Love's Availing Power: Imaging God, Imagining the World

2: Imaging the World in Relation

31 x Kierkegaard brought us a view of the self as freedom: created in love and anxiously poised over possibility, dizzy and falling, despairing and caught in consequences , claimed by grace and called to discipleship. That picture demands attention in our attempt to understand what power is and what, specifically, is the power of love. But with Kierkegaard, we found ourselves struggling to recognize a full connectedness—of mind (or the “third” of spirit, for that matter) with body, of the individual with other humans, of humans with nature. That struggle for connection is addressed if we look to Alfred North Whitehead and his work at Cambridge (1880–1910) and London (1910–1924) and at the “American Cambridge” (1924–1947).1 His work in England in mathematics, natural science, and education already speaks to what we may have been missing in Kierkegaard. But the inclusive character of his vision is most evident in his mature work at Harvard in cosmology and philosophy of religion. Whitehead’s description of religion has an element that resembles Kierkegaard’s conviction about the solitary individual before God: “Religion is the art and theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things. . . . Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”2 Moreover, the Kierkegaardian emphasis on being held by God in a loving relationship is Chapter 2 imagining the world in relation: a whiteheadian inClusion 32 love’s availing power suggested as well. Religion “runs through three stages, if it evolves to its final satisfaction. It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion.”3 But that God is present does not distinguish the human creature from all the other creatures. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead cites an Egyptian papyrus from the early Christian centuries: “Cleave the wood and I am there.”4 God is purposefully present in all of creation. In his magnum opus, Process and Reality (1929), he offers a full cosmological sketch in which “each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God.”5 Without any question, this philosophical theologian belongs in the diverse crowd of “panentheists” gathered by Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke in their book In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being.6 They take their title from the apostle Paul’s sermon to the philosophers on Mars Hill in Athens (Acts 17:28). Paul’s missionary emphasis is on all human beings as created. With Whitehead, all created beings are explicitly included. Thus, God’s presence in the whole creation is the framework in which God’s presence with the human individual must be understood. Similarly, that questing individual will not be satisfied with a solitariness that becomes isolation: “In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.”7 worldly wisdom Thus, at the outset, in listening to Whitehead’s voice, we come to be clear that if we are to find God, we do well to study the world. People of faith claiming to know God should have motives aplenty for that study. What is a “world,” after all? A world provides a “universe of meaning” in which our speaking and our acting can make sense.8 A commitment to claiming such a “cosmos” can be found in Whitehead’s work well before his explicitly cosmological ventures at Harvard. Thus his biographer, Victor Lowe, points to his concern to “save causation” in his responses to David Hume and Bertrand Russell already in his 1922 presidential lecture to the Aristotelian Society.9 More to our point about inclusion, Whitehead’s contention is that if we truly understand the world, we will find ourselves speaking of God within that world.10 Christian theologians should not be surprised by that, if they do mean what they say when they speak of God’s omnipresence. It follows that any accurate sketch of how the world works should be of interest to those theologians. People of faith simply seeking to serve their God in this world may expect to acquire some tactical wisdom from such a sketch. Thus, if we 33 imagining the...