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Panentheism from a Trinitarian Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Joseph A. Bracken
Joseph A. Bracken*
Affiliation:
Xavier University
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Abstract

Classical models of the God–world relationship tend to emphasize the transcendence of God at the expense of God's immanence to the world of creation. Neo-classical or process-oriented models, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the immanence of God within the world process at the expense of the divine transcendence. Using the distinction originally made by Thomas Aquinas between person and nature within the Godhead, the author offers a modified process-oriented understanding of the God–world relationship in which the transcendence of the triune God to creation is assured but in which creatures derive their existence and activity from the divine nature or ground of being along with the divine persons. Ultimate Reality, therefore, is not God in a unipersonal sense, nor the three divine persons apart from creation, but a Cosmic Society of existents, both finite and infinite, who are sustained by one and the same underlying principle of existence and activity.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Spring 1995 , pp. 7 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1995

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References

1 Tracy, David, “The End of Theism and the Transformation of God,” address to a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion at its convention in San Francisco, 11 22, 1992.Google Scholar

2 Hartshorne, Charles and Reese, William L., eds., Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 22.Google Scholar

3 Barbour, Ian, Myths, Models and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 7.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 47-48.

5 Barbour, Ian G., Religion in an Age of Science, The Gifford Lectures 1989-91, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 245.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 246-47.

7 Ibid., 248-50.

8 Ibid., 258-60.

9 Ibid., 261.

10 See Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. Griffin, David Ray and Shelburne, Donald W. (New York: Free Press, 1978), 18.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 224, 244.

12 Barbour, , Religion, 262.Google Scholar

13 Ibid.

14 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 34–35.Google Scholar

15 Barbour, , Religion, 262.Google Scholar See also Clifford, Anne M., “Postmodern Scientific Cosmology and the Christian God of Creation,” Horizons 21 (1994): 78–79.Google Scholar Clifford likewise notes the close affinity of Barbour's reflections in Religion in an Age of Science with the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

16 Aquinas, , Summa Theologiae, I, q. 8, a. 1 resp.Google Scholar

17 Ibid. See also Aristotle, , Physics, 243a–245b.Google Scholar

18 “Est autem participare quasi partem capere: et ideo quando aliquid particulariter recipit id quod ad alterum pertinet universaliter, dicitur participare illud” (Aquinas, Thomas, “Commentary on the De Hebdomadibus of Boethius,” lectio 2: in Opera Omnia, vol. 17 [New York: Musurgia, 1950], 342).Google Scholar Cf. also Geiger, L.-B. O.P., La participation dans la philosophie de S. Thomas d'Aquin, 2ième éd. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1953), 48.Google Scholar According to Geiger, this is the only place in his writings where Aquinas actually defines what he means by participation.

3 Geiger, , La participation, 225Google Scholar: “La procession des créatures à partir de Dieu a pour cause exemplaire la procession même des divines personnes. C'est dire que toutes deux ont en quelque sorte une source commune. ‘La procession temporelle des créatures procède de la procession éternelle des personnes comme un bras secondaire dérive du fleuve… Comme le bras se détache du cours principal, ainsi la créature sort de Dieu et quitte l'unité de l'essence, en qui, comme en le cours principal demeure contenu le flux (écoulement) des divines personnes’“ (emphasis added). The cited material here is from Aquinas's prologue to his commentary on the First Book of the Sentences (Opera Omnia, vol. 6 [New York: Musurgia, 1948], 1–2).Google Scholar

20 See on this point Duncan Reid, “Common Intention as a Methodological Principle in Ecumenical Theology with Reference to the Doctrine of the Uncreated Energies,” 2, paper delivered at the International AAR/SBL Congress in Melbourne, Australia, in July 1992 and, to the best of my knowledge, not yet published elsewhere.

21 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 348.Google Scholar

22 ”It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God” [ibid.].

23 See two articles by Schindler, David: “Creativity as Ultimate: Reflections on Actuality in Whitehead, Aristotle, Aquinas,” International Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1973): 161–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Whitehead's Challenge to Thomism on God and Creation: The Metaphysical Issues,” International Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1979): 285–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In both articles, Schindler argues that Whiteheadian Creativity and the Thomistic act of being must be subsistent in order to confer actuality on the entities in which they are instantiated. Yet, while within Thomistic philosophy the act of being is subsistent in God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, within Whitehead's thought Creativity is not identical with God. I, however, would argue that by implication Creativity subsists in its primordial instantiation, namely, God, and simply exists in its secondary instantiations, finite actual occasions (Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 225Google Scholar). Similarly, Schindler and other Thomists tend to forget that even within Thomism God as an individual existent is an instantiation, albeit the primordial instantiation, of the act of being while all creatures are secondary instantiations of that same act of being. For the act of being, as Schindler himself notes (“Creativity as Ultimate,” 166), is not itself an actuality but the dynamic principle for the existence and activity of actualities, beginning with God.

24 See Bracken, Joseph A. S.J., Society and Spirit: A Trinitarian Cosmology (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991), 123–39.Google Scholar

25 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 225.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 66.

Z7 Ibid., 67. See also Christian, William A., An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 395–96.Google Scholar Christian, to be sure, also contends that there are good reasons in support of the opposite position, namely, that God not be considered as in space and time. For example, God has no spatial or temporal boundaries like finite, actual occasions existing in space and time. If, however, not just God but every actual entity both exists somewhere in the extensive continuum and “is everywhere throughout the continuum” (Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 67Google Scholar), this particular objection seems to lose much of its force. Moreover, the fact that Whitehead himself did not explicitly make God's “region” within the extensive continuum co-terminous with the extensive continuum as a whole is no argument that it cannot be subsequently thus affirmed.

28 Nobo, Jorge Luis, Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 256.Google Scholar

29 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 88.Google Scholar

30 See Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, trans. Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 382–84Google Scholar, and Systematische Theologie, vol. 2 (Gòttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 99–124.Google Scholar

31 See Gelpi, Donald L. S.J., The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 90–100.Google Scholar

32 Gelpi himself maintains that entities not only have experiences but are constituted by them (ibid., 20). But, logically, this implies that one cannot fully share the experience of another without ontologically becoming the other. Furthermore, in my judgment, Gelpi is unconsciously distorting Whitehead's reformed subjectivist principle to which he makes reference here: namely, “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 167).Google Scholar For, besides subjects of experience or actual occasions, Whitehead also provided for the reality of societies which are not themselves subjects of experience but rather the objective patterns of interrelation between and among subjects of experience, as I shall indicate below. Hence, for Whitehead, too, there is a necessary distinction between experience and knowledge. I am my experience here and how, but that experience is largely constituted by my knowledge of various societies, i.e., the objective patterns of interrelation between myself and other subjects of experience.

33 Gelpi, to be sure, appeals to the Greek patristic notion of perichoresis to explain, on the one hand, how the three divine persons are fully present to one another in knowledge and love, and, on the other, how human beings could in similar fashion be intentionally present to one another and to the divine persons were it not for the various encumbrances of life in this world (Gelpi, , The Divine Mother, 133–36Google Scholar). Yet, as I see it, while the divine persons exhaustively know one another's being and activity, they do not have one and the same experience. Each divine person has its own experience as the ontological basis for its personal identity. Their principle of unity as one God, accordingly, is not a common experience but the shared objective effect of three closely related personal experiences, namely, a joint field of activity structured by the recurrent pattern of their ongoing relationship to one another. This structured field of activity thus represents the enduring objective reality of the divine community. Furthermore, insofar as the divine persons include creatures, above all, rational creatures, within the preestablished pattern of their own communtarian life (see below), then the divine persons and their creatures share a common field of activity with creatures adding further structure to the field by reason of their relationships to one another and to the divine persons. Through sharing a common field of activity with the divine persons and by operating in virtue of the same principle of existence and activity as the divine persons, therefore, creatures can be said to exist in God even as they remain ontologically independent of God.

34 In his most recent publication, The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology (New York: Paulist, 1994)Google Scholar, Gelpi offers a critique not simply of Whitehead and process theology but of most of the major theologians and their followers within Roman Catholic systematic theology at present (i.e., Edward Schillebeeckx, Juan Luis Segundo, Clodovis Boff, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan). While I find many of his comments quite insightful with respect to the limitations of the philosophical/theological scheme employed in each case, I nevertheless feel uneasy with his insistence that only his own modification of Peirce's conceptual scheme is truly workable for the proper understanding of experience in contemporary theology. To be specific, while Peirce's category of “thirdness” or law should surely be affirmed as an indispensable component of human experience, it does not follow that that same component is notably lacking in the conceptual schemes of the authors noted above so that they can be effectively categorized as “Kantians” or “conceptual nominalists” (see, e.g., The Turn to Experience, 14, 26-29, 53-61, 106, 117). Within Whitehead's philosophy, for example, law or generality is certainly present in Whitehead's notion of societies which perpetuate a recurrent pattern through space and over time for successive generations of actual occasions. Whitehead, to be sure, did not develop his own understanding of the notion of societies with the thoroughness with which he elaborated the category of actual occasion. He certainly did distinguish between societies and momentary nexuses or casual groupings of actual occasions in a way that Gelpi seems to overlook or ignore. Furthermore, this lacuna in Whitehead's thought has prompted individuals like myself to work on a further development of Whitehead's thought rather than simply to reject it. Naturally, one should also be free to use the conceptual categories of Charles Sanders Peirce in setting forth Roman Catholic doctrine as Gelpi does. But it is a much bigger risk to propose that Peirce's scheme for the interpretation of human experience is the only satisfactory model available for doing systematic theology today.

35 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 21.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 35.

37 Ibid., 350.

3S Ibid., 34-35, 89. See also on this point Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 203–06.Google Scholar

39 See Hartshorne, Charles, “The Compound Individual” in Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Northrup, F. S. C. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1936), 193–210.Google Scholar

40 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 34–35, 89.Google Scholar Whereas an Aristotelian substantial form imposes its unity on the material “elements,” the common element of form within a Whiteheadian society is generated by the interrelated activity of those same “elements,” namely, actual occasions. Thus in Aristotle's philosophy form enjoys priority over matter, while in Whitehead's thought matter enjoys priority over form. But in both philosophies the form provides the basis here and now for the unity and objectivity of the entity in question.

41 See Bracken, , Society and Spirit, 43–49, 58–60, and 67–73.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 123-39; see also Bracken, Joseph A., The Triune Symbol: Persons, Process and Community (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 35–47.Google Scholar

43 The divine names here and elsewhere are written with quotation marks so as to indicate their purely metaphorical, non-sexist intent. Furthermore, since the divine persons are here represented as personally ordered societies of actual occasions, they are evidently gender-less. For, in Whitehead's philosophy, actual occasions are also constitutive of the world of inanimate things. Only the divine names, accordingly, have a gender-orientation; it is for this reason that I deliberately cite them in quotation marks to indicate their metaphorical character.

44 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 224, 244.Google Scholar

45 See Copleston, Frederick S.J., Religion and the One: Philosophies East and West (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 17–18.Google Scholar Copleston also includes various non-theistic Asian religions (e.g., Taoism and Buddhism) as well as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in his survey of worldviews grounded in a given understanding of the One and the Many. In the end, he concludes that the One must either be conceived as a transcendent personal God or as a transpersonal Absolute (e.g., the universe as a self-evolving social process) which exists in and through its individual members (ibid., 148-71, 268-73). As will be evident below, I conceive the relationship between the One and the Many somewhat differently. The One as such is neither God nor a transpersonal Absolute such as the universe. Instead, it is a transpersonal principle of activity whereby the universe is an ordered totality rather than simply an aggregate of contingently existing things; likewise, it is simultaneously the principle of divine activity whereby three distinct persons are one God rather than three gods in close collaboration. The One, in other words, is not itself an entity (whether God or the universe) but the immanent principle of activity whereby God and the created universe exist in dynamic interrelation.

46 See, for example, Johnson, Elizabeth A., She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourses (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 214.Google Scholar Speaking of God as “Holy Wisdom,” Johnson notes: “Holy Wisdom does not exist in lifeless self-identity but corresponds to herself in a threefold repetition by virtue of which she can freely encompass the world. Unoriginate source, unknowable mother of all, she forever comes forth from hiddenness as her distinct self-expressing Word.… Simultaneously, Holy Wisdom forever unfurls as distinct self-bestowing Spirit.” In my judgment, this is implicit modalism since Holy Wisdom is the underlying reality for “her” three divine manifestations. On the other hand, Holy Wisdom in Johnson's scheme would correspond quite closely to my notion of the divine nature which empowers each of the divine persons to exist in relation to the other two. Especially when Johnson in the next chapter describes Holy Wisdom as “She Who Is” (ibid., 224-25) the correlation with the act of being in Thomistic metaphysics is quite clear. Yet, where I treat the act of being simply as the divine nature common to the three persons, Johnson hypostatizes the act of being so that the persons then become modal manifestations of this underlying hypostatic reality. Admittedly, Thomas Aquinas does the same thing in the Summa Theologiae, talking about God equivalently as one person (Ipsum Esse Subsistens) in the early questions of part 1 and then, as I see it, somewhat inconsistently about God as three persons in Questions 27-43 (see on this point “Ipsum Esse Subsistens: Subsistent Being or Subsistent Activity?,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 14 [1991]: 279–92Google Scholar, where I urge that God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens in the early questions is the indeterminate subject of the act of being, whereas in the later questions this indeterminate subject of the act of being is further specified as three distinct but intrinsically interrelated divine persons). But, as I see it, even the authority of Aquinas does not justify this line of thought. It would be better to consider the act of being more precisely as the nature of God which the three divine persons equally share in their dynamic relations to one another. Other recent authors on the Trinity whose thought I find implicitly modalistic would be Hodgson, Peter in God in History: Shapes of Freedom (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989);Google ScholarLampe, G. W. H. in God as Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977);Google Scholar and Lodahl, Michael in Shekhinah/Spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish and Christian Religion (New York: Paulist, 1992).Google Scholar Space is lacking, however, for careful exposition of my reasons for this judgment in each case.

47 See, for example, LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 223.Google Scholar Describing the dynamism of the economy of salvation, LaCugna comments: “This chiastic model of emanation and return, exitus and reditus, expresses the one ecstatic movement of God outward by which all things originate from God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, and all things are brought into union with God and returned to God.… [T]he subject matter of the Christian theology of God is the one dynamic movement of God, a Patre ad Patrem.” Thus the unity of the Godhead is located in the first person, God (the Father), who inevitably enjoys a certain pre-eminence over the other two divine persons. As Leonardo Boff comments, “the nature (or substance or essence) of God is personalized at the outset. The Father establishes the original relationships out of himself, since he is constituted the sole source of origin of all relationships” (Boff, Leonard, Trinity and Society, trans. Burns, Paul [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988], 82).Google Scholar This approach to the Trinity is quite common among Orthodox theologians, including John Zizioulas on whom LaCugna relies heavily for her own interpretation of the Trinity. Furthermore, it is also implicit in Karl Rahner's understanding of the Trinity on whom LaCugna likewise depends, even as she differs from him on certain key issues. For, in The Trinity Rahner states that the Father is the “God of the old covenant” who inaugurates the new covenant by sending us “His” Son and Holy Spirit (Rahner, Karl, The Trinity, trans. Donceel, Joseph [New York: Herder & Herder, 1970], 59Google Scholar). Thus the nature or essence of God for Rahner is the selfhood of the Father as eternally shared with the Son and the Spirit within the “immanent” Trinity and then progressively communicated to human beings in the economy of salvation (ibid., 102).

48 See Moltmann, Jürgen, Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Kohl, Margaret (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 174–76;Google Scholar also Boff, , Trinity and Society, 83–85.Google Scholar

49 In recent publications, Gordon Kaufman likewise seems to be thinking of God, not in terms of a transcendent entity, but along the lines of an underlying ontological activity which gives order and direction to the “cosmic powers” which brought human beings into existence and continue to sustain them: on this point see Kaufman, Gordon, “Nature, History and God: Toward an Integrated Conceptualization,” Zygon 27 (1992): 379–401.Google Scholar The difference between Kaufman and me, of course, is that I argue that this underlying activity is the nature of God functioning as the ground of being for creation rather than simply God as such. Thus I am able to preserve belief in a personal God even as I agree with Kaufman that we humans normally experience God not as an entity distinct from ourselves but as a “serendipitous” activity at work in our own lives and in the world around us.