50 Key Concepts in Theology

Process Theology
Argues that God and creation are in a continual process of becoming.
Process theology originated in the twentieth century as the theological
development of the metaphysics of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
At the centre of process theology is the vision of the cosmos as motion rather
than a static system. According to process theologians, there are no static
entities because everything in our world is a movement of continual growth
and decay.
Whitehead argued that creation was the result of God’s ‘yearning after
concrete fact’ – that’s to say, God’s longing to turn his ideas into concrete
reality. The world that God creates is not a static structure but a dynamic
process in which free decisions are made. God himself is caught up in the
ongoing process, becoming an effect of his own creative action. In
Whitehead’s term, God is bipolar: both cause and effect, past action and
future consequence, potentiality and actuality, time-bound and eternal,
transcendent and immanent, idea and event.
The cosmos consists of ‘actual’ events which are partly determined by
their relationship to other actual events and partly free and creative. God’s
creative action is not simply to set the universe in motion (as the Deists had
argued). The act of creation is not an event but a continuous succession of
interacting events in which God is the guiding principle. In Whitehead’s
words: ‘It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is
immanent in the World.’
Although process theology is not necessarily Christian, a number of
Christian theologians have argued that the process view of God fits much
better with the biblical view of a loving creator who is intimately involved in
the history of the cosmos. Furthermore, process theism takes time and history
seriously, showing how God can be really concerned with the minutiae of an
individual human life. Classical theism, by contrast, regards God as
‘monopolar’: eternal, static, abstract. The ‘bipolar’ view of process theology
means that God is both eternal and completely tied up with the activity of the
universe.
Although process theology had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, and
although the technicalities of process theology are now very much a niche
interest in academic theology, the underlying ideas of process theism have
exercised a very considerable influence over Anglophone liberal
Protestantism from the 1960s onwards.

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The principal objection to process theology is that it appears as though
Christian theology has merely been bolted onto a process philosophy.
Although thinking of theology in terms of process is illuminating, process
philosophy works perfectly well without the Christian God, even without God
altogether. Nietzsche and Kazantzakis, for example, have offered staunchly
non-theological versions of process philosophy. Unlike most conventional
theism, process theology does not depend upon any special revelation, so the
teachings in the Bible are supplementary to, rather than essential to, the
philosophical understanding of cosmic process.
It is possible to argue that the logical conclusion of process theology is
the kind of post-Christian process theology set out by Don Cupitt, who argues
that the world is in a continual flux of becoming, but a flux without God.
THINKERS
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued that we experience the world as
‘duration’, the simultaneous happening of events in time.
John Cobb (1925– ): a leading process theologian who tried to
‘understand faith in Christ as demanding openness to others’ and ‘identified
Christ with creative transformation’ (