Religions in the Making

Whitehead and the Wisdom Traditions of the World

Cobb

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894841
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Whitehead had a place for God in his comprehensive cosmological vision, and his theism has long attracted interest from some Christian theologians. But Whitehead's ideas have much wider use. Some Buddhists have found help in articulating their nontheistic vision and relating it to the current world of thought and action. In this book religious writers in seven different traditions articulate how they can benefit from Whitehead's work. So this volume demonstrates that various features of his thought can contribute to many communities. According to his followers, Whitehead shows that the deepest convictions and commitments of the major religious communities can be complementary rather than in conflict. Readers of this book will see how that plays out in some detail. A Whiteheadian Hindu can recognize the truth in a Whiteheadian Judaism, and both can appreciate the insights of Chinese Whiteheadians committed to their classical thinking. Perhaps a new day in interreligious understanding has come.

1

A Jewish Perspective

Divine Power and Responsiveness

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson

Editor’s Introduction

Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Jewish Reconstruction, may be counted as a process thinker along the lines of John Dewey, but this nontheistic movement has not been attractive to many Jews. A number of Jews have identified themselves with Whiteheadian process thought, but thus far it has not been considered as a serious option in the Jewish community as a whole. Rabbi Artson thinks it is time that far more Jews became aware of its helpfulness and basic congeniality. Some Christians have in the past recognized that not all the obstacles to acceptance of process theology among Christians apply to Jews, and Artson’s citations from the tradition indicate that this is correct. The orthodox philosophical theology shared by Jews and Christians has had less hold on Jewish thought. There seems to be a real possibility that if large numbers of Jewish thinkers considered the possible replacement of traditional Greek categories by process ones, many would agree that these meet the needs of Judaism better.

The basic issues discussed in this chapter are important for all members of the Abrahamic traditions. How can the understanding of God as good be reconciled with the evil in the world? And how can the theistic understanding of the world be reconciled with modern science. Although some of the sources that Christians and Muslims cite would be different, much the same responses are relevant to all. Although specifically and emphatically Jewish, this chapter deals directly with how the process understanding of God and the world can help the Abrahamic traditions generally. Even those in nontheistic traditions will find the account of process theology here offered interesting and illuminating.

Process theology—a constellation of ideas sharing the common assertion that the world and God are in a flux of dynamic change, of related interaction and becoming—can be unsettling at first glance. We take for granted what it means to be conventionally religious, and those traditionalist assumptions make it difficult to open ourselves to an engaging and explanatory way to conceive and connect to an embracing faithfulness. Much of what I will offer as an alternative may sound shocking, perhaps even irreligious if this is your first encounter with process thinking. I want to provide an image that makes it possible, at least, to work through the shock and discomfort to some degree. You may wind up rejecting this dynamic/relational approach in the end, and that is your privilege too, but the opening image may help create the possibility of a new understanding.

I live in west Los Angeles in a home that was built in the 1950s. Our dining room has wood paneling along its four walls. When we first bought the house a decade ago, the room was painted a sickly green, presumably in the late 70s during the high watermark of the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family aesthetics. The actual wood grain and tone were covered, though I think that in that era people thought such a look was cutting edge. With that greenish coat of paint, the walls looked fake and cheap. When we finally got around to repainting the upstairs of the house, we asked our painter if he could just paint the phony paneling a simple white because the green was hideous. He pondered for a moment, then took his thumbnail and scratched on the panel. The paint peeled away, and he said, “You know, I think that under this green there is actual wood.” His team spent three days sandblasting and then varnishing. At the end of the week our dining room was transformed! The wood is so rich and the patterns in the grain are magnificent. It is now my favorite room in the house. I had thought, erroneously, that it was the wood itself that was that sickly green, when in fact, that trashy look was just the coating that someone had painted over it.

Modern Western people often approach religion as I did the paneling: they assume that the only way to be religious is to accept the sickly green overlay of Greek philosophy. They take Aristotelian and Platonic presuppositions and filter religion through those ideas. Then, because they have insurmountable problems with those assertions, they assume that the quandary involves religion itself, or the Bible, the Talmud, observance, or God. What process thinking offers is the opportunity to sandblast the philosophical overlay of ancient Greece and medieval Europe off the rich, burnished grain of Bible, Rabbinics, and Kabbalah so that we can savor the actual patterns in the living wood of religion, the Etz Hayim,1 and appreciate religion for what it was intended to be and truly is.

Problems with the Dominant View

Because we are habituated to the pale green overlay, we assume that drab impression is what religion necessarily entails: specifically, the kind of theology that most Christian theologians call “classical,” by which they mean Augustine, Aquinas, the broad spectrum of medieval philosophy—which presupposes that God must be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.2 Based on Aristotelian presumption, God has—and must have—all the power (that is what omnipotent means).3 God has—and must have—all knowledge, knowing everything that is, was, and will be. God is omnibenevolent—pure good. The challenge for many contemporaries is that certain intolerable consequences result from these three axioms.

For God to be omnipotent implies that no power exists that is not God’s, which means, first of all, that any occurrence is God’s responsibility. Sometimes we like what happens, sometimes we do not; regardless, all that happens comes from God. So God gets the credit for anything good in life; for anything bad in life, God gets the blame. There is no escape from that inexorable logic, which engenders many people’s vehement rejection of religion. A God who could have stopped doing “X” but did not is a God with whom most of us want nothing to do. Everyone, at some point in life, suffers terrible trauma. At the moments that monotheists most need God and a sense of God’s love, they are coerced by their Greek-overlay theology into conceding that God must have a legitimate reason to cause (or at least to not prevent) the trauma from occurring. The fault, by default, must be their own. That relentless conclusion leads them to do what far too many Western people have done across the millennia, which is to abandon their moral compass and generally-reliable sense of right and wrong in order to blame themselves or their loved ones when bad things happen.4 The inescapable consequence of this theological straightjacket is that not only does something horrible happen, but beyond their suffering, the victim also feels delinquent, abandoned, or punished.

But there is yet another way in which the concept of omnipotence creates an insurmountable challenge. Power is always relational. One has power only to the extent that one has more of it than someone else does. To the extent that one has all the power, one actually has no power whatsoever, because power only works when there are two parties engaged in a power dynamic, one the object of the power of the first. Without that relationship, there is no possibility of demonstrating or utilizing power at all. Absolute power is self-erasing.5 The philosophical presumption that God is omnipotent was reinforced by the fact that many translations of the Bible refer to God as the “Almighty,” which derives from a mistranslation of El Shaddai.6 The Torah has terms for great power and unsearchable strength,7 but it has neither concept nor term for omnipotent. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Jewish Perspective
• Chapter 2: A Catholic Perspective
• Chapter 3: A Protestant Perspective
• Chapter 4: An Islamic Perspective
• Chapter 5: A Hindu Perspective
• Chapter 6: A Buddhist Perspective
• Chapter 7: A Chinese Perspective
• Chapter 8: A Taste for Multiplicity
• Chapter 9: A Retrospective