Discussing Process Theology

Process theology makes sense. It rests on some ideas about the nature of reality that are fundamentally different than those of traditional theologies. Process Theology has good ethics and values. I find the ethics of the traditional God appallingly erratic and often demonic. In the Bible and in much Christian thought, God has been described as directly willing and causing great evils: war, slavery, plague, famine and even the hardness of human hearts. God is depicted a standing by and allowing needless suffering that God could have easily prevented.

On the other hand, the God of Process Theology does everything within divine power to work for the good. “Reality” is relational and is a social process. “Dominion” has proven to be a tragic theological model for understanding our ethical relationship to the world. Instead we must come to realize that as participants in a complex and fragile web of relationships each person has some value.

God is love. God’s power in the world is necessarily persuasive… not coercive. God is the source of our freedom and therefore cannot coerce the world. Because God loves perfectly, God suffers with the world, calling to us in each moment through divine revelation, sharing a vision of the good and the beautiful. God cannot overrule our freedom, but instead awaits our free response, constantly and with infinite patience seeking to create the best that can be gotten from each choice we make.

I became even more convinced of this when Bob was sick. I felt God very near to me giving me strength to face each day that I did not have myself. This is the only theology that makes any sense to me.

I also reject the traditional Christian teaching of salvation theology. That is the product of Paul and the thinking of the middle ages. It is selfish in motivation..thinking only of oneself and an afterlife. Jesus is portrayed as teaching about the Kingdom of God in the New Testament remembrances and testimonies of him as found in the synoptic gospels. John, on the other hand, was much later and has an entirely different portrayal of Jesus. Paul, the earliest writer, had very little to say about Jesus having never known him personally.

Jesus taught that we should take care of one another and in the very early Christian movement, that's exactly what they did.