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Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes

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To give you an idea of the underlying assumptions of this book, let me quote a definition of process philosophy:

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY, a speculative world view which asserts that basic reality is constantly in a process of flux and change. Indeed, reality is identified with pure process. Concepts such as creativity, freedom, novelty, emergence, and growth are fundamental explanatory categories for process philosophy. This metaphysical perspective is to be contrasted with a philosophy of substance, the view that a fixed and permanent reality underlies the changing or fluctuating world of ordinary experience. Whereas substance philosophy emphasizes static being, process philosophy emphasizes dynamic becoming. Although process philosophy is as old as the 6th-century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus, renewed interest in it was stimulated in the 19th century by the theory of evolution. Key figures in the development of modern process philosophy were the British philosophers Herbert Spencer, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosophers Charles S. Peirce and William James, and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) is generally considered the most important systematic expression of process philosophy.

Contemporary theology has been strongly influenced by process philosophy. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne, for instance, rather than interpreting God as an unchanging absolute, emphasizes God's sensitive and caring relationship with the world. A personal God enters into relationships in such a way that he is affected by the relationships, and to be affected by relationships is to change. So God too is in the process of growth and development. Important contributions to process theology have also been made by such theologians as William Temple (1881-1944), Daniel Day Williams (1910-73), Schubert Ogden (1928- ), and John Cobb, Jr. (1925- ).

If you read theology for fun, this is the book for you! Hartshorne is often convincing but always interesting. He knows his subject and presents it well. His writing style is clear and does not require that the reader have a strong background. I have only two reservations. The first is that his arguments are occasionally summaries of points he makes in greater detail elsewhere, and so he is a little less convincing here, and that no one should read this book at night if they have to get up early the next day. Insomniacs beware!
On the other hand, if you want a book to wake someone up, this is an excellent gift.
I enjoyed the way his vision makes some of the more pecular things Jesus said sound perfectly reasonable. How often has anyone addressed why you should love your neighbor as yourself? Why should you give to everyone who asks of you and not just the deserving? What does it mean to love God with your whole heart.

Hartshorne has noticed what most of the rest of us have: God cannot have power over everything, know everything, and be all good. The difference between Hartshorne and the rest of us is that Hartshorne attempts to explain how God can exist in some other mode than as the impossible being taught to us by medieval scholars and modern fundamentalists.

Hartshorne posits six basic mistakes we make in thinking about God. As an example, he says that our traditional ideas about omnipotence make a pretty pathetic God. We usually think of power as the power of the tyrant, that is, the power to control others. If God controls all of us, then everything is His will. This mistake, in Hartshorne's estimation, leads to a great deal of double-talk (he is rather withering in his critique of St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance). But we can think of power as the power of love or creation: God can create a world of beauty worth worshiping.

Similarly with omniscience: if God knows all that is to happen, then God is little more than the tyrant who controls everything. Hartshorne suggests that God knows all that has happened, but that our individual decisions, and the future they create, are hidden from Him.

This is all very interesting. Unfortunately, Hartshorne appears to have written this in a feverish attempt to get it all out. While he claims a desire to write for lay people who think about religion, he descends into philosophical jargon and long-winded, knotty paragraphs at times; at others, he is almost folksy in his diction. After getting bogged down several times in his argument, I found I could follow him much better by skimming the section and paragraph headings, plowing through the text where I was interested or didn't understand the basic argument. I think this book could have benefited from a longer gestation.

Charles Hartshorne is one of the greatest and most important philosophers of religion of the 20th century, and I mean the *entire* 20th century: he lived from 1897 to 2000, covering the entire span of that century and dying at the age of 103. Along with Alfred North Whitehead, he was a principal developer of the modern process philosophy of religion.

Both Whitehead and Hartshorne believed their insights were critical for overcoming centuries of discord, misunderstanding, and philosophical errors that both religion and science were making that were actually standing in the way of their mutual progress. But most of Hartshorne's writings were intended for an audience of professional philosophers and were very carefully crafted to stand up to erudite criticism. This presented an imposing barrier for more widespread dissemination of his important ideas. Therefore in his old age he decided it was time for a more "popular" and informal presentation of his ideas, and this book is the result.

Unlike his more formal works, this work was composed at a furious pace, almost as a stream of consciousness, and perhaps for that reason, there are long passages that are as difficult to comprehend as you will find in his more formal works. Part of what makes some of these passages difficult is the extremely long and complicated sentences out of which they are composed: you sit there wading through a series of parenthetical clauses looking for the subject and predicate, and reading the sentence over and over, trying to put it together. It's difficult for a scholar to switch gears and write for an audience that is not trained in comprehending long, involved arguments, and perhaps just as much care has to be taken to present complex arguments for laymen as it takes to present them to professional scholars, only in an entirely different style that Hartshorne had never really trained himself for.

That said, this book is full of peerless gems of wisdom that jump out at you with astonishing force and persuasion. Hartshorne was a professed Christian, but his view of God will be met with shock by a lot of Christians, even heresy. He believes that for the sake of the religious future of the world, religious belief should be entirely informed by the modern scientific view of the world. Among other things, this means that the way God is in the world is not as a worker of miracles that require an interruption in the natural flow of events, but as a persuasive force in competition with all of the other natural sources of persuasion, including the freedom of the individual itself. He sees this process going "all the way down" the hierarchy of individuals in the natural world: from human beings, to nervous systems, to biological cells, to macro molecules, to simpler molecules, and down to the most fundamental atomic particles. Every such individual, before it makes a free decision to achieve an aim made possible by its very nature, has at least some minimal ability to respond to competing aims from the rest of the world, including the initial aim of God Himself/Herself (Hartshorne's non-sexist terminology when referring to God with a pronoun), which always gets in there first but is never guaranteed to prevail. Thus, God is in the world in an entirely *natural* way, never in a supernatural way. And this way of God being in the world is not simply a result of a decision on the part of God not to interfere, but is *intrinsic* to the very nature of God himself and the world. According to Hartshorne's metaphysics, it's impossible for it to be any other way.

To do justice to the various aspects of Hartshorne's philosophy would require a review as long as this little book itself. There are just a couple more points I want to make. When reading this book, I sense a principle that Hartshorne uses in deciding what the nature of God must be. In discussing God's nature, Hartshorne always arranges his philosophy of religion to allow God to be seen in the most positive light possible. You will see none of the embarrassments in traditional theology as it tries to reconcile an all-powerful God with an all-good God, or limitations in God's ability to sympathize and feel all of the joys and sorrows of *every* individual, regardless of where it lies in the hierarchy of complexity. Hartshorne's God is the most lovable, most worshipful God ever portrayed in the history of the philosophy of religion. You don't worship Hartshorne's God because of some ultimate reward in the afterlife -- which is essentially a selfish reason for worship, but because Hartshorne's God is intrinsically lovable: we "fall in love" with his awesomely lovable God that is as metaphysically perfect as possible, and hence we cannot help but worship this God: we are drawn to worship this God simply because it is so worshipful, not because of threats if we don't or because of rewards if we do.

The last point I want to make about this book is that probably because of the haste in which it was written, some things are glossed over or slip by without enough explanation, and you're left with the feeling that perhaps errors have been made. Of course Hartshorne (as well as Whitehead himself) is often at pains to point out that process philosophy is a work in progress and that it should never present ideas as Absolute Truth, but the philosophy should grow through a dialog among many philosophers with different backgrounds and orientations. But there is one passage in the book that seems to me is particularly careless that also leaves the impression that the conclusion is central to the argument of the book. There is a line in his chapter on neo-Darwinian evolution (which he professes to accept and understand as well as any intelligent layman can be expected to) that is suspect: "[T]he only positive explanation of order is the existence of an orderer. Hence evolution is not, I hold, fully intelligible without God." To keep this review within reasonable bounds, you'll have to take my word for it that the rest of the paragraph this quote was taken from makes perfect sense. But just to read the quoted sentence, it looks as if it's a sound bite "proof" for the existence of God. But it seems to me that the "orderer" of order in the biological world is simply natural selection, and at least what is missing is a "proof" that the existence natural selection is "proof" for the existence of God. This just seems like carelessness, and unfortunately it happens here and there throughout the book.

This last reservation shouldn't deter you from reading this book, however. If you have an open mind at all -- for example if you are agnostic and just don't know whether there is anything more fundamental behind the scientific picture of the world "behind it all" -- you will definitely find a feast for thought in this book. It's just that it would be good to have some idea of the book's limitations before you start digging in, and digging in is exactly what you'll have to do: it isn't your typical layman's guide to a difficult topic that has been carefully crafted to make it both accurate and reasonably digestible for the non-professional.

For many of us who are 'professional Christians' known as clergy coming to terms with the fact that Classic Christian theology is neither Biblical nor is it believable in a scientific age can be traumatic indeed. Gods that hurl lightening and run around dressed in smoke and fire and appear on earth as human beings are simply not credible any longer.
The churches which are mostly run by men (almost all of them) cling with great tenacity to these patristic, domination/submission antiquities because it bolsters the male ego to know that he and he alone is made in the image of one of these gods, Allah, Yaweh or whoever.
Process theology and process thought allow us to have religion without this primative god stuff to make us decide that we have either to check our brain at the door of the church or avoid the church altogether. The fact is that more and more people make exactly one of those two choices. Those who are willing to check their brains at the door are fundamentalists of various sorts and persuasions. Those who are unwilling to give up the scientific, rational worldview of today check out of the church altogether.

I am writing this review simply because I found Mr. Hartshorne to a inaccessible with his theory. Now, I am someone who belongs to a progressive Christian church, and I am always engaged with my pastor about such theological topics. I think from what I know of process theology I all ready felt when reading scripture before even knowing what process theology was. My problem with Mr. Hartshorne's work is too much reliance on non-Biblical views of theology. For example, when he discusses the issue of immortality after death as being one of the mistakes Christians make, he fails, from I read to address how scripture addresses the issue. On page 35 for example, under the title os "Two meanings of "Immortality" he mentions "the sublime Book of Job" as failing (?) to address immortality. True, he writes that "Job worships God, not because God will grant him bliss beyond the grave, but simply because God is worshipful, because worship is the appropriate response to the supreme Creative and Receptive Spirit of the cosmos." Makes sense to me. Sure, I guess Christians have been told, as in the New Testament, of being "saved". Why should have Job dealt with such an issue? The Bible does state that everything is meant to happen at the appropriate time. Also, Mr. Hartshorne asks whether or not Dante is "sound theology". Who really thinks that? It's unbiblical. If you really think that Dante's visions are real, well, you are seriously mistaken. For myself, I don't really think too much about the afterlife. First, because it's not really discussed in detail in the Bible. Also, my reason for engaging God in a relationship, through Jesus, is not based on fear that I will be sent to Hell, or to get the dangling carrot of eternal life in front of my face. I am in awe of God, which can translate as fear due to His awesomeness. The Bible tells me that that fear, or awe, is the beginning of wisdom. I'm still working on it, too. Mr. Hartshone goes on to mentaion Bergson, Whitehead and deals with philosophy, but not scripture. I am all into theology, so long as it is accessible. Also, I have to admit that I get really tired of theology, as I did with this book, because it was not succinct. I know others will feel differently and I don't mean to start an agrument. If anyone wants an engaging look on process theology for the lay person, then I strongly suggest you read Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki and Michael Lerner. Again, not a bad book, but I became bored by his intellectualism. I also wish he dealt more with scripture.

I guess the reason why

Hartshorne makes a lot of sense to those uncomfortable with the extreme (and neo-Platonic) elements of Christianity: omnipotence, omniscience, unchanging, the Unmoved Mover, etc. Well worth reading and pondering.

Good book for those who take an interest in Process Theology. But much like every other philosophical fad over the past few centuries, P.T. will soon fade away (along with Open Theism) as its definition of God's omniscience is incompatible with Scripture -- for many people, the Bible is the measuring stick for their beliefs.

To be honest, most people of faith don't care about this higher theology. Generally speaking, they aren't attracted to a liberal interpretation of the Bible either. And without an audience that supports a liberal interpretation of Scripture, there will be no one to listen to the Process Theologian. Of course, those of faith that do have an interest have done much to destroy the foundation of P.T. so even if there was an audience they will not stick around very long. Personally, I give P.T. about 30 years before they come up with some neo-P.T.

My suggestions is to read this entertaining & thought-provoking book while it is popular & people are still talking about it! If you have an interest in P.T. read this book, but if you don't I wouldn't bother unless you simlpy want to be informed of the various systems of thought (like myself).

I know... this review does not have much to offer along the lines of analyzing the book. He's a good writer. Maybe a little big-headed in thinking he can take on Aquinas' arguments (a failure in my opinion) but he has some provoking and interesting things to say.

If you want to discover the primary source of the aberrant movement in Evangelical Theology today called "Open Theism"
"Free-will Theism" or "Presentism", this is the book to compare with what Clark Pinnock,John Sanders and Greg Boyd have written to make their 'case'.

'God at Risk';'Searching for an Adequate God';'God at War';
'Trinity and Process:Critical Evaluation of Hartshorne's Di-Polar Theism Toward a Trinitarian Metaphysics','God of the Possible';'Satan & Problem of Evil' for instances.

Hartshorne, especially in this volume, caused these once evangelical scholars to question,challenge,then revise many of the Attributes of God Biblically explained by the Classical Theologians for millennia. Their sincerity does not lessen how sincerely wrong their Biblical understanding,exegesis,interpret-
ive techniques,conclusions are. Very enlightening to see the strong connection between PROCESS and OPENNESS. Undeniable.