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3. The Temporality of Divine Freedom (1974)
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t h r e e the temporality of Divine Freedom (1974) This essay was inspired by a need to complement a major essay by Lewis S. Ford, “The Non-Temporality of Whitehead ’s God.”1 Without disagreeing with anything Ford wrote, I was convinced that there was another side of the story that must be worked out if the Whiteheadian viewpoint is to square with revelation and our deepest religious convictions. Ford had admirably described the sense in which, in the Whiteheadian framework, God can be said to be nontemporal. What seemed missing was the sense in which, granted the above, God’s influence in the world can be thought of as freely tailored to God’s love for individual, particular entities rather than simply preprogrammed by his nontemporal, universal matrix of value. The essay, therefore, is written entirely within the Whiteheadian scheme of metaphysics and is necessarily quite technical. Readers unacquainted with the intricacies of that metaphysics may wish to pass to the next essay. 22 Originally published as “the temporality of Divine Freedom,” Process Studies 4, no. 4 (1974): 252–62. Reprinted with permission. The Temporality of Divine Freedom 23 —I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. —Hosea 14:4 a chief attraction of process philosophy for Christian thinkers has been its ability to formulate in a new way the relationship of God to the world. By contrast, traditional philosophy tends to emasculate biblical texts like the above, construing them as mere anthropomorphisms, since obviously God cannot be described in emotional and temporal terms—or so the doctrine goes, despite massive evidence of religious experience to the contrary. even in process philosophy, however, skies are not all blue when it comes to talking about God. there is a deep cleavage between those who agree with Whitehead in describing God as a single actual entity, nontemporal in his primordial nature and everlasting in his consequent nature (the “entitative” view), and those who prefer with Charles Hartshorne to regard God as a personally ordered temporal society of successive occasions (the “societal” view). though I shall speak in terms of the entitative view, toward which I incline, what I have to say has nothing to do with debating the above issue since it will apply equally well to the societal view. I wish rather to call attention to a peculiar aspect of one of the arguments used to support the latter view, since I think it betrays an inadequacy in all current Whiteheadian views that has not been appreciated. Delwin Brown, supporting the societal view, writes: “On the entitative view, God is free but once (even if, as we shall consider later, ‘once’ is to be construed in some unique nontemporal sense). this single evaluative adjustment of possibility permanently fixes the character of God’s consequent commerce with the world.”2 He then proceeds to argue that God’s primordial nature, thus understood, is like a computer that once-for-all programs all God’s decisions in history. It follows that even in his freedom God cannot be faithful, since “faithfulness ” entails adhering freely through time to one’s previous commitment , and on this view God is “free but once,” not temporally free. lewis s. Ford reviews the same general objection even more sharply: [54.173.43.215] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:23 GMT) 24 Adventures in Unfashionable Philosophy If God acts solely in terms of his primordial nature, is not everything simply cut and dried, following inexorably from the implications of that conceptual unity? this is an ancient problem: how does leibniz’ God, programmed to choose the best of all possible worlds, or even aquinas’ God, whose will is assimilated to his reason, differ from a computer? (“Non-temporality,” 355) Ford retorts, however, that the objection fails to notice that God’s primordial decision was not made at some time in the dim, dark past. Rather, it is not made in time at all. It is nontemporal, hence unrepeatable , but emerges in time insofar as it gradually acquires its definition with respect to the world. What we find in the temporal world is a burgeoning of God’s timeless free decision as seen from our temporal perspective . Only if God’s primordial decision lay in time (in the past), would Whitehead’s position be faced with the leibnizian difficulties. Now although Ford’s finely nuanced exposition may answer the objection as Brown posed it, Whitehead’s position (and Ford’s and Brown’s...