The Divine Transcendence and Relation to Evil in Hartshorne's Dipolar Theism

The title above identifies two issues in Charles Hartshorne's panentheistic understanding of God that, in my judgment, have not been sufficiently clarified. The purpose of this paper is to provide additional clarification, that the adequacy of this type of theism may be more carefully judged by its admirers and by its detractors from their respective perspectives. The first part will identify central elements of Hartshorne's reasoning about God's relation to the world. The second part examines how Hartshorne speaks of a divine "transcendence" in a naturalistic metaphysics that is thoroughly empirical. The third part will examine the ways that God is related to the world's evil and whether God is in some way responsible for this evil in a way that makes God morally culpable. The discussion will uncover significant differences from the way process theists, traditional theists, and non-theists have usually thought about creation, eternity, and everlastingness.

Of course, in a naturalistic metaphysics, transcendence will have to be constructed in a way that differs from that in the metaphysics that undergirds classical (or traditional) theism. Hartshorne proposes that all worldly relations are internal or external relations sustained by their relation internal to God. All worldly relations and their terms can be said to be related within this relation internal to God in which God is related to the world by a relation external to the world. I interpret this external relation to have the practical effect that we can have no perception or prehension of God as God while we perceive worldly events that, Hartshorne says, comprise the strict identity of God. There is a complexity here that may be said to be "paradoxical" in its own way that is more "dialectical" than contradictory. In any case, no worldly individual or entity enjoys absolute independence. This is also true of God in virtue of the world's relation internal to God. Everything is related and dependent. Nothing enjoys aseity, unless it is reality as a whole, the universe, which Hartshorne understands to be divine. Bernard M. Loomer (1912-85), his onetime student, friend, and colleague, expressed the naturalistic principle: "Process philosophy knows of no God who is fundamentally transcendent in the epistemological or metaphysical sense. From its point of view, the limits of knowledge are defined in terms of the limits of what is experienceable. The limits of the experienceable are defined in terms of the limits of relationship" (Loomer, "Christian Faith" 191). Obviously, transcendence must be of an inner-worldly kind.

Elements of Hartshorne's Reasoning about God's Relation to the World

Every metaphysics is an imaginative construct in the same way that the idea of God has emerged in the course of human evolution on our planet. This remains a fact even though theists have attributed their knowledge of God to divine revelation. This claim, of course, is a part of the construct. Theism and the world's religions are cultural emergents that have accompanied the development of human civilizations and their languages. Every idea of God, primitively and presently, begins in the minds of individuals and communities as an imaginative construct. It continues in them by being traditioned or taught in these communities. In the midst of his intense work on the ontological argument, Hartshorne seemed surprised when he remarked that "[t]he technical difficulty with regard to the Argument is that the idea of God is apparently not a conception of formal logic. . . . [T]he whole question seems to fall outside the basic rules of any language" (Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection 53-54). Had he forgotten that metaphysics is imaginative construction? Did he expect an identifiable extensional correlate to the Anselmian idea that God cannot be conceived not to exist without the imaginative construction he so painstakingly engaged in?

It should be clear that models of God and of God's relation to the world can be very complex and idiosyncratic. Hartshorne's model is his construction of the divine essence with the help of St. Anselm and a definite description. Several elements of the reasoning behind his idea of God...