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Process thinking, which 'started' with Whitehead and then Hartshorne, is right at one end of a spectrum of beliefs that Tom Oord has called Open and Relational Theology. At the other end are evangelical scholars like Clark Pinnock and John Sanders. The Whitehead end, which today might be represented within the church by someone like Ilia Delio, would seem barely Christian to evangelicals, and many process philosophers consider Whitehead's use of the word to be anachronistic and unnecessary, so perhaps they are right.

It sounds like you might be an open and relational thinker of another kind, so don't close that door completely! I don't know of any process or Open Theist scholars who say God changes God's nature, only that God may acquire new information that results in something that looks to us like God changing God's mind about what the common good might look like.

Many ORT scholars picture God as creating the universe ex nihilo and then voluntarily entering the space-time continuum in order to have genuine relationship with us. Even Whitehead believed that God had one 'pole' that was within time and one outside it.

I think a teleological objection remains, though. If God cannot make the universe bend to God's will, how will the new creation ever happen? What remains of hope?

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Yeah I like some of the philosophical ideas from Whitehead but I think some of the ways people try to use them are ill-informed. This is just doubly problematic because the ideas themselves are largely kept alive via a theology school itself. I’m under the impression you can get more or less the good aspects without the bad by just going straight back to some strains of German idealism. Schelling became pretty orthodox late in his life yet didn’t seem to renounce all the things he said earlier, he just seemed to realize they pointed toward the Bible after all. Part of me wonders if process theology was just an attempt to make Schelling more materialistic and less mythical and that involved basically dropping Christ entirely but not being able to drop God. Disclaimer, I’m not a theologian. And yeah I don’t think process theology leads anywhere loving at all. If God’s basic nature changes, and God starts out good, logically, God would have to change to not be good. If God starts out all-powerful, logically, God would change not to be all-powerful. I think some ideas from process philosophy can be useful, but I think if you were to use the dipolar idea, you’d have to say God has an eternal pole and a temporal pole, which is probably true, for example, things like God being love and all-powerful would be eternal, while God being a burning bush for Moses or walking past Sodom and Gomorrah would be temporal, but that’s never how it’s interpreted in process theology, and also, I’m not a theologian, so please no one take that super seriously just because I commented and speculated about it.

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Oops! I missed out a rather vital word! Many process philosophers consider Whitehead's use of the word GOD to be anachronistic and unnecessary...!

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Maybe. I think Whitehead tried to drop it and couldn't though, but yeah, that's basically just pantheism, which always makes atheists ask pantheists why they call the Universe God anyway.

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