Process Theology and the Critique of Classical Theism

Summary

Process theology, developing from Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy (Process and Reality, 1929) and Charles Hartshorne's theological elaboration, challenges classical theism on several specific points: divine immutability, divine atemporality, and the related question of whether the God of classical theism is sufficiently personal to be the God of religious life. Process theology's alternative — a dipolar conception in which God has both an eternal abstract pole and a temporal concrete pole, with God genuinely affected by and responsive to creaturely action — has gained substantial influence in twentieth-century Protestant and Catholic theology. Within Maslik 1 (Philosophical and Metaphysical), the process challenge identifies real difficulties for classical theism that contemporary defenders have engaged with care; the framework preserves a modified classical theism as baseline while acknowledging the legitimate concerns process theology raises.

The Critique of Classical Theism

Process theology's critique focuses on what it takes to be three problematic features of classical theism.

Divine immutability

Classical theism (Augustine, Aquinas, the major classical Christian and Islamic traditions) affirms divine immutability: God does not change. This produces specific theological commitments. God's knowledge does not increase as new events occur; God's attitudes do not shift in response to creaturely action; God's will does not develop over time.

Process theology argues this is incompatible with the religious life. If God does not change in response to prayer, then prayer's communicative dimension is illusory. If God does not grieve at human suffering or rejoice at human flourishing, then the personal relationality religion describes is also illusory. Religion, on process theology's reading, requires a God who responds — who is affected by what creatures do, not merely who knows what they do from eternity.

Classical theist responses (Aquinas, Eleonore Stump, Brian Davies) distinguish between intrinsic and Cambridge change: God does not change intrinsically (in respect of God's essence) but can have changing relations to changing creatures without intrinsic change. The distinction is real but contested.

Divine atemporality

Classical theism affirms divine atemporality (or "eternity" in the strong sense): God does not exist in time but exists outside time, with all of time present to God simultaneously.

Process theology argues that atemporality is incompatible with genuine divine action and personal relation. To act in time, a being must occupy time at some point. A genuinely atemporal being seems either to be unable to act in time at all or to act in a way that is impersonal and unaffected by temporal circumstance.

Classical responses (Stump-Kretzmann's "eternal time" proposal, see divine-attributes-and-the-coherence-of- theism) develop sophisticated apparatus for relating atemporal divine action to temporal creaturely reception. These responses preserve classical atemporality while accommodating the personal dimension.

Nicholas Wolterstorff's Time and Eternity (2017) develops a different response from within Christian philosophy: a temporal God who exists in time rather than outside it. This is closer to process theology in this respect than classical theism. The framework engages both positions as live options.

Divine impassibility

The third critical point is divine impassibility — the classical doctrine that God does not have passions (affective states caused by external circumstances). Classical theology distinguishes God's love (which is intrinsic and self-determining) from creaturely love (which is caused by the lovable object and changes as the object changes). God loves humans, on classical theism, but is not moved by humans in the way humans are moved by what they love.

Process theology rejects this. A God who is not moved by human suffering, not affected by human action, not changed by creation, is not the personal God of religious life.

Recent Christian theology has engaged this question extensively. The trend has been toward modified forms of classical theism that preserve impassibility in its strong metaphysical form while affirming richer personal-relational dimensions than the strongest classical statements allow. The exchange between Brian Davies (defending classical impassibility) and contemporary critics has been substantive.

The Process Alternative

Process theology's positive proposal involves a dipolar conception of God. God has two poles or aspects.

The primordial nature (Whitehead) or abstract pole (Hartshorne) is eternal and unchanging. It contains the eternal forms or possibilities, the rational structure of what could be.

The consequent nature (Whitehead) or concrete pole (Hartshorne) is temporal and changing. It receives the actual world as it unfolds, is affected by what creatures do, and responds.

The dipolar conception attempts to preserve both classical theism's commitment to divine eternity (in the primordial nature) and the religious experience of personal divine relationality (in the consequent nature).

John Cobb's Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975) and David Ray Griffin's series of works developed the position theologically. Process theology has been influential particularly in liberal Protestant theology and in some streams of Catholic thought.

What Process Theology Captures

The framework grants what process theology rightly captures.

The religious-experiential point. The God of religious life is experienced as personal, relational, and responsive. Classical statements that emphasize divine immutability strongly can obscure this dimension. The process insistence that God is related to creation in a substantial way is a legitimate religious observation.

The theological problem of prayer. If God knows everything from eternity and does not change in response to prayer, the religious activity of prayer needs careful theological articulation. Classical responses are available, but the question is real.

The problem of divine suffering. The biblical witness (and the Qurʾanic, to a lesser extent) speaks of God as grieved, angered, pleased — language that the strongest classical impassibility readings struggle to accommodate. The process insistence that this language is not merely metaphorical has theological force.

What Process Theology Costs

Process theology has costs the framework cannot ignore.

Reduced divine perfection. The dipolar God is, in its consequent nature, a being that develops, grows, responds. This is closer to the God of religious life in some respects but raises problems about whether such a being is sufficiently God-like in classical theological terms (omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good in the strong senses).

Difficulties with creation. If God is genuinely affected by creation and develops in response to it, creation becomes part of God's own development. This blurs the classical creator-creature distinction. Process theology's relation to creatio ex nihilo has been contested within the tradition itself; some versions of process theology deny the doctrine outright.

Problems for divine sovereignty. If God is responsive to creaturely action and develops in response, divine sovereignty in the classical sense is reduced. Process theology accepts this; it is not a bug but a feature. But it represents a substantial departure from classical theism.

Problems for divine perfection. A God who can be surprised by creaturely action, frustrated by creaturely resistance, or grieved by creaturely suffering is a God with vulnerabilities that classical theism resisted as diminutions of divine perfection.

The Islamic Tradition's Relevance

The Islamic tradition has its own engagement with these questions. The kalām tradition's debates about the ṣifāt (divine attributes) addressed many of the same issues that contemporary classical-process disputes address. The Ashʿarī school's position (real attributes whose modality is unknown) preserves both attributes language and divine simplicity in ways that resemble some sophisticated classical-theistic responses to process critique. The Muʿtazilī position has structural features that overlap with both classical and process positions in different respects.

Importantly, Islamic theology has generally not gone as far as process theology in modifying classical theism. The Qurʾanic language of divine knowledge, power, and will resists the kinds of revision process theology proposes. The fiṭra doctrine assumes a God who is structurally and not just functionally what classical theism describes.

The Framework's Position

The framework's position is a modified classical theism.

Modified: the framework acknowledges that the strongest classical statements (some Augustinian formulations, some Thomist developments) can produce difficulties for the personal-relational dimension of religious life, and that contemporary classical theism has been right to develop subtler positions.

Classical: the framework preserves divine perfection in the strong sense — omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, simplicity, atemporality — as the baseline. The process alternative goes further than the framework finds warranted by the considerations process theology raises.

Theology of accommodation. The framework accepts that some biblical, Qurʾanic, and ordinary religious language about God involves accommodation — expressing divine reality in terms intelligible to human cognition without claiming that the human- intelligible terms exhaust the divine reality. The question of how literally to take responsive, emotive, temporal language about God is then a hermeneutical question rather than a metaphysical forced choice.

What This Article Establishes

Contributions:

A presentation of the process theology challenge.
Engagement with the strongest versions of each process critique (immutability, atemporality, impassibility).
Acknowledgment of what process theology rightly captures.
Identification of what process theology costs.
The framework's position: modified classical theism as baseline.

Limits:

The article does not adjudicate every disputed point.
The article does not exhaust the engagement with contemporary classical theism (Stump, Mann, Wolterstorff, Davies have produced extensive relevant work).

Connections to Other Masalik

Maslik 1 (this maslik): companion to kalam-vs-falsafa-debate, divine-attributes-and- the-coherence-of-theism, ghazali-tahafut-and- causation.
Maslik 0 (Transversal): connects to the problem of evil and to questions about religious plurality.
Maslik 5 (Prophetic): connects to questions about how revelation describes divine action.

Key Distinctions

Classical theism (immutable, atemporal, impassible) vs. process theology (dipolar, temporal in one pole, genuinely affected by creation)
Strong classical formulations vs. modified classical theism (e.g., Stump-Kretzmann "eternal time")
Whitehead's primordial/consequent natures / Hartshorne's abstract/concrete poles
Cambridge change (relational change without intrinsic change) vs. substantive change
Theology of accommodation (some divine language is accommodative to human cognition)
The framework's modified classical theism as baseline position

Major Proponents (of process theology)

Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality (1929)
Charles Hartshorne — The Divine Relativity (1948); Anselm's Discovery (1965)
John Cobb — Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975)
David Ray Griffin — God and Religion in the Postmodern World (1989); multiple later works
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki — In God's Presence (1996)
Catherine Keller — On the Mystery (2008)

Major Critics (defending classical theism)

Brian Davies — The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (2006); Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary (2014)
Eleonore Stump — Aquinas (2003)
William Mann — multiple papers on divine attributes
Edward Wierenga — The Nature of God (1989)
Edward Feser — Aquinas (2009); broader Thomist defense
Most contemporary Islamic theologians — the Islamic tradition has generally remained closer to classical theism than to process theology