Theology matters. What we believe about God matters. It matters because our understanding of God and the world affects how we feel about our lives and what we do in the world, and what we believe shapes how we understand our joys and victories. Often the world presents us with questions and challenges, and we look to our deepest beliefs for answers.
I came to process theology because I had seen too much suffering. I remain a process theologian because it helps me manage change, motivates me to transform the world and forces me to see God in everyone. I can think of no better theological approach for the times we are now navigating.
Theology matters. What we believe about God matters.
What we experience is real. That seems obvious, but it’s important to state that what we experience – what we know about our lives and the world – is real and actual, and it matters. I found process theology while working with survivors of sexual violence and domestic violence. I was also a community organizer working in impoverished communities, and I engaged with those who were suffering every day. I had my own experiences of suffering. And the beliefs I inherited were not helpful. Those beliefs were telling me that suffering was part of God’s plan, that it was designed to teach us something or that it was the work of a devil. None of these beliefs comforted me or the people I worked with. I was seeking to understand God’s role amid these experiences. We all have cultured, racialized, gendered, geographic and religious experiences. We have things we know to be true of our own lives, and we witness things happening in the world, both among those we love and with people who seem far away. These experiences shape who we are and what we know about the world.
“Change alone is unchanging”
One thing we know about the world is that things change. This is not a new idea. The ancient philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “Nothing endures but change. Change alone is unchanging.” The process of change, of becoming, is a core tenet of process theology. What happens in the world results from three factors: what one has to work with, what’s possible in one’s context and what one does with it. Our past includes our ancestors, our cultural histories, our traditions; it includes what happened five years ago and what happened five minutes ago. The past tends to repeat itself, and the discipline of psychology offers a common expression: “Past behavior is the strongest indicator of future behavior.” We tend to do the same things repeatedly. The past exerts a powerful influence upon us.
The process of change, of becoming, is a core tenet of process theology.
When the past repeats itself, most of the repetition is mundane. For many of us, breathing is not something we think about. We were breathing five minutes ago. We were breathing one minute ago. We expect to be breathing in the next moment. The past isn’t just about things that have happened. Rather, the past is part of who we are. It’s what makes us who we are: the environment, our ancestors, our habits, other people, the things in our past we’re conscious of and all the things in our past that we aren’t conscious of.
The past does not determine who and what we are. Just because we were breathing well five minutes ago doesn’t mean we’ll continue to breathe well into the future.
No matter what our past has been, we can become something new. The past does not determine who and what we are. Just because we were breathing well five minutes ago doesn’t mean we’ll continue to breathe well into the future. Christianity captures this by talking about the newness in life. St. Paul writes, “Everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Where does that newness come from? God is the source of all possibilities. God has all the possibilities within God’s self. Everything possible is a part of who God is, and God offers these possibilities to us in our process of becoming. Possibilities are morally neutral; they’re just options. God often has possibilities that we don’t see, which is why we can be surprised when something occurs that we didn’t imagine.
God’s call
God’s offer of possibilities is an offer of God’s self to the world. I call this “God’s call” to the world. Some people call it “the love of God” that enters the world. Many process theologians like the term “the lure of God,” because God’s call is persuasive and attractive. Other people call this “the grace of God” or “the voice of God.” What’s important is that it’s God’s very self. God tailors the possibilities offered to us for each context. That means what’s possible for you in a particular context might not be possible for somebody 30 miles away from you or somebody on the other side of the world. The possibilities are offered to us in each moment according to our context, according to what we have to work with, what’s available to us.
God tailors the possibilities offered to us for each context.
Because God’s offer of possibilities is an offer of God’s very self, incarnation is universal. So God isn’t just throwing some balls at us that we can either catch or let bounce off our force field. When God is calling us, loving us, and offering grace, God is offering God’s very self to us and becoming a part of who we are. Thus, God is actually in everything. We believe this is true whether we’re conscious of it or not. We often describe this as God being closer than our very breath, or as the breath of God being inside us. God is embodied in everything, everybody, the Earth, the dirt, the molecules — an idea that can be challenging because it means that we are called to recognize the Divine that is in everyone and everything.
When God is calling us, loving us, and offering grace, God is offering God’s very self to us and becoming a part of who we are.
What we do with the past and with what’s possible comes down to our own agency and the source of our freedom. We get to decide what happens when we work with our past and when we have possibilities open to us. Our agency involves a decision-making process of synthesizing, of sorting, of sifting the inputs of our past and what’s possible.
This process of becoming is the process of change. It’s always happening. This process occurs to everything: people, animals, insects, rocks, molecules. People might more rightly be called human “becomings” than human “beings” because we’re constantly undergoing this process. We’re constantly sifting through what we inherit, what we have to work with and what we’re going to do with it. And these things aren’t simply influences upon us — they constitute us. They are part of who we are. We are our decisions. We are our freedom.
This process of becoming is the process of change. It’s always happening. This process occurs to everything: people, animals, insects, rocks, molecules.
When we become something new, we aren’t who we were 10 years ago, or we aren’t who we were even two weeks ago, and that person we were is gone. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called this “perpetual perishing.” He said we are always perishing. We are always dying. We are always losing something. Experiences change us. We lose the person we used to be. Because we are always becoming, we are also always losing. This loss is not necessarily good or bad. Loss is just part of change; it’s part of how the world works.
Because we have agency in how we become, we do not have to conform or become or affirmatively answer or heed or follow God’s call in the way God calls us to follow it. We might continue as we have in the past. Most of the time, many of us do just continue, and God is still calling us. Think of the biblical prophets who do not answer their calls, at least not the first time. They run away from calls; they would rather be anywhere else, doing anything but what God is asking them to do. Yes, God, I heard you very clearly: you want me to lead the people, you want me to tell them something, you want me to do X or Y. No, thank you, God. I don’t want to, God; I don’t feel I am capable, God; I don’t have the right tools, God; I’m not strong enough to do it, God. Over and over, prophets say no to the call of God. And we call them prophets because, although they eventually say yes, their accounts offer an excellent reminder that we don’t have to say yes to God. That’s our agency. God is going to call us over and over again. That’s God’s agency.
God in process
God also has a process of becoming. God has the same things to work with that we have to work with — but in reverse. After we become something, God receives what we end up with, what we become. God doesn’t just know about it and say, “Hmm, interesting.” Now we impact and influence God, and we also become part of who God is. Thus God is constantly changing, too, because what happens in the world becomes part of God. And God doesn’t know what we’re going to do before we do it.
God must work with what happens in the world. Then God holds all the possibilities within God’s self and evaluates them. God relates all these to God’s values and offers some possibilities to us. God values good things: art, truth, beauty, adventure, justice, and the common good. In God’s valuation process, God seeks whatever could be good about what has happened and tries to hold onto and highlight that good. In every situation, God is looking for the best of what there is, even if it’s terrible in the world. Then God makes us the best offer in the next context in accordance with God’s value. This is what Jesus means when Jesus says the kin-dom of God is at hand: these principles of the kin-dom of God are coming to us in God’s offering of God’s self to the world.
Understanding suffering
Process theology helped me understand suffering in new ways. The classic problem of evil for theologians is phrased like this: If God is all-good and all-powerful, then why do bad things happen to good people? We’re kind of comfortable when bad things happen to people we think are bad, right? But why do bad things happen to seemingly innocent people? Why do we experience evil and pain? One of the most common answers lies in free-will theory. In this theory, God has all power, but God limits that power in the interest of our having free will. So God does have the power to make things happen, including the power to keep people from suffering, and God already knows what will happen. But God thinks it’s more important that we feel like we have agency. So God says: I will limit my own power, and you all will have free will.
But our experience teaches us that we do, in fact, make decisions. We do have choices. We do come to a crossroads. Jewish and Christian traditions often feature God saying something like, “I lay before you life and death, I call you to be a prophet, but I won’t make you. I choose you this day.” The choice is ours. In process theology, the idea is not that God could stop evil suffering and doesn’t — rather, it’s just not something that God does because we have real freedom in our becoming. We get to decide who to become, how to become, how we influence the world, and how we influence God. We are truly free. God doesn’t know what we will choose ahead of time. There’s no big plan that we’re fitting into.
We get to decide who to become, how to become, how we influence the world, and how we influence God. We are truly free.
Experience also reminds us that evil and suffering exist in the world. We can use our freedom to say no to God’s call to us. Another source of evil is acting as if we are not all interconnected. People usually use words like “selfish” or “greedy.” But when we choose to behave in ways that are contrary to God’s vision and values, we are simply acting as if what we do does not affect other people, the created world, the natural world, one another. Our freedom can be the source of evil. Sometimes, we are doing just fine. We’re doing what we should be doing, but somebody else is using their freedom to be destructive, and then their actions impact us. Someone else chooses to commit a crime. Somebody else chooses to do violence. Somebody else can make a decision that introduces evil into your world, even if you didn’t do anything. Evil and suffering aren’t always about individual acts we take or individual decisions we make. Systems and structures can collectively do this. They can act selfishly. They can act outside of accordance with the common good. Then we have entire structures of evil.
Why process theology?
What difference does process theology make, and why is it so needed now? Process theology makes sense of what we know about the world. It honors the idea that change is the only constant. It reminds us that we need to work with God in creating the world we would like to see. We don’t have to become about loss, nor do we need to blame God or a devil for loss. Loss is just part of what happens.
Process theology makes sense of what we know about the world. It honors the idea that change is the only constant. It reminds us that we need to work with God in creating the world we would like to see.
Instead, we may think: How do we attend to loss? How do we honor loss? And how do we seek beauty and adventure amid loss and evil? We don’t have to worry about making mistakes or getting everything perfect because we know that no matter what we do, God is offering us love, grace, a calling, God’s very self in each moment and again in the next moment. We are never separated from God, no matter what. Whether anyone else ever understands us, we know that God knows us from the inside out and draws us into God’s self in our most difficult moments.
We bear some responsibility for what this world looks like. We are not stuck in the past, and God is always calling us forward toward new ways of living out and helping to create heaven on Earth. To deeply believe that God is in everyone and everything, we need to treat the Earth and animals like God is in them. God is in people like us and in people who are different from us, people who look like us and people who don’t, people who love like we do and people who don’t. God is even in people we don’t like and in people who hurt us. So process theology makes our world inclusive, and we find it harder to think about us versus them. Rather, we think about God’s values and ideals and how we can embody them to creatively transform the world.
