A little update

incoming: Process Insights

From next week, I’m adding a short new feature to my weekly ‘Progressive Reflections on the Lectionary’ posts.

From Monday onwards those reflections will also include a brief “process insight,” as well as the usual historical, political and literary narrative stuff.

These new bits won’t be long - probably just a few sentences - but I hope that they will offer a way of seeing the text through the lens of process theology, or process philosophy.

I’m doing this for two reasons: 1) I use process thought to frame my personal understanding of the nature of the divine; 2) The good people at ‘Process & Faith’ have hit a brief pause on their long running lectionary project, so I’m just trying to add a little capacity.

British readers are less likely than US folks, I think, to know much about process thinking (even though it relies heavily on a British philosopher) so below there’s a short primer. Perhaps this will help you decide whether you feel it’s worth reading the new passages or not!

Process theology, based on process philosophy, starts from a simple place: reality is not made of static things but of unfolding relationships.

There are no ‘beings’ - only ‘becomings’.

According to process thinking, everything is in motion, everything is becoming, and everything affects everything else. God is not the distant, unmoved overseer of what we tend to call ‘classical theism,’ a way of thinking that relies heavily on poorly understood Greek philosophy. Process thinking says God is not the man on the cloud with a thunderbolt - but also not the enthusiastic but surprisingly underachieving micromanager of popular religion.

In process thought the divine is deeply involved in the world’s ongoing life at its most fundamental level. This is a ‘relational’ theology, God is involved in and affected by ‘the world’ - feeling both joys and pains. It is also an ‘open’ theology, God doesn’t have the perfect foreknowledge of what will take place, but of the multiplicity of options that present themselves at any new moment.

It’s fair to say that in process thinking the divine cannot be ‘perfect’ in the classical sense - because that kind of perfection doesn’t allow room for change, and change is the only constant.

In a neat process theology trick God is both changing and unchanging. I won’t go into the details of all that now, but its a carefully worked out position. Crucially: the divine nature is love, and that can’t change, but God is also experiencing as we experience, and experience leads to change. Thus God both changes and doesn’t change.

All of that has an impact on the idea of power: the process idea of God doesn’t include the ability to ‘do to.’ God cannot unilaterally make things happen - hence the reason there are bad things in the world (process theodicy is, I think, the best answer to the so called ‘inconsistent triad’). The divine, in process thought, has ‘only’ the power of love (which is also the greatest power there is).

Some of you might be thinking: this sounds like ‘deism’ rather than theism, to which I would say: “Ha! Nerd!” But not, it’s a theism rather than a deism. God ‘acts’ in the world constantly and consistently by “luring” or drawing it toward healing, creativity, justice, and flourishing.

In process theology there is an emphasis on persuasion rather than coercion, relationship instead of domination, and divine responsiveness over divine immutability.

When it comes to looking at Biblical texts through a lens of process theology, this is about reading texts with a particular attention to ideas like movement, change, or divine vulnerability.

If all goes to plan, in each “process insight” I’ll simply offer one small way the week’s text opens up when we read it through this sort of lens. Bear with me, it may take a little time to bed in, please feel free to let me know what you think as we go along!