GOD IN PROCESS
Scriptures: Psalm 51
II Corinthians 5:11-19
Talk about God – about the way God is revealed to us and the ways we know the Lord through faith, science, and theology. This is what we began to do last week and will continue to do this Sunday and next, despite the seeming inappropriateness of heavy thoughts on these hot summer days. But if there is to be a basis for our belief, it must begin with God – and so from time to time we must rediscover the meaning God has for us both traditionally and in the light of 20th and 21st century scientific knowledge. Remember, as I said last week, that we are speaking here as a community of believing Christians, not trying to establish proofs for God’s existence over-against the recent spate of God-denying books; that we understand God primarily as revealed to us in the Christ-event; and that these sermons are intended to spark discussion and stimulate each of our own thinking about the meaning of God in our lives.
God, we said last week, is revealed to us through our material world. This is the how of God – how we come to know God. Today we take the next step: looking at the what of God – the nature, the being, the essence of God. And, of course, the first thing that must be said in tackling this question is that we can know the nature of God only imperfectly, for to know – or even pretend to know – the full nature of God would be to make us as gods; and this impulse to be as God is the very core of human pride and sin.
In trying to understand something of the nature of God, I am going to make two possibly startling statements which are the keys to my understanding of the God we worship: first, God is now and eternally in the process of becoming who and what God is; and second, what we as men and women do has an effect on the very being of God.
God is in the process of becoming. This means that God is not static but dynamic, not immutable but influenced by forces, not distant and austere but able to enter into covenant relationships with persons. This God we worship is aware of the flux and flow, the waxing and waning, the ups and downs of our own lives and the forces of this world precisely because such flux and flow is of the very nature of the Lord’s own being.
How is it possible to speak of God as in the process of becoming when in our liturgy we so often use descriptive terms like Almighty, Everlasting, Eternal – terms which imply a never-changing deity? To understand what has been happening in human thought and knowledge, come with me on a brief journey to look at a bit of the history of how humanity has experienced the nature of God.
For the ancient Israelites God was personal – a God seeking a covenant relationship with God’s people. In fact, so personal was this God that often God was given human attributes. But after the Babylonian Captivity the people pulled away from their sense of a personal God, and God became more distant, more fixed. So, by the time of Second Isaiah, in the middle of the 6th century BC, this prophet could describe attributes of God which view God in fixed roles: Creator, Redeemer, Judge, King, Savior, the Eternal One, the Holy One of Israel. Oh, God’s concern for people is still affirmed, but it was being over-shadowed by this sense of almighty-ness or all-powerfulness.
But God’s personal involvement in the lives of human beings once again took center stage as God became human in Jesus Christ. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Godself” – these words of Paul are the key to humanity’s renewed understanding of God. God’s grace, God’s reconciliation, God’s involvement with the flux and flow of human existence was the message delivered not so much in the words of Jesus but through his very being. All of the Hebrew Scriptures’ attributes of God were still present, but through Christ God entered into a much more intimate and personal relationship with God’s people. That’s what the adult study class was looking at in Paul’s letter to the Colossians this morning: it was through Christ that God’s redemption has come.
But then a strange and (in the light of subsequent history) rather unfortunate thing happened involving that peculiar Christian doctrine of the parousia or Second Coming, which said that Christ would come immediately to receive his people into eternal life. When this didn’t happen the Gospel of John and other, later Christian writers began talking about Christ in philosophical terms (like logos, or “the word became flesh”). This watered down the sense of how God’s grace came to us through the Christ; and thus once again God became more rigid and absolute. As Christianity headed into the second century of its existence and beyond, the all-powerfulness of God was predominant. The grace of God poured out through Jesus the Christ was secondary.
Such an emphasis on the Almighty and Eternal, though, leads to problems which have troubled rational men and women. Who has not heard of the classical paradoxes involving the Almighty God? If God is omniscient – that is, all-knowing – then why should not our every action already be known by God? (Indeed, John Calvin made this paradox into one of the cornerstones of his theology – he called it predestination.) Again: if God is omnipotent – that is, all-powerful – could God make a mountain that God couldn’t lift? If God is infinite and thus self-sufficient, how could the fall of “each sparrow” affect the Lord – as the Gospel writer so clearly affirms that it does?
Partially out of response to these paradoxes, but also out of the realization that the New Testament image of God-in-Christ does not square with the view of God as only Almighty and Eternal, 20th and 21st century religious thinking has helped us to renew our faith in a “God of grace” along with a “God of glory”. Martin Buber, for example, resolves all of these paradoxes into the one understanding that while God is the “wholly other” (Buber refers here to God as the “mysterium tremendum” or “tremendous mystery”) God also remains “the wholly present”…nearer to me than my I.” In being this God completely present with us, God becomes dependent upon God’s own creation for God’s own fulfillment. Buber puts this for us most directly: “…God needs you – in the fullness of His eternity needs you….. You need God, in order to be – and God needs you, for the very meaning of your life….. We know unshakably in our hearts that there is a becoming of the God who is.” This line from Martin Buber is the crux of my own belief in who and what God is: yes, God IS…but that nature is not fixed; it can change; God can continually become. (As Bill Clinton said in a wholly different context, “It depends on the definition of IS”…..but we’d better not go down that path.)
But also remember we said last week that we need to understand God anew in the light of scientific discoveries as well as in religious thought, and this is certainly true here, for it is, interestingly enough, contemporary science that gives us many of the clues we need to understand a God who is in the process of becoming. In the middle of the 20th century Einstein’s physics saw the universe of matter as a fluid, ever-changing substance, continuously whirling through vortices of space and time. This approach then changed as quantum mathematics and “superstring” theory challenged our set presuppositions about the unchanging nature of the reality of matter itself, giving us a picture of our universe as one which must be dynamic and continually becoming if it is to have any real substance.
If, as we said last week, God is revealed to us in history and through matter, then it is only as we come to a better understanding of this world and this universe that we will better understand the nature of God. Beginning with this insight, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has used scientific concepts to help us know a God who is in the process of becoming. Empirical knowledge (that is, knowledge that we know through our senses – that which we experience) for Whitehead includes the totality of experience, and religious or mystical experience is thus very much a part of our empirical knowledge. We have experiences through relationships, and therefore in the process of entering new relationships new experiences occur. This fundamental fact points to that dynamism which is a part of every existing moment in our lives and in the life of the universe. To be alive is to be dynamic! And God is alive throughout the universe – a dynamic aliveness which is growth, which is becoming, which is being affected by our own human liveliness.
To say with Whitehead that God is in the process of becoming is to resolve some the paradoxes we talked about before. A God who is in process transforms evil and suffering – not by denying their reality but by experiencing them along with us as a fellow-sufferer. God experiences even the incredibly evil anguish of a crucifixion, but then transforms it into a redeeming event. Perhaps this thought may not be comforting on an immediate human level when we are truly suffering, but to experience a relationship with God as fellow-sufferer is to know that grace, redemption, and peace are in the midst of even our most intense suffering.
Moreover, God in process of becoming means that we have real freedom to explore our relationship with God and the world. God does not limit our freedom but takes what happens as a result of that freedom and brings it into the process of fulfilling God’s own experience. What we do, you and I, out of our freedom affects the God who is and who is becoming. Think about that statement a moment longer: what you and I do out of our freedom has an effect on the God we worship! God then takes the results of our free actions and decisions – whether good or bad -- and transforms them through redemption and grace. Such a realization gives us a sense of joyous freedom and at the same time tremendous responsibility. What we do affects the very nature of God.
One of the strange ironies of our time is that science can point to this important understanding of God with the theory of evolution -- a concept that once was seen as opposed to the Creator God. Those who would agitate to have “scientific creationism” or “intelligent design” taught in schools alongside the theory of evolution fail to see this delicious irony that in fact it is evolution which tells us more about the nature of God than their more narrow view. This dynamic, fluctuating universe is continually evolving into higher states of being, according to evolutionary thought, and God experiences and expresses evolution in the process of God’s own becoming. Such an understanding of both God and the world is grounds for our highest hopes.
But we need to note here that there is another scientific concept that seems to contradict the optimism of evolution – the concept of entropy, which sees the universe as constantly running down through loss of energy which is used up and not replaced whenever conversion from matter to energy or energy to matter takes place. Christianity would rebut the reality of entropy with a key reality of its own – the fact of resurrection. Resurrection tells us that in spiritual life entropy can never reach its maximum. Even the loss of all energy does not negate the salvation of our God who is and who is becoming.
One of my favorite writers, Isaac Asimov (even though he was a self-proclaimed atheist), makes this point quite marvelously in an early short story (perhaps written before he became a full-fledged atheist) called “The Last Question”. Even though the components here are humanity and machine, the conclusion is couched in language which indicates the power of the spiritual over even such an all-encompassing concept as entropy. In the story two computer technicians pose this question to Multivac, which has in the mid-21st century just been celebrated as the greatest refinement of all computers: “How can the net amount of entropy in the universe be massively decreased?” (in other words, “how can matter and energy be restored once they are used up?”) Multivac answers: “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER”. This same question is posed by humans to computers throughout the eons of time with the same response until entropy has nearly reached maximum with all energy gone, and MAN (which is the fusion of all humanity) asks the question one last time of AC (the fusion of all computers). As MAN dies out, AC, existing now only for the sake of the last question, assembles and correlates all the collected data:
“And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
“But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer – by demonstration – would take care of that, too…..
“The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a universe and brooded over what was now chaos. Step by step it must be done.
“And AC said, ‘Let there be light!’
“And there was light.”
The word of God spoken in creation – thereby releasing us from the ultimate authority of such physical forces as entropy; the word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ – thereby reconciling us to Godself; the word of God affirmed through resurrection – thereby establishing the power of God over all things; this same word of God reveals to us a living God who participates in each of our lives and is thereby conditioned by that participation. A remarkable statement by the youth caucus at a United Church of Christ General Synod puts all this into perspective: “The Christian faith is not merely social action or theological formulation, but a dynamic power-filled relationship to God.”
May we all continually discover such a “dynamic power-filled relationship with God” in our own lives.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
July 15, 2007