Whitehead, Rosenzweig, and the Agenda for Future Jewish Thought: A Response Essay to Bradley Shavit Artson's "Ba-derekh: On the Way—A Presentation of Process Theology"

Introduction: Artson's Theses

Rabbi Artson argues with considerable skill and persuasion for the following theses. First, that in the past Jewish theologians¹ used the tradition of philosophy, whose origin is in the ancient Athenian schools of Plato and Aristotle, to develop a sophisticated intellectual schema both to understand their universe and to apply that understanding within their lived society by interpreting the authoritative texts of rabbinic Jewish history.² Second, (by implication) this theological rabbinic activity is as normative in characterizing traditional rabbinic Judaism, as is any other form of rabbinic activity, including politics and law.³ Third, there is a great need for new Jewish theology. The past theology is no longer believable by intellectually mature and informed contemporary people, especially Jews, and for that reason it is no longer useful for rabbinic Judaism to continue to employ this kind of philosophy to interpret Judaism's foundational texts in the way that they were interpreted in the past. The problem here of credibility is not with the foundational texts. Rather, it is with the schemata used to interpret what they mean. Fourth, at this stage of modern Western history, the most promising schema to employ to reinterpret the foundational rabbinic texts is Process Theology.

Process Theology

"Process theology" begins with Alfred North Whitehead's discussion of the natures (original and consequent) of God in relationship to the rest of reality in Process and Reality.⁴ However, the term is not restricted solely to the philosophy of Whitehead or even to his disciples.⁵ Whitehead's philosophy also is associated with the philosophy faculty at Harvard University in the 1920s and 1930s, and therefore Process Philosophy is further associated with the distinctive American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism, especially the writings of Charles S. Peirce and William James. Among the notable American Process philosophers are Charles Hartshorne and Shubert Ogden, as well as the distinguished Christian theologians Robert Cummings Neville and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In addition, Process Theology plays a critical role in the twentieth-century founding of the new field of the study of science and religion, notably with the writings of Ian G. Barbour and Philip Hefner, and it continues to be an almost normative philosophical position for contemporary scholars of modern science and liberal Christianity (who tend to call their Christianity "religion"), notably Philip Clayton, Catherine Keller, and Nancy Howell.⁶

Hans Jonas

Special mention needs to be made in this connection of Hans Jonas. As in everything else, Jonas' thought is so sui generis that any attempt to classify it with others is difficult, and because of that difficulty he too often is omitted from consideration. Jonas is undeniably Jewish and his thought is Jewish. However, he preferred to be known in general as an intellectual historian and a philosopher of science, and I will honor his own judgment about himself. Yet his thought and life are deeply rooted in modern German Jewish culture and the early history of the modern State of Israel; he is a great scholar of Gnosticism whose work deeply influenced both Jewish and Christian scholars of the rise of early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, and his attempt to deal with the spiritual implications of Darwinian evolution has not yet been fully explored. Similarly, I would not call Jonas a Process philosopher, because his writing shows no overt influence by Whitehead, and I would not call Jonas a theologian of any kind, because of his agnosticism about the existence of God. Yet it is also clear that Jonas' ontology is as remote from Aristotelian-Platonic substance thinking as was Whitehead's, and his world-life view was certainly not materialist or reductionist as are the views of so many contemporary philosophers of science. Yet he clearly knew at least Darwinian biology and he was deeply concerned with the implications of Darwinism for western civilization. As in everything else, here as well Jonas is sui generis. Perhaps if he is like anyone, then the...