Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes

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.

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.

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- ).

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.