50 Key Concepts in Theology

Christ in a Pluralistic Age,
1975).
Don Cupitt (1935– ) argues that ‘we should see the whole of reality as
like a great fountain that continually recycles its own waters … It is
composed of nothing but a pure formless rush of contingency, pouring out and
scattering’ (The Religion of Being, 1998).
David Ray Griffin (1939– ): a leading process theologian who has argued
for a post-modern process theology of nature in which the human subject is
understood within the context of an ecological whole. The task of theology
should be ‘to relate talk of nature, human nature and divine action to
contemporary sciences’ (David Ray Griffin and Houston Smith, Primordial
Truth and Postmodern Theology, 1989).
Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) developed Whitehead’s philosophy as a
theological system. Hartshorne’s God is absolute in the sense of being
‘unsurpassable’, but this does not stop God surpassing himself. He is the
‘self-surpassing surpasser’ who develops in time. Hartshorne differs from
Whitehead in thinking of God as a ‘society of actualities’ rather than a single
actuality.
Heraclitus (sixth century bc) argued that everything in the cosmos is in
continual change, hence his famous dictum: ‘You never step in the same river
twice.’

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Nikos Kazantzakis (1885–1957): a Greek novelist, author of The Last
Temptation of Christ. Kazantzakis believed that life is a process of heroic
struggle: ‘My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of
love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall
give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did
today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are
the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow’ (The Saviors
of God: Spiritual Exercises).
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that the cosmos is ‘a monster of
energy, without beginning, without end … at the same time one and many …
eternally changing, eternally flooding back … with an ebb and flood of its
forms … this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally
self-destroying’ (The Will to Power).
Norman Pittenger (1905–97) argued that the God of process theology is
closer to the biblical picture of God than the static God of classical theism:
‘Every theology must have some final criterion. Paul Tillich has “the new
being”, biblical fundamentalism had “the word of Scripture”; liberalism, in
the older mode, appealed to “experience”. Process theology finds its criterion
in the biblical text, “God is love”.’
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) set out a philosophy and
metaphysics of process that formed the basis of later process theology.
IDEAS
Actual entity (or actual occasion): the description of entities as events
that we experience in time.
Panentheism (literally ‘everything in God’): the belief that God is infused
in the cosmos.
BOOKS
David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, Process Theology: an Introductory
Exposition (Westminster Press, 1976)
C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology: a Basic Introduction (Chalice Press,
1993)

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