Abstract
The tensions engendered by the traditional use of the absolute categories find their corollary in the abandonment of these categories in Trinitarian theology. This statement represents the critical side of this study. The constructive side centers around the proposition that the logical and moral difficulties thrown up by orthodoxy can be met by the social view of deity suggested by Trinitarian theology and worked out in the metaphysics of Whitehead. Such a view admitting temporality, relativity and process into the Such a view entails admitting temporality, relativity and process into the divine life.
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References
Cyril Richardson, “The Ontological Trinity: Father and Son”, Religion in Life, Vol. XXVIII, p. 15.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ( New York: Macmillan, 1929 ), pp. 10–11.
PR, pp. 31–32. John Cobb has collected a number of Whitehead passages which suggest the subordination of God to creativity. See A Christian Natural Theology, (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965 ), pp. 167–8, 204.
There are not two actual entities, the creativity and the creature. There is only one entity which is the self-creating creature“. Religion in the Making, ( New York: Macmillan, 1926 ), p. 102.
Stephen Ely, The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1942) esp. pp. 44–50.
Edward Madden and P.H. Hare, “Evil and Unlimited Power”, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XX, 2, December, 1966, pp. 278–289.
Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1966 ), p. 417.
Madden and Hare, “Evil and Unlimited Power”, The Review of Metaphysics Vol. XX, 2, December, 1966, p. 288.
See PR, p. 528: “God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast”.
Daniel D. Williams, “Deity, Monarchy & Metaphysics: Whitehead’s Critique of the Theological Tradition”, The Relevance of Whitehead, ed. I. Leclerc, ( New York: Macmillan, 1961 ), p. 367.
Whitehead employs the term “prehension” to refer to this basic way in which things experience or “feel” the world. Prehensions, then are feelings of data in such a way that the data organically inform the being of the prehender. In this way, the past becomes a component part of the present. Cf. PR, pp. 361–365.
Cf. Daniel Williams, “Deity, Monarchy & Metaphysics” in I. Leclerc, ed., The Relevance of Whitehead, and “How Does God Act” in W.L. Reese & E. Freeman, eds., Process & Divinity, ( LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1964 ).
How Does God Act“ in Reese & Freeman, eds., Process and Divinity,pp. 176–177.
Leslie Dewart, The Future of Belief, ( New York: Herder & Herder, 1966 ), p. 193.
I am partially indebted here, to William Christian’s unpublished paper “Whitehead’s Theology” (mimeographed and distributed by the Society for Religion in Higher Education, 1967).
Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgirmler, Theological Dictionary,(New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), p. 472, approvingly quoted by Dewart, The Future of Belief,p. 148.
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© 1974 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Cooper, B.Z. (1974). Redemption and Process Theism. In: The Idea of God. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-8093-1_8
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