David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This past week, we have been looking at Process Philosophy and Theology. And we’ve been talking about the many aspects of this from all the way back until the present and what it’s doing nowadays. We’ve run into a lot of ‘p’s here, Process Philosophy, Process Theology, Panpsychism and Pantheism, or Pandeism according to who you’re asking, but they sort of mean the same thing and Panentheism. So Process Philosophy is the oldest coming from Whitehead. Then Process Theology coming out of that. And then some ideas that have been added in since the Process Theology started with Panpsychism and Pantheism and Panentheism. So let’s head off into those ‘p’s today, shall we? First off, it all begins with Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process in Reality”, published in 1929 from lecture notes that he gave at Harvard during those between twenty five and twenty nine. One of his students, as a matter of fact, a graduate assistant was Charles Hartshorne 1897 to 2000. Now Hartshorne is the one who brings the Process Philosophy into Process Theology for the first time, from nineteen twenty three to twenty five. He studied in Europe. He was a student at Edmond Research. We have we have discussed as a phenomenologists Martin Heidegger and then he was a research fellow at Harvard.Nineteen twenty five to twenty eight. This is the time that Alfred North Whitehead was giving the lectures that would become the book. And then he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Nineteen twenty eight to nineteen fifty five and from there affected a lot of liberal religious future leaders teaching in the divinity school there. So we need to look just a minute, though, because that’s all a long time ago. Let’s think about where we are today. So this is a recent writing from John S. Fainberg, chair of and professor of Systemic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School just north of Chicago. So Systematic Theology is where we try to develop systems of theology that all sort of logically fit together and so that we can talk about reality, usually having something to do with the theistic bent. So he says stemming initially from Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process in reality”, nineteen twenty nine process theology has gained widespread interest and acceptance among nonevangelical scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century. Process Theology and he’s going to define it for us, sees all existing things, including God as dipoles are actual entities. I’ll get back to that. Each actual entity has a primordial poll which contains all the possible things that the entity can become and an actual poll, the physical thing in the world that the actual entity is. The process God is finite, mutable, less than omnipotent, and by his physical poll suffers alongside of his creatures.This is not thought to be a defect, but rather an asset as it allows God to identify with his creatures and experience. What explains what happens to them as it happens? OK, that’s a lot to say. But what is this dipole polar thing? Well, there really are depolarize substances out there. It’s especially true in chemistry and biology. It means that there are these dipolar are things that are set up that describe or don’t describe God. So over on the right hand side here, we have the what what the professor is calling the primordial elements, those things that are possible.