emergence of modern science though, the world got much larger. Earth was not the center of the universe anymore. God appeared to be much further away and separate from nature, in other words "supernatural." So, a dualism developed in our understanding of reality. We had God and religion over here, but our day-to-day practical experiences and scientific knowledge over there. It seemed that God ruled the universe on Sunday but science ran the rest of the week based on the theories of Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, and others.

Process theology emerged in the early 20th century to meet the challenge of finding a unified view of reality that would include the many different things we learned over the centuries from both religion and science. It sought to overcome dualism, in other words. One of the most challenging questions process theologians asked themselves was this one. What is the real nature of God? We need to understand God's real nature in order to know how God can really meet the needs of our world, they said.

Taking into consideration the principles and concepts of evolution in biology, process theologians reasoned that it is logical to think that higher forms of life are possible and may already exist. We may have have failed to recognize them out of the common assumption that human beings as we presently know them are the high form possible; they thought. Remember, evolution teaches us that life is continuously changing and improving.

We have also learned from the life sciences that there are at least two critical elements of life; consciousness and physical being. Every living thing we have known so far has both a mind and a body. Does God have both of these critical elements? The process theologians reasoned that God probably does share this characteristic with the rest of creation. They termed these two elements of God's existence the Primordial nature of God and the Consequent nature of God.

They envisioned the Primordial nature of God as a collective conscience that remembers all past experiences and guides us in making individual choices among the possiblities for the future. Theologican Henry Nelson Wieman called this "Creativity", which he described as the process in the universe through which good things come into being. These good things include human ralationships, caring communities, and discoveries of wisdom.