The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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According to an article on "God and Cyberspace" in TIME, the weekly newsmagazine (December 16, 1996: 67), "process theology" is "a spiritual movement, . . . whose proponents argue that God evolves along with man. In their mind, the immutable God embraced by scholars like [Alvin] Plantinga make[s] no more sense today than an unchanging computer operating system. 'If God doesn't change, we are in danger of losing God,' says William Grassie, a Quaker professor of religion at Temple University[.] 'There is a shift to [the idea of] God as a process evolving with us. If you believe in an eternal, unchanging God, you'll be in trouble.'"

I have two comments on this: 

(1) That "process theology," properly so-called, may be critical reflection on or toward a "spiritual movement" is not sufficient reason for saying that it simply is such a movement, at least as such language is ordinarily understood. 

(2) In the views of the best known "process theologians," "God evolves along with man" is true only with the proviso that there is an "infinite qualitative difference" between God's evolution  and man's, or that of any other nondivine being. Whereas the evolution of any being other than God has both a beginning and an end, God's evolution is everlasting, never having begun and never ending. Because this is so, however, it would be as wrong to shift from the idea of God as immutable to the idea of God as a process evolving with us as the other way around; for it is as true, and as important, to say that God is (in one respect) eternal and unchanging as God alone can be as to say that God is (in another respect) temporal and changing, again, as only God can be. 

10 February 1997

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