Citations and references in the text point to some of the other sources for the ideas offered. An alternative response to the honest recognition of the reality and extent of evil is to come to a new understanding of God's power. The idea that God is met in the moral "ought" or the categorical imperative is. secularized version of the biblical understanding of God as lawgiver and judge.
God allows himself to be expelled from the world and to the cross. In the official formulation of the religion it has taken the trivial form of merely being attributed to the Jews they cherished. But the deeper idolatry, of molding God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained.
Whitehead speaks of the "tender elements in the world, working slowly and silently through love."
God and the World by John B. Cobb, Jr
The One Who Calls
The question of the relationship between present and future stands at the center of the present. The message of Jesus, preached in word and deed, was the coming of the Kingdom of God. Thus, even in the present, all that is inherited from the past appears to be of only relative or provisional value in the light of the new action of God.
In real life, the causal influence of the past is constantly confronted with multiple possibilities for the future. When we speak of the power of an ideal, we seem to ascribe to it an independent status. But the power inherent in the process to distinguish it from the mere elaboration of the past in the present has not been elucidated.
The evolutionary vision of the world has recently been renewed for us in the work of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. The clarification of the induction as it works in the human. consciousness, in his total growth and in the totality of nature was the peculiar achievement of. First, we have noted that in our experience there is both the causal influence of the past and the fresh assertion of newly recognized normative possibilities.
So far I have suggested that the serious use of the word "God" plays an important role in directing life and determining the elements of experience that acquire meaning. And perhaps the sense of the sacred comes from our encounter with this very Whole. In The Structure of Christian Existence I undertook to describe some of the modes of existence through which man successively came in response to the call forward.
The World and God
Evil, Religion, and Creation
Evil and the Power of God
As long as power is conceived primarily in that sense, there can be no satisfactory explanation of the evil in the world which does not reject the power of God. Most of the traditional attacks on theism in the name of the problem of evil implicitly, if not explicitly, assume this kind of power on the part of God. The confirmation that cosmic and biological evolution has moved in the direction of greater value.
In this context, the problem of natural evil in the usual sense is not pressing. One might assume that God's role would be one of persuasion in light of the entire cosmic environment. But there is no evidence of such an activity of God, and the problem of evil repeats itself at this point in the form of the repeated destruction of greater values by the sake of lesser ones.
Much of the evil in the world stems from the inability of subhuman entities to be moved by inclusive goals. The historical ground for affirming the goodness of creation is faith in the goodness of the creator. It is true, even if there is no hope for a better future, it is possible to affirm life and humanity, and therefore also the goodness of the creator, even in the face of evil.
Belief in the goodness of the present world is not only linked to hope for a better future; Likewise, faith in God and hope for the future are strongly dependent on each other. If we cannot believe in God, the grounds for hope in the future are indeed unclear. But only with such hope can we share in the confirmation that it is very good.
Christianity as a Religion
In these directions seems to lie the power of the modern call for the secularization of Christianity, even though the numerous advocates for it. There are, however, consciously or unconsciously some beliefs that usually retain an element of absoluteness, and this can be seen in the context of the historical sense of the absoluteness of the individual soul. If we substitute soul for person, we generally find that even the most secularized Christians affirm something like the absoluteness of the individual.
Indeed, it is often in the name of the ultimate and supra-empirical significance of each man that polemics are launched against other absolutes. Secularization has gone further towards the dissolution of an absolute end, be it defined in terms of heaven or the Kingdom of Heaven. But in the prophetic tradition all such rejection of the absolutization of what is not truly absolute has been rooted in God's own absoluteness.
This means that no absolute moral rule is possible, but it does not mean that there is no absolute element relevant to the assessment of the very relative moral rules. Can our sense of the importance of service and the search for justice in the midst of infinite relativity survive the deeply felt awareness that there is no final goal to all our efforts. So far, nothing has been said about the secularizing process that would necessarily do away with worship in the form we knew it.
Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the view that authentic faith has little to do with cultic rites. My conclusion from the above is that the religious elements are the core of the story. Indeed, none of the great religions has been best approached as to what is distinctly religious in its constitution.
Is Christian Theology Still Possible?
The vision of the world as creation implies, secondly, that it is the product of divine purpose and that it belongs to God. As long as this vision of the world remains unchallenged, man does not radically face the threat of non-being or meaninglessness. But neither affirmation nor negation is ever total, for the vision of the world as creation requires both.
It is the vision of the world as creation that holds together Psalms and Proverbs, Jewish legalism and Jewish apocalypticism, Paul and the English Deists. It is my conviction that this self-understanding has been determined by the vision of the world as creation. Life regains meaning as it becomes transparent to its Reason, or in my terms, reaches the vision of the world (including, of course, the self) as creation.
One of the reasons for the passionate interest in the Christian vision and the beliefs associated with it is the horror inspired by the emptiness of the modern vision. Historically speaking, the scientific progress of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not weaken the vision of the world as creation. As long as the Newtonian vision of the world could be preserved, scientists clung to it with remarkable tenacity.
We have undoubtedly learned that the vision of the world we interpret cannot be justified. We have not been shown whether the Christian view of the world as creation is true or false. Regardless of the doctrines one articulately espouses, such a vision of the world as a vision is a remote possibility.
POSTSCRIPT
If we posit reality as the basis for the interpretive understanding of experiential data at all, we must implicitly attribute to it a creative, supporting and organizing principle. The variety of ways in which this has been done is great, and many, if not all, of the traditional ways are now impossible; but features of this view that are fundamental to the Christian faith can be found. If we can trust the above brief outline of the sources of Christian self-consciousness, the belief that my Creator knows me is of paramount importance.
Many theologians now attempt to articulate Christian doctrine fully within the framework of the dominant modern vision of reality, and they tend to be much clearer than the former. It is much more widely recognized now than when I wrote that acceptance of the modern vision requires either the most drastic re-understanding of God or the complete abandonment of God-language. Gerhard Ebeling's God and Ord and Paul van Buren's The Secular Meaning of the Gospel are.
Although the drastic consequences of accepting the modern vision are increasingly recognized, only a minority of theologians are prepared to engage in the effort to renew the vision of the world as creation. A dwindling number do so in the broad stream of the Thomistic tradition, and Teilhard de Chardin has attracted attention with his rather distinctive form of it. I remain convinced that the possibility of Christian theology depends on the renewal of the vision of the world as creation, and that Whitehead's philosophy provides the best channel for this renewal.
In the years since this material was written, I have tried to explain and justify the claim that the Whiteheadian understanding of the world is postmodern in the required sense. I have also tried to show that it offers us a new interpretation of the world as creation, which a. Such an understanding of the world might reform and revive remnants of the still effective vision of the world as creation.