nature of the divine

When he thinks of the divine, it is not as some grand logician but as the poet of the world. God does not make the world but makes something of the world, allowing us to find or create meaning in the creative onrush of reality despite the wreckage of history. God leaves open the possibility of reconciliation even if it in fact never fully arrives. ... See more

On Whitehead’s reading, God conditions Creativity—which by itself lacks a definite vector and can be akin to nothingness or chaos—and gives it both aim and memory, so that process can take on a historical trajectory. God instills a sense of purpose but we are never going to arrive at a final, finished state. Whitehead’s theology attempts to provide... See more

Right now, the source of the meaning crisis is our lack of any shared aspiration. We have lost touch with what we have in common, and as a result, we have become alienated. We have become incapable of communion—with each other, with the universe, and with God. We have lost touch and have become disintegrated, incapable of intimacy. Yet God is alway... See more

I would suggest that the position with the most theological coherence and historical validity would be best encapsulated this way: God is, and always has been, at work in every culture planting the seeds of Christ even though it may not be communicated in the exact grammar of the traditional Christian lexicon. With Christ as the hermeneutic key, th

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Catherine Keller might be the bridge between Whitehead’s thought and those forms of radical theology. She develops a kind of theopoetic approach, evoking an aesthetic response to the mystery of existence and shifting our relationship to talk about God away from certainties and proofs. Theology becomes more akin to painting than science. One of the ... See more

To address both the frame problem and the fine-tuning conundrum, I propose that the continuum of possibilities is itself structured by what we may as well call a divine act. This is not the notion of God as an external watchmaker who meticulously designs each actual outcome. Rather, I draw on Whitehead’s process philosophy to argue that the divine ... See more

The word “God” is like a stick of dynamite. It remains valuable precisely because its utterance sets off such potent cultural and conceptual reverberations. Whitehead, in his own way, used it to name something at once tender and cosmic, intangible yet inescapable, the poet of the world who does not create the world from nothing but helps us make me... See more