Address: “Alfred North Whitehead’s Process
Theology”©
The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR, February 4, 2007
So, there I was, buckled into my
seat, tray table and seatback in their upright position, ready for
takeoff. Ahead of me was a five hour
plane ride from San Francisco to Newark, and on my lap was some light reading:
“A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality.”
As we reached a cruising altitude, I opened the book and read the first
paragraph:
The positive doctrine of these lectures is
concerned with the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of “actual
entities.” “Actual entities” – also
termed as “actual occasions” – are the final real things of which the world is
made up. There is no going behind actual
entities to find anything more real.
They differ among themselves. God
is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far off
space.
I was glad my seatbelt was still
buckled! This turned out to be the most
intelligible paragraph in the first 150 pages of the book. Words like “concrescence” and “prehensions;”
phrases like “cell-theory of actuality” and “intensity of upward valuation”
danced like sugarplums in my head. And
yet; as I reached the crux of this work, a chapter entitled “God and World,” I
found myself growing increasingly inspired and enlivened. I even began sharing lines of the text with
my neighbors around me. A woman in 19 C
just behind me wrote down the title and swore she would buy the book and read
it!
Flying in the air, somewhere over
the heartland of our country, I discovered in Alfred North Whitehead a kindred
spirit – a rather opaque kindred spirit at times, but nonetheless a kindred
spirit. As a panentheist who embraces
the idea that God is both wholly contained within the world and yet also
transcends it, I find myself his heir – not of his worldly goods, but of his
ideas. As UU’s, whatever our theological
stripe, we ought to be aware of Whitehead’s contributions to the stream of
liberal religious history, and to our tradition within that larger context.
Alfred North Whitehead, born in
England in 1861, originally trained as a mathematician. He taught and wrote with Bertrand Russell on
this subject, but also extended his learning into the arenas of physics,
philosophy, and religion. At 63 he moved
to the United States to accept a position at Harvard teaching philosophy, and
he remained there until the age of 77.
The main work which I am concerned with today, his book entitled
“Process and Reality,” was presented as series of lectures at Harvard. Even though he himself warned that any
attempt to “sound the depths in the nature of things” would be “shallow and
puny,” and that thus any hint of dogmatic certainty would be an “exhibition of
folly.” he nonetheless attempts in this work to lay out a metaphysics, or a
coherent framework by which ideas relevant to every element of our experience
could be interpreted. This framework
later became the intellectual basis for Process Theology, which found its home
at the University of Chicago in the works of Charles Hartshorne, Henry Nelson
Wieman (whose ideas will be the basis for next week’s address), John Cobb and
others.
The significance of their ideas for
us as Unitarian Universalists cannot be overstated. Process theology provided a bridge between
the traditional theism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its omniscient
and all-powerful God acting from afar; and the science-based view of secular
Humanism that rejected the idea of God or any transcendent reality as obsolete. They did so by redefining God using the tool
of reason, and the teachings of science as their guides. For them, the gap could be bridged, and both
science and theology embraced. As we
UU’s struggle to include room for faith and doubt, reason and intuition,
science and wonder, we can look to Whitehead and the Process Theologians as
guides.
A colleague of mine, The Rev.
Yielbonzie Johnson, said at a recent workshop on “Worship outside the Box” that
we worship (or celebrate life if you prefer) any time that we measure the gap
between what is, and our highest ideals.
The creative juice of life is always found in that in-between place –
between certainty and doubt, knowing and unknowing, satisfaction and challenge. In a nutshell, the purpose of our religious
endeavor is to continually locate ourselves on the continuum of reality and
possibility. Alone we can easily delude
ourselves about our own limits on the one hand, and our blind certainties on
the other. Yielbonzie suggested that as
minister, we ought to imagine a big neon sign above our pulpits that reads
“Delusion!” – a sort of warning to be humble in approaching the power of the
pulpit.
In community, we can tenderly and
firmly guide one another toward what is possible, while also helping each other
to avoid the arrogance of ever thinking we have arrived – at the truth, at the
only answer, or at the end of life’s unfolding, for to arrive is to start anew.
Whitehead approached his task with
the mind of a mathematician, striving to clear a path through the valley of
existential mystery with a scheme through which we could pass the fire of all
experience. His theories are all about
the energy of the in-between – between becoming and being, between flux and permanence,
between order and novelty. Whitehead
takes the notion from physics of “dipolar” reality – the idea that there are
equal and opposite forces with a small span between them, and applies it
theologically, defining God as that force which contains equal and opposite
forces: the one and the many; the spiritual and the material; the past, present
and future. In his own words:
It is as true to say that God is one and the World
many, as to say the World is one and God many…
It is as true to say that the World is imminent in
God, as God is imminent in the world.
It is as true to say the God transcends the World,
as that the World Transcends God.
It is as true to say the God creates the World, as
that the World creates God.[1]
God for Whitehead is a living,
changing force – the energy that moves mere potential into actuality. And we, as humans, interact with that force,
co-create with that force, both consciously and unconsciously. Another way to state this is that God is the
lure towards harmony, the interplay between that which is static, and that
which is fluent. God is for Whitehead
“the poet of the world” tenderly moving us from turmoil to wholeness, that
nothing might be ultimately lost.
In learning more about Whitehead,
I’ve realized that I have a gap in my own education regarding the intellectual
contributions of the early-to-middle Twentieth Century. It seems that standard theological education
for UU ministers drives it students along a highway starting with Socrates,
making regular stops along the way up until the Transcendentalists of the 19th
Century, and then gets into the express lane where you only make one quick stop
at the Humanist Manifesto of the 1930’s before you pull up with your Easy Pass
at the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism in 1961. We basically jumped from Emerson’s radical
Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838, in which Ralph Waldo charged his
Unitarian elders with creating a “corpse cold” rationalist approach to
religion, speaking in gorgeous prose about the glories of nature and the
encounter of the mystery through the intuition; almost directly to the
Unitarian Universalism of today, with its pluralist approach to religious
community that includes everyone from fans of Richard Dawkin’s “God Delusion”
to followers of the “Tibetan Book of the Dead.”
In fact, we are all much indebted to
the brilliant minds of Whitehead, Hartshorne, Wieman, James Luther Adams (stay
tuned for Adams on February 24th), among others, who looked at
reality as an unfolding process and offered us a way to walk the tightrope
between wonder and awe on the one side, and scientific knowing on the
other. While not everything that
Whitehead posited during his lifetime remained intellectually current
(particularly an earlier attempt to rival Einstein’s theory of general
relativity), much his work in his process metaphysics has endured. Some twenty years after Whitehead died, in
fact, the Big Bang cosmology came into currency – positing that our universe
began between 10 and 20 million years ago in a simple state with the explosion
of a primeval atom, and has subsequently grown ever more complex and
expansive. This theory is compatible
with Whitehead’s idea of a growing, living, changing God. God is “the absolute wealth of potentiality”
wrote Whitehead: “[God] is not before all
creation, but with all creation.”[2]
Whitehead was not only a
philosopher’s philosopher, concerned only with speculating endlessly about
knowledge and existence – he had very specific critiques of society as
well. Apparently, while at Harvard, he
held regular open houses on Sunday afternoons to which all Harvard students
were welcome, and where conversations on a wide range of topics were
engaged. Whitehead, the now aging sage,
held court at these events and was know for his wise and witty opinions about a
wide range of human endeavors.[3]
Whitehead critiqued education,
pointing out the paradox of a system that “stifles imaginative zest” by
requiring so much repetition, whereas imagination requires impulse. “…Formal training has its limit of usefulness.”
he wrote. “Beyond that limit is
degeneration: ‘The lilies of the field toil not, neither do they spin.’” While often quoting the Hebrew and Christian
scriptures, Whitehead was just as likely to pepper his writing with quotes from
his favorite poets: Shelly and Wordsworth.
Of the dominant religion of his time, while not wholly condemning he did
have strong words: “When the Western World accepted Christianity, Caesar
conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his
lawyers….The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to
Caesar.”
Of society and its governing
structures he warned: “The social history of mankind [sic] exhibits great
organizations in their alternating functions of conditions for progress, and of
contrivances for stunting humanity.”
Looking at the paradoxes of our own democratic system, I think Whitehead
captured something basic about human community.
Although we want to create the beloved community, where all are included
and all have an equal chance to pursue life, liberty and happiness – fear and
greed and violence become stunting influences.
It is in attempting to own the truth that we venture into the realm of
evil: “…there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths.” explains
Whitehead. “It is in trying to treat
them as whole truths that plays the devil.”
I must say that the little I have
been able to convey of Whitehead’s vast intellectual undertakings fails on many
levels. Whitehead found it necessary to
invent his own language in order to communicate his ideas; the problem being
that most of us do not speak Whiteheadian and will never learn to do so, as
much as we might wish to stretch our minds.
Reading Whitehead is like eating a delicious but tough steak – you don’t
want to give up on the flavor, but it is still very difficult to chew!
However, there were brilliant young
men in his time who knew Whitehead and encountered him not only through his
published writings – all of his personal papers were burned at his death at his
own directive – but spoke with him, heard him lecture, spent time debating
ideas with him, and then built upon the framework he provided. Our subject for next week, the Naturalistic
Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman, will provide a more digestible avenue for
understanding how Whitehead’s ideas were applied. If Whitehead is a Porterhouse slightly
overcooked, Wieman is a Filet Mignon, tender and delicious (I apologize to the
Vegetarians and those of you carnivores who are starting to feel hungry just
now.). Especially for any of you who
struggle in the complicated terrain of agnosticism, or find yourselves caught
between the web of rationalism and faith, Wieman provides a sturdy bridge over
such waters.
In the meantime, I leave you with
this final thought from Whitehead: “Not ignorance, but
ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.” May we ever plumb the depths of the
many-sidedness of things, never resting in the delusion that we have arrived at
sufficient knowing. May we celebrate the
unfolding of life, which even when it appears blanketed with loss and pain, yet
might emerge into harmony and wholeness in the fullness of time.
Amen.