Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology by Robert C. Neville (review)

490 BOOK REVIEWS Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology. By RoBERT C. NEVILLE. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980. Pp. xi+ 163. $rn.95. Robert Neville's Creativity and God is a compact, sympathetic, yet critical series of proposals concerning Whitehead, the process theology tradition , and God. It is an intriguing text for anyone interested in one or more of these areas. Within Neville's own textual corpus, CreativityandGod seems to function as in part a summary and in part a controversialist respite from a massive endeavor to develop a speculative theory of religiona theory focused on God as Being-itself (God the Creator, Chicago, 1968) and human beings as free personally, socially (The Cosmology of Freedom, New Haven, 1974), and spiritually (Soldier Sage Saint, New York, 1978). The book is also an important one for those who are-or who would like to see if they are-interested in this impressive project. The central aim is " to provide a sustained critique of process theism, in its roots and at least some branches, from a standpoint at one with Whitehead in appreciation of speculative philosophy, neighboring in general cosmology and opposed regarding the conception of God" (x). Neville frames his discussion by taking the process tradition as an endeavor to work out perceived difficulties in the way Whitehead related God and Creativity. The first seven chapters presume process theism's claim that Whitehead's uniqueness lies in separating or distinguishing God and Creativity. Neville takes the reader through competing strands of " the conceptual structure of process theism" (Chapters I through VI) before a climactic chapter on process theism's endeavors to come to terms with " the structure of experience itself" (116) (Chapter VII). The argument is clear if compact, and its progression is as follows. First, if God is an individual actual entity (Lewis S. Ford, Whitehead) , God will transcend the world too much; indeed, the result is " Whiteheadean deism" {!l!9) (C. II). Further, Creativity on this view remains an irrational , a surd (C. III). On the other hand, if God is a society of actual entities (Charles Hartshorne) , then God is "subject to the strictures of necessity" (33, C. IV). Further, there are links between the social view of God and inadequacies in Hartshorne's handling of personal identity, universals, ambiguity and suffering, and a priori knowledge (C. IV)) . But, if God is neither individual nor society, ought we to jettison the God of Western religions? Neville argues that both Shubert Ogden's critique of the classical tradition and his neo-classical alternative are inadequate (C. V). Further, process philosophy is "fundamentally alien to the transcendental turn" in theology (C. VI). The latter presumes the givenness of a particular theological content, of secular experience, and/or of transcendental projects in themselves. The most one can do (and Neville claims Charles Winquist has done it) is give a Whiteheadian interpretation to the transcendental imagination (113). BOOK REVIEWS 491 Chapter VII is the climactic chapter, for here Neville moves to "the structure of experience itself" as this is articulated in John Cobb's endeavor to come to terms with world religions. The problem here is that Cobb talks as though a choice must be made between, say, Buddhism and Christianity. But Neville thinks that new structures of existence woven from the various unintegrated resources at our disposal are needed (119120 ). Using Plato's theory of the educable " parts of the soul," he proposes that the quest for new structures of existence is a quest for new forms of the spirited part of the soul (the saint), the rational part of the soul (the sage), and the appetitive part of the soul (the soldier). On the basis of this cumulative critique of the distinction between God and Creativity, the final chapter recommends that the distinction be abandoned. On the process view, the category of the Ultimate (including Creativity, one, and many) remains a kind of irrational given (138-39, 43-47); Neville, on the other hand, wants to distinguish creaturely "cosmological creativity" (the self-constitution of one out of many) from " ontological creativity " (" a transcendent creator that makes itself creator in the act of creating") (8, 139-40, 144...