Does the World Make a Difference to God?

DOES THE WORLD MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO GOD? IF GOD IS INDEED the Lord of History so that the human enterprise is somehow his project, and if that project in its genuine historicity and precariousness is contingent and can fail, then what the world is and becomes must of necessity affect God. If such be the case, men are no marionettes merely acting out in a kind of " shadow-screen " world what has been predetermined from the very beginning. On the contrary, in. some sense our choices then seemingly determine God, making him to be the kind of God he now is and will be. But then is God any longer God? Or have we not simply (as Engels sees Hegel doing) : onto the throne self-consciousness prodded hoping to see the old time God ungodded? 1 Seemingly, the above envisagement means the concept of God must embrace contingency and temporality, qualities heretofore understood as precisely non-divine, as constitutive of the creature in its very creatureliness. Why, then, is this not to call into jeopardy the principle of the infinite qualitative difference? Theologians in the Catholic tradition have, until recent date, remained largely immune from the urgency of the question. Such is no longer the case; the problematic can no longer be avoided due to the speculations of a large array of thinkers with a common commitment to the categories of Process Philosophy -thinkers representing philosophically a Neo-Classical Metaphysics and theologically a Post-Liberal Protestantism.2 1 Words put into the mouth of Hegel in hell by Engels in his satirical poem " The Triumph of Faith." 2 An excellent, detailed and up-dated bibliography is available in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by D. Brown, R. E. James, Jr., and 146 DOES THE WORLD MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO GOD? 147 Nonetheless, the essays which have thus far appeared are clearly programmatic in kind, tentative probings towards solutions rather than definitive statements, leaving the question an open one and warranting still another sifting of the problem.3 The Solution of Dipolarity At the very forefront of all contemporary efforts to come to grips with the problem stands Whitehead's principle of a dipolar God. A real duality is introduced within God who is viewed as immutable in a primordial nature and ever-changing in a consequent nature. In the permanency of the former God seeks fluency, in the fluency of the latter he seeks permanence. The primordial nature is conceived as a " mental " pole wherein God " prebends " all values, thereby making such values availG . Reeves (Indianapolis and N. Y.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 475-489. After Whitehead's Process and Reality (Macmillan, 1929; Free Press Edition, 1969) which stands at the origin of the present discussion, special mention should be made of the following: Charles Hartshorne, "The Di-Polar Conception of Deity," The Review of Metaphysics, XXI (1967); W. L. Reese and E. Freeman, eds., Process and Divinity, Philosophical Essays Presented to Charles Hartshorne (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1964); H. N. Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion with Truth (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1927); Bernard E. Meland, ed., The Future of Empirical Theology (U. of Chicago Press, 1969); John Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965); Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God (N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1966); Norman W. Pittenger, God in Process (S. C. M. Press, 1967); Ralph E. James, The Concrete God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967); Lewis S. Ford, "The Viability of Whitehead's God for Christian Theology," and Robert C. Neville, "The Impossibility of Whitehead's God for Christian Theology," Proceedings: Amer. Catholic Phil. Ass. (Washington, 1970); Daniel D. Williams, The Spirit and Forms of Love (N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1968); Alix Parmentier, La Philosophie de Whitehead et le probleme de Dieu (Paris: Beauchesne , 1968). 3 In addition to the suggestiveness in much of the work of Teilhard de Chardin, the following studies have recently appeared in English: Karl Rahner, "On the Theology of the Incarnation," Theological Investigations, IV; Piet Schoonenberg, Man and Sin (University of Notre Dame, 1965), esp. p. 50; Martin D'Arcy, "The Immutability of God," and Walter Stokes, "Is God Really Related to the World," both in Proceedings...