Last week I mentioned that for my theology, I don’t need God to be all-powerful. (In truth, the concept of an omnipotent God creates serious, deal-breaking problems for me vis-à-vis the character and nature of God. I lean toward YHWH (The Exhale) as being about the business of love/creation/love, as relational and all-encompassing.1 So now we’re tap-dancing into something called “process theology.”
In short, process theology holds that rather than being fixed and immutable, God is eternally becoming (YHWH, “I am who I am” can also be translated as “I will be who I will be.”). 2 There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but that gives you a hint of why it sparks controversy. “Process theologians…stress that God’s power is relational; rather than being unaffected and unchanged by the world, God is the being most affected by every other being in the universe.”3
I think in our culture, and certainly our current climate, the concept of the “power of God” has been fetishized to the point that our own fears and addiction to power4 have been projected onto God. In other words, what we may have been taught about God’s power really comes from our own need to believe Someone is in charge, Someone who can and will “fix” our broken world (the one we’ve, ahem, broken). And in the darker mirror of our psyche, Someone we fiercely hope will make sure “people will get what’s coming to them.”
But for me, when I view the power of God through the lens of process theology, I see, among other things, that the dynamics of love and relationship (by definition intertwined) are the very essence of God, and creation/creating is the ongoing and essential result. Within and beyond The Exhale, newness is continually occurring. From this vantage point, the power of God appears as something different from, or maybe the better word is beyond what, we seem to preference, and in coming weeks we’ll look at Bible stories and imagery that I believe point us in that direction.
We’ll consider panentheism next time. If you dig the Mystics, you might appreciate this rabbit hole.
I want to direct you to Dan McClellan, a biblical scholar who, among other areas, focuses on textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.” It’s heady stuff, be warned, but fascinating. In one of his videos (he is on Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube) he parses the phrase we’ve always read as “In the beginning…” and says it is better translated as “When God began creating…” That shift makes me think of a new theory dubbed the Big Bounce or “cyclic universe cosmology.” This theory says the Big Bang we think of as the beginning of everything is just one in a possibly infinite number of Big Bangs. But McClellan’s translation also leads me back (or forward!) to seeing creating energy as God’s essence.
Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
I think human beings always knee-jerk-read “power” and assume the meaning is equal to “power over.” I believe that comes from the bone-deep awareness of our mortality (our egos fight that, our subconscious/unconscious continually nudge us with the dark whispers of it), and the often infuriating sense of impotence that comes with our human limitations.
I might be a “process theology” person — because I believe the relational definition fits better than the “power over” ❤️