Theology

Rabbi Bradley Artson on Process Theology

Process theology recognizes every “thing” is really a series of events across time, a process, that emerges in relationship. We are each a process, and creation is a process. God is a process, revelation is a process. All emerge in relationship, meaning that no thing can be understood in isolation. Each event has an interiority in which it integrates the reality around it with its own choice about how to proceed. In addition, an exteriority in which it has an impact on the choices of every other event around it. We are all part of something interactive and dynamic.

In such a worldview, God is not outside the system as some unchanging, eternal abstraction. Instead, God permeates every aspect of becoming, indeed grounds all becoming by inviting us and every level of reality toward our own optimal possibilities. The future remains open, through God’s lure, to our own decisions of how or what we will chose next. God, then, uses a persistent, persuasive power, working in each of us (and all creation at every level) to nudge us toward the best possible outcome. But God’s power is not coercive and not all powerful. God cannot break the rules or unilaterally dictate our choices. Having created and then partnered with this particular cosmos, God is vulnerable to the choices that each of us makes freely as co-creators.

Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, p. 64

The hiding God is present; though man is unaware of him, He is present in his hiddenness. Therefore, God can only hide in this world. But if this world were altogether and radically profane, there would be no place in it for Him to hide. He can only hide in history. Since history is man's responsibility, one would, in fact, expect him to hide, to be silent, while man goes about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God's convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.

Language: The Challenge Discussing God

"God in Modern Jewish Thought" by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD

"Moreover, people who believe in God mean many different things by the word “God,” and they differ even more widely in the role that that belief plays in their lives and what it means in terms of their actions. Conversely, people who deny belief in God mean to state many different things in describing themselves that way, and their denial may be a pervasive part of their lives - they fight belief in God as often as they can and with as many people as they can - or it may be just a minor aspect of their lives.

This is all very confusing. After all, if people mean very different things by the word “God,” they presumably mean very different things by asserting or denying belief in God. Furthermore, the kind of evidence we would look for to convince us of their belief or denial depends crucially on what they mean to assert or deny in the first place. One can legitimately wonder whether people actually share anything when they speak about God or whether God-talk is a series of people using their own private languages, languages that can only be understood and assessed by others if they have the patience to ask each person many questions about what they mean by “God” and why they believe whatever they assert about God...

...One last point will be helpful for our discussion of modern Jewish conceptions of God. Because we have the faculty of memory, our pictures of other human beings can often remain the same long after we lose track of them. That is clearly true for my memory of many of my friends and students in years past and, I presume, it is equally true of their memories of me, unless we happen to see each other years later. If, however, we are still interacting with each other, it is probably important to adjust our images of each other so that our current interactions reflect the new realities. That is clearly the case with parents and children: as children mature, parents need to change their image of them and their expectations of them, or there will be trouble! My point here, then, is that sometimes it is very important to update one’s former image of a person in order to reflect the changed circumstances of our relationship.

The implications of this human analogy are hopefully clear. If we have multiple conceptions of human beings, where, after all, one can point to one physical body as the person in question, how much the more will that be true of God, where no such physical body exists. Furthermore, if various people can and do have multiple and widely varying conceptions of a person, all the more should that be true of God, who presumably is open to interaction with everyone. In fact, in light of the number of people who profess a belief in God, it is amazing that there are not vastly more conceptions of God than there are.

The relevant and trustworthy sources of evidence for any one of those conceptions will depend on the particular description of God, just as it does with human beings. If God is defined as “the Creator of the universe,” for example, the evidence depends on theories of astrophysics. Questions like these are then relevant: Did the world come into being at a given moment, or has it existed eternally? What evidence is relevant to deciding that question – or is the answer to that question completely beyond human capability to know? If, for the sake of argument, physicists find grounds to believe in the Big Bang, is that equivalent to a belief in God as the Creator? On the other hand, if God is portrayed as a powerful and loving, covenantal partner with the People Israel, as most Jewish sources do, what kinds of evidence can and should we look for to make belief in such a divine Partner reasonable? However we answer that question, the nature of the evidence will clearly be different from what we need to demonstrate a divine creative force.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to be willing to reconsider our images of God in the past - and especially those of our childhood - in light of our more mature thinking and our added experiences as adults. God may have been “the Man on the Mountain with the flowing white beard” when we were seven or eight, but that will not do for seriously religious and intellectually alive adults – any more than second- or- third-grade mathematics or English skills will suffice for an adult."

ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL (1907-1972): GOD AS WHOLLY OTHER

"God, according to Heschel, can be encountered in three ways: through nature, through God’s word in the Bible, and, most importantly, through sacred deeds. While Kaplan concentrated on the creative forces of nature to find and identify God, Heschel instead focuses on the sublime, the mystery and the glory of nature and the reactions that those aspects of nature engender in us – namely, wonder, awe, and faith. The sublime is “that which we see and are unable to convey” (God in Search of Man, p. 39); it produces in us a response of wonder – “Wow!” The mystery to which Heschel refers is not what we do not yet know, which would lead to inquiry; it rather is the surprise that anything exists at all, which engenders in us a sense of awe or radical amazement – “Oh!” The glory is “the presence, not the essence, of God; an act rather than a quality; a process, not a substance.” It is the experience of God’s abundance of goodness and truth, which produce in us a response of faith – “Yes!”

“God is more immediately found in the Bible as well as in acts of kindness and worship than in the mountains and forests” (ibid., pp. 311-312). But Heschel is anything but a fundamentalist: “The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally” (ibid., pp. 178-179). Instead, one must one must see the Bible as the record of human beings being overwhelmed by God and trying to describe their admittedly inadequate understanding of such experiences in their own words: “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash [interpretation]” (ibid., p. 185). Revelation is therefore an ongoing process, in which the Bible gives each of us a clue of God’s meaning for our lives each time we study it.

Finally, the most effective way to find God, according to Heschel, is through obeying the commandments and through worship. Piety is a primary way to attain faith: “A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought” (ibid., p. 283). Simply obeying the commandments, though, can lead to “religious behaviorism”; to avoid that, one must fulfill the commandments with focused attention (kavvanah), and one must root one’s observance in theological awareness, one’s halakhah in aggadah.

All of these paths to God, however, are only clues to something beyond experience. Ultimately, God is “an ontological presupposition” – that is, a fact about being that we must presuppose before we ever experience anything, let alone think about it. In that way, God is like “thing” or “movement,” both of which we must presuppose before we can experience anything, let along think or talk about it. “The meaning and verification of the ontological presupposition are attained in rare moments of insight” (ibid., p. 114), and the God we encounter through such clues and in such moments is ultimately unknowable: “Our starting point is not the known, the finite, the order, but the unknown within the known, the infinite within the finite, the mystery within the order” (ibid.). God is, then, wholly other from what we know in human experience, but God can be discovered if we are sensitive enough to the clues in nature, the Bible, and in sacred deeds and worship and if those lead us to the insight of the reality of God behind all those phenomena and His importance for our lives." - Rabbi Elliot Dorff

"It is not from experience but from our inability to experience what is given to our mind that certainty of the realness of God is derived…Our certainty is the result of wonder and radical amazement, of awe before the mystery and meaning of the totality of life beyond our rational discerning. Faith is the response to the mystery, shot through with meaning; the response to a challenge which no one can for ever ignore. “The heaven” is a challenge. When you “lift up your eyes on high” you are faced with the question. Faith is an act of man who transcending himself responds to him who transcends the world…

God is the great mystery, but our faith in Him conveys more understanding of Him than either reason or perception is able to grasp…This, indeed, is the greatness of man: to have faith. For faith is an act of freedom, of independence of our own limited faculties, whether of reason or sense-perception. It is an act of spiritual ecstasy, of rising above our own wisdom." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel God in Search of Man, p. 46-47

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder...Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.

Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.

The grandeur or mystery of being is not a particular puzzle to the mind, as, for example, the cause of volcanic eruptions. We do not have to go to the end of reasoning to encounter it. Grandeur or mystery is something with which we are confronted everywhere and at all times. Even the very act of thinking baffles our thinking.

ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955): God as the Mystery of the Universe

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." - Einstein

"Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order... This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic." - Einstein

"Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things." - Einstein

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is inpenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men." - Einstein