The ‘fellow-sufferer who understands’ is found reaching “toward the world both as it is and as it can be.” 4 At this point one can see that, for Whitehead, God’s power is not something separate from God’s love for the world. After an event has occurred it is experienced by God’s consequent nature in such a way that, “what is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world” (351). Whitehead calls God “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire” which means God’s primordial nature participates in the initial phase of the subjective aim of each occasion (344). God is not then uninvested in what possibility becomes actualized through the creature’s freedom, but in the confrontation with a range of possibilities God is advocating for the better possibilities. These possibilities are a gift because they make freedom possible. In God the possibilities relevant for the becoming of each new moment are experienced. It is the past that is actual for Whitehead and yet the past alone is not capable of sustaining life or bringing about novelty. The three are the gift of possibilities, the lure for feeling, and the love of the world. The experience of God in the process of becoming has at least three elements that reveal the fabric of Whitehead’s alternative dynamic of power. Each moment of becoming is experiencing God, even if the occasion is not conscious of it. It is important to note that this experience of God is essential for a recognizable temporal existence, but it is not require a subjective awareness. So in addition to the experience of the past actual world, each becoming includes an experience of God. As both the ordering ground for the becoming of the world and the freedom enabling ground for its creatures, God is a constitutive part of each actual occasion. The course of creation would be a dead level of ineffectiveness, with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility” (247). In Process and RealityWhitehead recognized the necessity of God’s presence for becoming when he said, “apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. As John Cobb puts it, God saves the world by transforming the world. God’s di-polarity enables God to feel, know, preserve, and save the world. The primordial nature, which orders the eternal objects (think Platonic forms) for the attainment of value in the temporal world, and the consequent nature, which receives the temporal world into God. 2 In Process and Reality he came to describe God as having two natures. God plays an essential role in the world’s becoming by being the “actual entity imposing its own unchanged consistency of character on every phase” so that “a definite result is emergent” from the process. Everything grows out of datum and the datum themselves had their own process of becoming so for Whitehead “it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every becoming” (22). 1 – Alfred North Whiteheadįor Whitehead nothing just exists, everything grows together. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is he poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process: this is the energy of physical production. ” Well Tony here’s my attempt to summarize Whitehead in 800 words….the short answer is classical Process thought would agree with you and probably identify Rob Bell closer to Open Theism (the biblical based cousin to Process thought) since they preserve Creation Out of Nothing, see God’s power as ‘self-limited’ verses naturally interdependent with the world, and have no problem permitting divine power to ensure eschatological consummation. Except that process theology may be a way around that (Tripp?). Tony Jones said, “ It seems to me contradiction to hold that God gets what God wants, and that human beings have near-absolute freedom to love or not love God.
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