God Christ Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology

by Marjorie Suchocki

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to process theology by one of its foremost practitioners.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Nonfiction, Christian

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1984

Reviews

[Steve Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part I The Process Model: Theology in a Relational World
The philosophical, social, scientific, and technological climate of modernity and postmodernity invites us to express and experience Christian faith through “the relational model of existence utilized by process theology.” (11)
The “cumulative acts of human beings in society are the source of the demonic”(15) - culture and history and forces that turn us away from well-being. Sin is assent to the demonic. It is response to death in its many forms that closes ourselves off from the future that is possible for us. Sin imprisons. It harms others and lessens our capacity to be the gift to others we could possibly be. Sin distorts reality. It is “the Lie.” (27)
God is the entity that envisions all possibilities, without restraint or sin. God is relational, providing the world with possibility, receiving the effects of all responses, evaluating and integrating them in an everlasting process of transformation that invites transformative response.

Part II God For Us: A Process Doctrine of God
Suchocki discusses God’s “touch”, God’s offering of possibility and the development of consciousness. I think we could argue that a process understanding of Pauline “walking in the spirit” is to live increasingly in harmony with the preconscious aims/opportunities/invitations from God.
God’s presence is a balm to our profound loneliness in the world, “releasing us from loneliness to presence” and so reengaging us in “the creation of meaning.” (59) “Presence - human and divine - insists upon and achieves the meaning of love.” (61)
Traditional theology has positive God’s timeless omniscience to help resolve the human terror of perishing. And yet this theology denies the reality of time and of God’s participation with us. God’s knowledge of all that is possible and God’s inclusion of all that has ever existed into the divine adventure yields forges God’s tremendous wisdom, which invites us to partner with God in responsive trust, co-creating a more beautiful present and future.
God’s power is to eternally self-create and to eternally integrate all influences into a vision of just harmonious possibility. God’s power of influence is to stir hope and preserving action toward a more just world.

Part III God as Presence. God in Christ: A Process Christology
Jesus reveals God’s love through incarnation. In process, incarnation - Christ being human and divine - is easy to explain. How Jesus is uniquely God incarnate is harder. In Christ, though, four conditions make for a unique incarnation - the expectancy or fullness of time, the initial aim of God toward Jesus, the full adoption of that aim by Jesus, and the ongoing process of Jesus’ complete reception of God’s aims throughout his life.
God’s participation in Jesus’ suffering on the cross is revelation of and grounds for God’s deep understanding of the human experience. “My pain … is also God’s pain” and God loves us in our pain. (110) All sins of society are also sins against the God who feels, and in God’s suffering with us, God knows us well enough to give us possibilities that shape transformation.
Resurrection reveals the center of God - beauty, joy, and life, even while receiving and integrating all pain and tragedy. God continually lives by pattern of resurrection: within Godself, integrating received death into the life of God, and within the world, receiving death, ugliness, and misery, and returning transformative possibilities for life, beauty, and joy. “Love is the basis of the resurrection and the firstfruit of the resurrection, becoming the ground for trust and hope.” (125)

Part IV Wisdom. Christ in God: A Process Ecclesiology
Faith is needed to respond to God’s possibilities, while faith also presupposes grace, both in the proclamation of the gospel one receives through the church and through God’s presence and God’s initial aims offered to us. The church is the community of those whose identities are being formed by faith, in response to Christ, and who are proclaiming the gospel through word and deed, that others may respond.
The church’s apostolicity is its relationship to the past in its “constant testimony to the resurrection.” (138) Its unity is a quality of its future, as people and communities are formed into “our bond of kinship in Christ.” (146) Its holiness is in its present, “in the living dynamism” of “love and justice,” “openness and mutuality” of Christ and Christ’s kindom. (149) There is a constant pole to all this - the church’s reference point in Christ - and a relative pole, the degree to which communities are responding to Christ in their own diverse circumstances and cultures.
Suchocki discusses the sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper in terms of constancy and relativity, constancy of proclaiming Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, relativity of community’s response to these re-presentations of Christ. There is a beautiful discussion of these two sacraments as modes of apostolicity - re-presenting the past and future of people united with Christ; unity - communities becoming community around and in Christ; and holiness - the effect of love and justice in community as we respond to Christ.
The universality (or catholicity) of the church is that it can be expressed in all cultures throughout the earth, not that it must be the faith system for all people. It is available to all peoples, not needing to be first or dominant for all peoples.

Part V Power. The Reign of God: A Process Eschatology
“The reign of God”, the focus of the teaching of Jesus, is “to live deeply and richly in this life through personal and social structures of love, and to participate everlastingly in the life of God.” (183) Key means by which God in Christ leads Christians toward deep and rich life are eschatological forgiveness and reversal of values. Suchocki calls for liberation from demons both “out there” and “in here, within one’s own psyche and kind” and along these lines, discusses the connection between forgiveness and deliverance. (194)
Resurrection as a feature of the reign of God is discussed. There are many course corrections from popular Christian (mis)understandings. Heaven is not a place outside of earth, heaven is God. “Early church theologians expressed the resurrection as a promotion into God and as a participation in God.” (203) (Really?) So this resurrection begins in this life, as all our experience is prehended by God and drawn into subjective immortality with God. Suchocki argues that this transformation in God - spiritual, not material - is consistent with I Corinthians immortal bodies, but I think she underestimates the degree to which Paul models his thinking on the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, which involved some form of embodied consciousness. Suchocki also discusses God’s ongoing judgement of humanity as God’s assessing and evaluating us as God integrates our becoming into God’s experience. Beyond this, Suchocki discusses some form of post-mortem judgement which involves radically deep self-knowledge, radical union with God while maintaining differentiation, and a profound awareness of our effects on God and all of creation. To some this process of evaluation - of participation in God’s concrescence - will feel like heaven, to others hell. And yet for all, “there is a home in God for the whole universe.” (216)
Prayer is discussed, modelled on the Lord’s prayer, as a “means whereby we open ourselves for conformity to God’s purposes”, as a “catapulting activity, pushing us to appropriate action,” and as a “unitive activity, through which our fears of fragmentation are put to flight in the deep reality of the togetherness within God’s final reign.” (224) What is not discussed is the impact of our prayers upon God.
Before a really great appendix summarizing process thought, Suchocki concludes with a chapter on the Trinity. Father, Son, Holy Spirit served as a revelation of God’s complexity amidst unity, but “the historical relativity of the words is lost to view.” (234) This formulation of Triune God now obscures as much as it illuminates. Suchocki suggests that presence, wisdom, and power is a better formulation in our context, or even the three words God for us.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN EXCELLENT STATEMENT OF PROCESS THEOLOGY

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (born 1933) is an author and United Methodist professor emerita of theology at Claremont School of Theology; she is also co-director of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont. She has written other books such as The Fall to Violence; Divinity & Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism; In God's Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer; Through a Lens Darkly: Tracing Redemption in Film; The Whispered Word: A Theology of Preaching, etc.

Process theology John Cobb wrote in his Foreword to this 1986 book, “What will happen when feminist theologians turn their attention away from the discussion of woman and man and feminine and masculine and join in writing about God and human beings, the church and the wider world?... will it truly be theology in a new key? [This book] provides us with the first important answer to this question. It presupposed feminist insights without articulating or labeling them. And it proceeds to speak of the great doctrines of the church from a perspective which is not emphasized. It is not theology about feminist issues, but it IS feminist theology… it is process theology with a difference.”

In the first chapter, Suchocki explains, “Process theology is a contemporary expression of Christian faith. The content of that faith is still formed through personal and historical interpretations of God’s work… The philosophical vehicle through which this faith is expressed in that of Alfred North Whitehead… Faith, too, follows from our experience of God’s redemptive power. By using Whitehead’s model of experience to express the realities of Christian faith, we push toward the rewards of deepening our own vision and action in the world through theological thought.” (Pg. 5)

She asks, “How is it, in a world so good, that we do not enrich each other? How is there room for sin in the process model?... the model… offers a peculiar clarity with regard to the dynamics of sin… the inescapability of relationships means that the avenues of enrichment may become avenues of destruction. The effects of relationships are internal, and therefore we are peculiarly vulnerable to each other. The world as described by process thought may indeed be beautiful, but it is also dangerous.” (Pg. 22)

She notes, “God is revealed in the world. Sometimes… we encounter a long series of gray and rainy days. To be sure, there is light, but our spirits long for the brightness of the sun… finally and suddenly the sun breaks through… [This is like] the hiddenness of God, both through the sense in which God’s presence is at preconscious levels of existence, and through the distortions of sin. This hiddenness is no more final than the gray of springtime skies. General revelation, or the mark of God in the world, is like the light that illumines the world despite the overlying clouds, and special revelation is like the bursting through of the sun.” (Pg. 56)

She states, “God, and only God, knows every reality, every actuality, precisely as it experienced itself… God’s ‘knowledge of the world, then, is absolute and complete, even to the inclusion of its own experience of temporality. The possibilities of the primordial nature and the actualities felt in the consequent nature thus constitute the knowledge of God. The wisdom of God is… God’s use of all that is known. God’s integration of the consequent nature into the primordial nature is the reality of God’s wisdom… It is God’s wisdom, rather than God’s knowledge per se, that saves us.” (Pg. 75)

She points out, “In a process universe, everything affects everything else: to be for oneself is also to be for others… That which one is, one is for the universe. This is no less true for God than for the most insignificant portion of actuality; to be is to have an effect. As God feels the world and pulls the divinely recreated world into divine justice, this actualized reality of justice itself gives rise to God’s feeling for optimum modes of justice in the temporal world that is becoming. What God does with the world in the divine nature influences God’s own influence on the becoming world… God’s creative power in the world is always toward justice, and toward an achievable mode of finite justice. That the justice is ACHIEVABLE is due to God; whether or not the justice is ACHIEVED is due to the world.” (Pg. 87)

She suggests, “if love grows among the religions of the world… so that we are no longer competitors and strangers and enemies to be feared, then we will be encountering a new possibility for harmony in the world… If universality is located in God rather than in our own particularities, then there is a basis for such a new community. There is a basis for genuinely hearing the other rather than trying to make the other like us… could we be experiencing a new direction from God toward human community through the affirmation of many who remain many and yet are as one? If that were the case, and if we responded, we might know something of the kingdom of God on earth.” (Pg. 160) Later, she adds, “Differentiation remains in the primordial depths of God, but a differentiation that is divinely sustained as the most fitting actuality of unity, beauty, holiness: the kingdom of God which is the kingdom in God which is God.” (Pg. 190)

She concludes, “How we think about reality matters; our expressions of a vision of reality are part and parcel of that life which we call redemptive and Christian. That the vision is relative is essential to the openness of the vision and to the redemptiveness of the vision… Finally, perhaps, the expression of a vision of reality which is relative to our time and place is simply a mode in finitude of what might finally be an everlasting dialogue, each sharing with another a vision of beauty from a particular perspective, yet keenly and gratefully and joyfully feeling the depths of beauty from which all our visions spring.” (Pg. 223)

Much more than simply an “introduction” or “guide” to Process Theology, this book is filled with original developments and insights. It will be of great interest to those studying Process Philosophy and Theology.

[Robert S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, but worth the effort.

[Joel Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it. Process party for the win. I find this to be a more helpful and healthy view of Gods participation in life with us. It can be dense at times, but it’s worth a read.

[John Hood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty advanced book on process theology. If you're faith is lacking a little mental challenge, this is something to try.

[Horace Mcmillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most beautiful philosophical theology I have ever read. It just works.

[Roger]

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