3.God as creative Responsive Love (3)

Divine creative love as persuasive

    God as the controlling Power → biblical record is quite ambivalent on the question of whether God is in complete control of the world.

    Process thought → divine creative activity as based upon responsiveness to the world. → since the very meaning of actuality involves internal relatedness, God as an actuality is essentially related the world.   

       Any divine creative influence must be persuasive, not coercive.   

       God provides each worldly actuality with an initial aim → this is an impulse, initially felt conformally by the occasion, to actualize the best possibility open to it. Given its concrete situation.

       God seeks to persuade each occasion toward that possibility for its own existence which would be best for it; but God cannot control the finite occasion’s self-actualization.

       Process theology’s understanding of divine love is in harmony with the insight that if we truly love others, we do not seek to control them. 

Divine creative love as promoting enjoyment

    Cosmic moralist → enjoyment has been understood as something that God at best tolerated and often as something that he opposed. → this attitude toward sex is the extreme example of the church’s traditional attitude to enjoyment in general. 

    If the primary focus is on the creatures’ enjoyment of existence, the great amount and variety of suffering and the great inequalities involved would easily suggest that God was wither malevolent or incompetent, if not both. Hence, the notion that God is completely in control all things can be saved by saying that creaturely enjoyment is not a high priority. In fact, the sufferings of life, and even the inequalities in this regard, can be regarded as divinely intended mean to promote the desired moral and religious attitudes.  

      Platonic equation of being and goodness → in Protestant though the idea of intrinsic goodness of existence has faded and Christian theology has become increasingly moralistic.

1)     ontological dualism of the modern age made it difficult to think of existence as such as intrinsically good, since humans were the only created beings with any intrinsic (experiential)reality.

2)     The loss of confidence in the rational and then the Biblical evidences for God’s existence made the problem of evil more desperate.

3)     The dominant trend in theodicy has been to explain the great sufferings of the world by declaring that God did not intend the world as a hedonistic paradise but as a vale of soul making. 

    Process theology

      God’s fundamental aim to be the promotion of the creatures’ own enjoyment. → since God is not in complete control, the divine love is not contradicted by the great amount of intrinsic evil, or disenjoyment in the world. 

      The promotion of enjoyment is God’s primary concern throughout the whole process of creative evolution.

      Although the development of moral attitudes is of extreme importance, it is a derivative concern, secondary to the primary value, which is enjoyment itself.

      In process thought, morality stands in the service of enjoyment.

      The divine initial aim for our human experiences is such as to transform into immediate enjoyment the intention to contribute to future good.

//이것은 좋은 착상이기는 하다. 다른사람의 ㄱ쾌락을 위해 그리고 미래의 쾌락을 위해 절제해야한다.  Enjoyment is primary, moral attitude is derivative.  

Divine Creative Love as Adventurous

    Since God’s creative activity is persuasive, not controlling, it is a love that takes risks. Each divine creative impulse into the world is adventurous, in that God does not know what the result will be. 

    There is another dimension to the divine adventurousness. → traditional theology tended to portray God as the Sanctioner of the Status Que. The notions of God and order were closely associated. → Rom 13 : be subject to the governing authorities because they have been instituted by God, so that he who resists the authorities resists what God has pointed. → Paul’s statement is one of those Biblical statements which presuppose that God is in control at least of the major features of the world process.

    The notion of God as Sanctioner of the Status Quo is closely connected with that of God as cosmic Moralist.  → the focus on the development of moral attitudes, understood as being in opposition to the growth of enjoyment, distracted attention from the question of what kinds of conditions are needed in order to maximize the possibilities for enjoying existence.

    Process theology understand God precisely as the basic source of unrest in the universe. In Whitehead’s words, “The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe:??？♣♧♤★☆

         When he speaks of the essence of the universe, Whitehead primarily has in mind the notion that actuality is process and that at the root of process there is the Primordial Nature of God, which he sometimes calls the Divine Eros. This is conceived as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realization, each in its due season. Not all ideal possibilities can be realized simultaneously. This is why there is process. But also no ideal can be repeated indefinitely without its freshness being lost. The primordial Nature of God is the goad toward novelty in the universe, stimulating us to realized new possibilities after the old ones no longer are sufficient to give zest to our enjoyment of being actual. 

       Order is an essential ingredient in the maximization of enjoyment. → the richness of human experience could emerge only on the basis of the order of the body. “it is by reason of the body, with its miracle of order, that the treasures of the past environment are poured into the living occasion.”  → excessive order can inhibit enjoyment. Hence, order must not be lost, but it also must not be dominant. →” the art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”

       God is the source of order. two important qualifications must be made

1)     Order represents dominance of an ideal possibility which was at one time a novel element in the world. Hence God is the source of order by virtue of first being the source of novelty.

2)     Neither order nor novelty is understood as intrinsically good, but only as instrumental to the one intrinsic good, which is the enjoyment of intense experience.

       God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities. the evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute end.

       God is the source of some of the chaos in the world. → “if there is to be progress beyond limited ideals, the course of history by way of escape must venture along the borders of chaos in its substitution of higher for lower types of order”

       The connection between the notion of God as the source of adventure toward novel ideal and that of divine creative love as fostering enjoyment has already been made clear. The connection with God as persuasive power is also obvious. Since God does not control the details of any worldly process, the existence of a given state of affairs does not imply that God willed it. Further since God encourages the actualization of novel possibilities as a means to maximizing creaturely enjoyment, continuation of a state of affairs that originally resulted from a high degree of conformity to God’s aims may not express God’s present will. → we should worship the Creative Good, not the created good.

     Two sense → it takes risks and promotes adventure toward novelty in the world.

     Third sense: this adventure embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them. This point is that God’s own life is an adventure, for the novel enjoyments that are promoted among the creatures are then the experiences providing the material for God’s own enjoyment. → the Unity of Adventure includes the Eros which is the living urge towards all possibilities, claiming the goodness of their realization” and God’s life is also an adventure in the sense of being a risk, since God will feel the discord as well as the beautiful experiences involved in the finite actualizations: the adventure of the universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty.

God as Creative Responsive Love

    God was conceived to be active, unresponsive, impassive, inflexible, impatient, and moralistic.

    Unfortunately, in some passages Whitehead does not describe the two natures of God as if they were truly integrated. Sometimes the primordial Nature is described as if it were static order of the eternal would mean that the creative imput of God into the world in each moment would be based upon a completely inflexible vision: it would not be based upon a sympathetic response to the previous state of affairs. possibilities, and the initial aim for each worldly actuality is said to be derive for the Primordial Nature. t

    The world does not really have to do with two natures or poles of God that stand externally related to each other, the one influencing the world and the other being influenced by it.  Rather the primordial Nature is abstract, while the Consequent nature is God as fully actual. → the creative activity of God is based upon sympathetic responsiveness; and the responsiveness of God is an active receptiveness made in the light of an intended creative influence upon the future.

   

    The process dipolar notion of deity has some affinity with the Taoist notion of the Tao, in which the feminine and masculine dimension of reality are perfectly integrated. → Tao is spoken of as a power that works slowly and undramatically, but is finally the most effective agency in reality.

// 왜 신에게 음가 양을 강요해야한다고 생각하는 것일까? 그것은 우리의 생각일 뿐이다.