Chapter 10

Process Theology and God in Time

Another Bridge Too Far

Introduction: Drawing the Line

In the previous chapter, we examined open theism and concluded that it takes divine temporality a step too far by denying God's exhaustive knowledge of the future. Open theism, we saw, gets much right — God is temporal, relational, and genuinely responsive — but it makes the unnecessary and biblically untenable move of limiting what God knows. In this chapter, we turn to a view that goes even further. Process theology does not just limit God's knowledge. It reimagines the very nature of God, the world, and the relationship between them. It offers us a God who is temporal, yes — but also a God who is dependent on the world, incapable of guaranteeing outcomes, and unable to create from nothing. If open theism is a bridge too far, process theology is a different bridge altogether — one that leads to a fundamentally different destination than the God of the Bible.

Why does process theology deserve a full chapter in a book about God and time? The answer is simple but important. Throughout this book, I have been arguing that God is genuinely temporal — that He experiences real sequence, acts in history, and responds to His creatures in real time. But whenever someone hears "God is temporal," a question naturally arises: How far does this go? If God is in time, does that mean He is limited by time? Does it mean the world is as eternal as God? Does it mean God cannot control the future? Process theology answers "yes" to all of these questions. And that is precisely why we need to engage with it carefully. If I am going to argue that God is temporal, I need to show where the boundaries are. I need to show that affirming God's temporality does not require us to accept the entire process package. Process theology crosses a line that we cannot cross without abandoning the core convictions of historic Christian faith.¹

My thesis for this chapter is straightforward: process theology rightly emphasizes God's temporality and relational engagement with the world, but it goes far beyond what Scripture teaches by making God dependent on the world, denying creation ex nihilo, compromising divine sovereignty and omniscience, and reducing God to a fellow-sufferer who cannot guarantee the outcome of history. We can — and must — affirm divine temporality within the framework of orthodox Christian theism. Process theology shows us what happens when we abandon that framework.

What Is Process Theology? An Accessible Introduction

Process theology is not just a view about God's relationship to time. It is a complete philosophical system — an entire way of understanding reality from the ground up. To understand why process theology says what it says about God, we need to understand the bigger picture of its metaphysics (its theory of what reality is made of). This is not merely a theological adjustment; it is a wholesale replacement of the philosophical framework that traditional Christianity has used for centuries.

The movement begins with Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a British mathematician and philosopher who spent his later career at Harvard. Whitehead was not a theologian. He was a scientist and philosopher who developed a grand metaphysical system in his major work, Process and Reality (1929). His system was designed to account for the dynamic, changing character of the natural world as revealed by modern science — especially quantum physics and relativity theory. Whitehead believed that the traditional Western philosophical tradition, going back to Plato and Aristotle, had made a fundamental mistake: it had treated reality as fundamentally composed of unchanging substances (things that endure through time and remain the same). Whitehead argued that the opposite is true. Reality, he insisted, is fundamentally composed of events — momentary flashes of experience that come into being, achieve their brief moment of actuality, and then perish. He called these events "actual occasions" or "occasions of experience."²

Think of it this way. In our ordinary way of thinking, a table is a substance — a thing that endures through time. The table is there today, and it will still be there tomorrow, and it is the same table. For Whitehead, this is an illusion. What we call "the table" is actually a rapidly flowing series of momentary experiences, each one coming into existence and then immediately perishing, to be replaced by the next. Reality is not made up of things that persist; it is made up of events that flash into being and then vanish. This is why the system is called "process" philosophy — because reality is fundamentally a process, a flow, a becoming. Nothing endures. Everything is in perpetual motion.

Now, here is the crucial step. Whitehead applied this framework not just to tables and rocks but to everything in reality — including God. God, in Whitehead's system, is not a fundamentally different kind of being from the world. God is the supreme "actual entity" — the greatest occasion of experience — but He is not ontologically different in kind from other entities. He differs from them only in degree. God is greater, more complex, more enduring than any creaturely occasion of experience — but He is made of the same basic metaphysical "stuff" as everything else.³

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), Whitehead's most important theological interpreter, took this philosophical framework and developed it into a full-blown theology. Hartshorne was a philosopher at the University of Chicago and later the University of Texas, and he spent decades working out what Whitehead's metaphysics means for our understanding of God. Other important process theologians include John Cobb Jr., who became perhaps the most prominent process theologian of the late twentieth century, David Ray Griffin, who developed process theology's implications for issues like the problem of evil, and Marjorie Suchocki, who explored process theology's implications for eschatology and redemption.⁴

The Process God: A Portrait

To understand how process theology relates to our question about God and time, we need to grasp several key features of the process view of God. I want to present this view as fairly and clearly as I can, because only by understanding what process theology actually teaches can we see both its genuine insights and its deep problems.

God Is Dipolar

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the process God is what Hartshorne called divine "dipolarity." In traditional Christian theology, God is understood as having one nature — He is simple, unified, the same in all His attributes. Process theology rejects this. It says God has two "natures" or two "poles," and they are very different from each other.⁵

The first pole is God's primordial nature. This is the eternal, unchanging side of God. In the primordial nature, God eternally envisions all possibilities — every possible form, every possible value, every possible way reality could be arranged. The primordial nature is God's infinite storehouse of possibilities. It does not change, because the range of what is possible is always the same. Whitehead described the primordial nature as God's "conceptual" side — His eternal grasp of all the abstract patterns and potentials that could ever be realized.⁶

The second pole is God's consequent nature. This is the temporal, changing, growing side of God. In the consequent nature, God experiences everything that actually happens in the world. Every event, every experience, every joy and sorrow of every creature is taken into God's consequent nature. The consequent nature is always growing, always changing, always being enriched by new experiences. It is called "consequent" because it is a consequence of what happens in the world. God's consequent nature is shaped by creaturely decisions and experiences.⁷

Think of it like this. Imagine a musician who carries in his mind the knowledge of every possible musical composition that could ever be written (that is the primordial nature). But the musician also listens to every song that is actually performed in the world, absorbing each melody, each rhythm, each harmony into his growing experience (that is the consequent nature). The musician's knowledge of possibilities never changes — the range of possible music is infinite and constant. But his experience of actual music is always growing.

The implications are enormous. On this view, God's very being is partly constituted by what happens in the world. God does not just know what happens — He is changed by it. His consequent nature grows and develops. The world contributes to God's reality. God needs the world in order to have a consequent nature at all.

God Cannot Coerce — Only Persuade

In traditional Christian theology, God is omnipotent — all-powerful. He can do anything that is logically possible. He created the universe from nothing by the sheer power of His will. He parts seas, raises the dead, and will one day bring all of history to its appointed conclusion. Process theology rejects this picture entirely.

In process thought, God's power is exclusively persuasive, never coercive. God does not determine what happens. He cannot force any outcome. Instead, God offers each occasion of experience what Whitehead called an "initial aim" — a vision of the best possibility for that moment. God "lures" each entity toward its best possible outcome. But every entity is free to accept or reject God's aim. God cannot make anyone or anything do what He wants. He can only invite, attract, and persuade.⁸

Cobb and Griffin explain it this way: God is like a cosmic teacher who provides guidance and inspiration but cannot force students to learn. God sets before each moment the best possibility and hopes it will be chosen. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. When it is not — when creatures choose lower possibilities instead of higher ones — evil and suffering result. But God cannot prevent this because He lacks the power to do so.⁹

This has direct implications for the God-and-time question. A God who can only persuade is a God who is genuinely temporal in the strongest possible sense. He does not know what will happen because what happens depends on creaturely decisions that have not yet been made. God responds to each moment as it comes, offering new aims, adjusting His vision, working with whatever material He is given. Time is real and open — not just for creatures, but for God too.

No Creation Ex Nihilo

One of the most dramatic departures from traditional Christian belief in process theology is its rejection of creation ex nihilo — creation "out of nothing." Traditional Christianity teaches that God created the universe from nothing. Before creation, there was only God. The universe exists solely because God willed it into being. This means God is ontologically independent of the world — He does not need the world in order to exist or to be who He is.

Process theology denies this. In process thought, the world is co-eternal with God. There was never a time when God existed alone, without a world. God and the world have always existed together, in an everlasting partnership. God does not create the world from nothing; rather, God shapes and influences the world that has always been there. Griffin is especially emphatic on this point, arguing that creation ex nihilo is a late development in Christian theology that was not part of the original biblical witness.¹⁰

The reason process theology denies creation ex nihilo is deeply rooted in its metaphysics. If reality is fundamentally composed of occasions of experience, and if God Himself is an occasion of experience (the supreme one), then God and the world are interwoven at the most basic level. God cannot exist without some world to experience, just as the world cannot exist without God's primordial vision of possibilities to draw on. God and the world are mutually dependent. Each needs the other.¹¹

Limited Omniscience

Like open theism, process theology denies that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future. But process theology's denial goes further than most versions of open theism. In process thought, the future is genuinely indeterminate — not just unknown but nonexistent. Future occasions of experience have not yet come into being, so there is literally nothing there for God to know. God knows every possibility, and He knows which possibilities are more likely than others, but He does not and cannot know exactly which possibilities will be actualized. The future is open even for God.¹²

God as Fellow-Sufferer

One of the most emotionally powerful features of process theology is its emphasis on God's suffering. Whitehead famously described God as "the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands." In the consequent nature, God experiences everything creatures experience — every pain, every loss, every heartbreak. God does not stand above suffering as an impassive observer. He enters into it fully, sharing in the agony of His creatures.¹³

This is, I think, one of the reasons process theology has had lasting appeal, especially for people who are struggling with pain and loss. The idea that God feels our suffering, that He is not distant or unmoved, that He is right there with us in the darkness — this is deeply attractive. And I want to say clearly: the instinct behind this emphasis is right. God really does care. God really does feel. As I have argued in my companion book, The Heart of God, God genuinely experiences emotions in response to what happens in the world. But the crucial question is this: Does the process God only suffer with us, or can He also save us? Can He rescue? Can He deliver? Can He guarantee that evil will not have the last word? That is where the process view runs into devastating problems.

What Process Theology Gets Right

Before I lay out my criticisms, I want to acknowledge honestly what process theology gets right. Fairness requires this, and intellectual honesty demands it. Process theology has made genuine contributions to our understanding of God, even where its conclusions go far beyond what I believe Scripture teaches.

First, process theology is right that God is temporal. God genuinely experiences sequence, succession, and before-and-after. The static, frozen, timeless God of strict classical theism is not the God of the Bible. On this point, process theologians and I stand on the same side of the debate. The God who creates, acts, responds, and redeems is a God who operates within some form of temporal reality.¹⁴

Second, process theology is right that God is relational. God is not a distant, self-contained monad who is indifferent to His creatures. He genuinely relates to us, interacts with us, and is affected by what we do. The biblical portrait of God as a covenant partner, a shepherd, a father, a husband — all of these images convey a God who is deeply involved in the lives of His people. Process theology has done valuable work in recovering this relational emphasis against versions of classical theism that portrayed God as aloof and disengaged.

Third, process theology is right that God is affected by the world. In my companion book, The Heart of God, I have argued at length that God has genuine emotional responses to His creatures. He grieves over sin (Genesis 6:6). He rejoices over repentance (Luke 15:7). He is angered by injustice (Exodus 4:14). He delights in His people (Zephaniah 3:17). These are not mere metaphors. They reflect the genuine reality of God's emotional life. Process theologians have been among the strongest voices calling us back to this biblical picture of a God who truly cares.

Fourth, process theology is right that God's love is invitational. God does not typically coerce. He woos, draws, invites, and persuades. He calls His people and waits for their response. He knocks at the door but does not kick it down (Revelation 3:20). There is genuine beauty in the process emphasis on God's patient, non-coercive love. The biblical narrative is full of moments where God invites and humanity is free to accept or refuse.

Fifth, process theology is right that God suffers with His creatures. The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate demonstration that God enters into human suffering rather than standing above it. A God who cannot suffer is, I believe, a God who cannot love in the way Scripture describes. As Jürgen Moltmann powerfully argued in The Crucified God, a theology of the cross requires a God who can suffer.¹⁵

These are genuine insights, and I am grateful to process theologians for pressing them. The problem is not what process theology affirms. The problem is what it denies. And what it denies strikes at the heart of the Christian faith.

What Process Theology Gets Wrong: A Systematic Critique

We turn now to the most important part of this chapter: the reasons why, despite its genuine insights, process theology must be rejected by anyone who takes the biblical witness and historic Christian orthodoxy seriously. I want to be thorough here, because the problems with process theology are not minor quibbles or matters of theological preference. They strike at the very foundations of what Christians believe about God, creation, salvation, and hope. I will organize my critique around five major problems.

Problem One: Process Theology Compromises Divine Sovereignty

This is perhaps the most devastating problem. In process theology, God can only persuade — He cannot coerce, command, or determine outcomes. He offers His "initial aim" to each occasion of experience, but each entity is free to reject that aim. God can inspire, attract, and lure, but He cannot guarantee that anything will turn out the way He wants it to.

Stop and think about what this means. If God can only persuade, then God cannot promise. He cannot guarantee the future. When God says, "I will make all things new" (Revelation 21:5), the process God can only mean, "I hope to persuade all things to become new, but I cannot guarantee it." When Paul writes that "God works all things together for good" (Romans 8:28), the process God can only mean, "I am trying to persuade all things to work together for good, but sometimes they resist me and I cannot help it." When Jesus says, "I will come again" (John 14:3), the process God can only mean, "I plan to come again, but whether I actually can depends on how history unfolds."¹⁶

The God of the Bible is not like this. The God of the Bible says, "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose" (Isaiah 46:10, ESV). He declares, "I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it" (Isaiah 46:11, ESV). He is the God who parts the Red Sea, who brings water from a rock, who raises Jesus from the dead, who will one day destroy death itself. These are not acts of gentle persuasion. They are acts of sovereign power.

Now, I am not arguing for the Calvinist position that God determines every event. I believe in genuine human freedom — libertarian free will, the real ability to choose otherwise. As I argued in Chapter 9 and as I will develop in Chapter 29, God's sovereignty and human freedom are not mutually exclusive. God can be sovereign over history without determining every individual choice. But there is a vast difference between saying "God does not determine every choice" and saying "God cannot determine any outcome." The first is a position I hold. The second is process theology. And the second leaves us with a God who cannot keep His promises.

Griffin has tried to address this concern by arguing that God can guarantee general outcomes even if He cannot determine specific events. God's persuasive power is so great, Griffin argues, that the overall direction of history will move toward God's purposes even if individual moments go wrong.¹⁷ But I find this unconvincing. If God cannot coerce at all, then there is no guarantee that the cumulative effect of billions of creaturely decisions will produce the outcome God desires. Every individual decision could go the wrong way. Statistically unlikely? Perhaps. But not impossible. And a God who cannot guarantee the final victory over evil is not the God of Revelation 21, who promises to wipe every tear from every eye and make all things new.

Problem Two: Process Theology Denies Creation Ex Nihilo

We come now to what I consider one of the most serious departures from Christian orthodoxy in process theology: the denial of creation ex nihilo — the teaching that God created the universe out of nothing. This is not a peripheral doctrine. It is foundational to the biblical understanding of God, the world, and the relationship between them.

The biblical witness is clear and consistent. Genesis 1:1 declares, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (ESV). The language here is of absolute origination. God brings into being something that did not previously exist. John 1:3 reinforces this: "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made" (ESV). Paul echoes the same conviction: "For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him" (Colossians 1:16, ESV). The author of Hebrews states it with crystal clarity: "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3, ESV).¹⁸

These texts do not describe a God who shapes pre-existing material. They describe a God who brings the universe into existence by His word and will. There was nothing — and then there was everything, because God spoke. This is creation ex nihilo, and it has been affirmed by virtually every major Christian thinker from the second century onward. The early church fathers — Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius — explicitly defended creation ex nihilo against Gnostic and Platonic views that assumed the eternity of matter. The Nicene Creed confesses God as "maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible." This is not a late theological development; it is a foundational commitment of the Christian faith.¹⁹

Process theology's denial of creation ex nihilo has profound implications. If the world is co-eternal with God, then God does not have ultimate ontological priority over creation. God and the world are metaphysical partners — each needs the other. God needs the world to have a consequent nature; the world needs God to have a primordial vision of possibilities. This is a relationship of mutual dependence, not the relationship of Creator and creature that Scripture describes. The biblical God does not need the world. He created freely, out of the overflow of His own self-sufficient Trinitarian life. He chose to create — He was not compelled to do so by any metaphysical necessity.

Furthermore, the denial of creation ex nihilo removes the ontological distinction between Creator and creature that undergirds the entire biblical narrative. If God and the world are made of the same "stuff" — if God is just the supreme occasion of experience in a world full of occasions of experience — then the infinite qualitative difference between God and creation collapses. God becomes a being within reality, the greatest being certainly, but not the transcendent source of all reality. As R. T. Mullins has noted in his discussion of different models of God, process theology's rejection of creation ex nihilo is what fundamentally distinguishes it from neoclassical theism and places it outside the bounds of orthodox Christian thought.²⁰

Problem Three: Process Theology Compromises Omniscience

Like open theism, process theology denies that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future. But the process denial goes deeper. Open theists typically affirm that God knows all past and present facts with absolute completeness — He just does not know future free choices because (they claim) there is nothing yet to know. Process theology, however, locates God's ignorance of the future in the very nature of reality itself. Since reality is composed of momentary occasions of experience that flash into being and perish, the future is not merely unknown — it does not exist in any form. There are no "future facts" for God to know. There are only possibilities, some more likely than others, but none certain.²¹

I have already noted in Chapter 9 why I find the denial of exhaustive divine foreknowledge to be biblically untenable. The key passages bear repeating here in brief. Isaiah 46:9–10 presents God's ability to declare the future as a distinctive mark of His deity, setting Him apart from false gods who cannot predict what is to come. The prophetic tradition is filled with detailed predictions — of the exile and return, of the coming Messiah, of specific events centuries before they occurred. Jesus predicted Peter's threefold denial with pinpoint accuracy (Matthew 26:34). These predictions do not merely reflect divine probabilities or educated guesses. They reflect certain knowledge of events that have not yet occurred. (For the full exegetical treatment, see Chapter 20.)²²

Process theology cannot account for this prophetic tradition. If God does not know the future with certainty, then biblical prophecy becomes a series of divine guesses — highly informed guesses, perhaps, but guesses nonetheless. Some process theologians have acknowledged this implication and argued that specific predictive prophecy should be reinterpreted or demythologized. But this requires us to fundamentally reread the prophetic literature in a way that strips it of its most distinctive claim: that the God of Israel, unlike all other gods, knows and declares what is to come.

As I argued in Chapter 9, my position — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — shows that divine temporality does not require the denial of foreknowledge. God can be genuinely temporal and know the future exhaustively. He knows the future not by determining it (as in Calvinism) but by His unique capacity to access all of time. For the full philosophical development, see Chapter 25.

Problem Four: Process Theology Makes God Dependent on the World

Traditional Christian theology affirms God's aseity (a se — "from Himself") — the doctrine that God exists of Himself, dependent on nothing outside His own nature. God is self-sufficient. He does not need the world, creation, or any creature. He created freely, not out of need but out of love. The Trinity — the eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is a completely self-sufficient community of love. God would be God, fully and completely, even if He had never created anything.²³

Process theology denies this. In process thought, God needs the world. Without a world to experience, God's consequent nature would be empty. God's being would be incomplete. Hartshorne was explicit about this: God and the world are in a relationship of mutual dependence. God contributes to the world (through His primordial vision of possibilities), and the world contributes to God (through creaturely experiences that enrich His consequent nature). Neither can exist without the other.²⁴

This is a devastating departure from biblical theology. The God of Scripture does not need us. He loves us, and He chose to create us, and He genuinely enjoys His relationship with us. But He does not need us. His being is not incomplete without us. As Paul declared to the Athenians: "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:24–25, ESV).

The distinction between "freely choosing to be affected" and "needing to be affected" is crucial. As a neoclassical theist, I affirm that God freely chooses to be affected by His creatures. He willingly opens Himself to our joys and sorrows, our prayers and praises, our faithfulness and failures. But He does this freely, as a sovereign act of love — not because He has to, not because His being is incomplete without us. The process God has no such freedom. He is bound to the world by metaphysical necessity. This is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is not the God who freely loved the world and gave His only Son.²⁵

R. T. Mullins helpfully distinguishes neoclassical theism from process theology precisely on this point. The neoclassical theist affirms that God and creation are ontologically distinct and affirms the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, "thus denying pantheism and panentheism." The neoclassical theist also "rejects process metaphysics, and retains a more classical substance metaphysics, thus distinguishing neoclassical theism from process theology."²⁶ This distinction is vital. One can affirm divine temporality and divine passibility — as neoclassical theists do — without adopting the entire process package. God can be temporal, mutable, and passible while still being ontologically independent, sovereign, and the free Creator of all things.

Problem Five: A Fellow-Sufferer Who Cannot Save

We come now to what I consider the most pastorally devastating consequence of process theology. Whitehead described God as "the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands."²⁷ It is a beautiful phrase. But stop and ask: Is a fellow-sufferer who can only empathize enough? Is a God who understands but cannot rescue the God of the Bible?

Imagine a child drowning in a river. A bystander stands on the bank, watching with deep empathy, feeling the child's terror, weeping at the child's struggle. The bystander understands completely. He suffers alongside the child in genuine compassion. But he cannot swim. He has no rope to throw. He can only watch, feel, and grieve. Now imagine a second person who dives into the river, fights the current, grabs the child, and pulls her to safety. Both people care. But only one can save.

The God of the Bible is the one who dives in. He does not merely empathize with our suffering — He acts to deliver us from it. He sends plagues on Egypt to free His enslaved people. He parts the Red Sea. He sends prophets. He becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ, enters human suffering from the inside, dies on a cross, and then rises from the dead to conquer the last enemy: death itself. The resurrection is an act of sovereign power, not gentle persuasion. God did not "lure" death into submission. He conquered it. "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55, ESV).

The process God cannot do this. He cannot conquer death because He cannot coerce. He cannot guarantee resurrection because He cannot determine outcomes. He can only invite, attract, and hope. For a person in the depths of suffering — facing cancer, grieving a child, enduring persecution — the process God offers sympathy but not salvation. He stands on the riverbank weeping, but He cannot jump in.²⁸

This is why I call process theology "another bridge too far." It rightly sees that God is temporal and relational. It rightly sees that God is affected by the world. But in its zeal to emphasize divine responsiveness, it strips God of the very power that makes His love effective. A love that can only weep but never rescue is a tragic love. And the Christian gospel is not a tragedy — it is the story of a God who loved the world so much that He did not merely empathize with it from a distance but entered into it, suffered within it, died in it, and then shattered death itself by the power of His resurrection.

The Creepy Emotions Problem

Before we leave our critique of process theology, we need to address one more significant problem — what R. T. Mullins, in his important study God and Emotion, calls "the problem of creepy emotions." This problem is especially acute for process theology, though it also affects any version of divine passibility that is not carefully nuanced.²⁹

Here is the issue. Process theologians often say that God shares all the feelings of all creatures, and that He shares them even more fully than we do ourselves. God's consequent nature absorbs every creaturely experience. Think about what this actually means if we take it without qualification.

If God literally shares every emotion of every creature, then God shares the emotions of the sadist who takes pleasure in torturing others. Does God experience sadistic pleasure? If God shares every feeling of every creature, then God shares the lust of the sexual predator and the hatred of the bigot. As Richard Creel humorously pointed out in a well-known objection, does this mean that God feels horny? The idea of an omnipresent, omniscient God experiencing such emotions is, to put it mildly, deeply uncomfortable. Creel suggested it is worse than uncomfortable — it is "creepy."³⁰

Mullins identifies what he calls the "Simplistic Divine Empathy" thesis that lies behind this problem. This thesis holds two things: (1) God feels exactly what His creatures feel, and (2) God agrees with the emotional evaluation of His creatures. Mullins points out that there are really two distinct problems here. First, there is what he calls "the Problem of Emotional Agreement" — the problem that God would share the sadist's joy in inflicting pain, which would make God morally monstrous. Second, there is what he calls "the Problem of Mere Feeling" — the problem that even if God does not agree with the sadist's emotional evaluation, there is still something deeply unseemly about God experiencing the raw sensations associated with morally repugnant emotions.³¹

This problem is especially acute for process theology because process theology takes the world to be, in some sense, God's body. Hartshorne described the God-world relationship in panentheistic terms: the world is in God, even though God transcends the world. If the world is in God in this intimate way, then every creaturely experience is directly and immediately God's experience. There is no buffer, no distance, no distinction between creaturely feeling and divine feeling. The sadist's pleasure is, quite literally, God's pleasure — at least in terms of raw experience.³²

How can the passibilist respond? Mullins identifies two options. The first is what he calls "the Zagzebski option," named after philosopher Linda Zagzebski. Zagzebski argues that genuine empathy does not require agreeing with the other person's emotional evaluation. When you empathize with someone, you acquire a "copy" of their emotion while remaining aware that your own perspective is different. An empath never gives up her own perspective. God can fully understand the sadist's experience without sharing the sadist's moral evaluation of that experience. Far from entailing agreement, genuine empathy actually requires the ability to disagree — to feel what the other person feels while recognizing that their evaluation is wrong.³³

The second option is what Mullins calls "the Maximal God option." This approach uses the framework of "perfect being theology" — the idea that God is the greatest possible being. Rather than saying God is "omnisubjective" (that He shares every creaturely experience without exception), the Maximal God approach says that God has empathy to the greatest degree that is consistent with His moral perfection. There may be some creaturely experiences that God cannot share precisely because sharing them would be inconsistent with His perfect goodness. God has maximal empathy — not omnisubjective empathy — because His empathy is constrained by His moral nature.³⁴

I find this discussion illuminating, and it directly supports the position I have defended in my companion book, The Heart of God. God's passibility — His genuine emotional responsiveness — must be understood within the framework of His moral perfection. God genuinely feels, genuinely responds, and genuinely suffers with His creatures. But His emotional life is not a mirror image of ours. It is shaped and governed by His perfect goodness, wisdom, and holiness. God can grieve over sin without sharing in its pleasure. He can feel compassion for the sinner without endorsing the sin. This is mature, theologically informed passibility — not the unqualified empathy of process theology that leads to creepy and morally problematic conclusions.

The point for our purposes is this: the "creepy emotions" problem shows that process theology's view of God's emotional life needs significant correction. Unqualified divine empathy — the idea that God simply absorbs every creaturely experience without distinction — leads to morally unacceptable conclusions. A more careful, nuanced passibility — one that affirms genuine divine emotion within the constraints of God's moral perfection — avoids these problems while preserving the biblical portrait of a God who truly cares.³⁵

Process Theology and the Problem of Evil

One area where process theology has been particularly influential is the problem of evil. In fact, many people are drawn to process theology precisely because it seems to offer a satisfying answer to the question: Why does God allow suffering?

The process answer is simple: God does not "allow" suffering because God cannot prevent it. God is doing everything He can — offering the best possible aim to each occasion of experience, luring all things toward beauty and harmony — but He lacks the power to guarantee that His aims will be accepted. Evil results when creatures choose lower possibilities instead of higher ones. It is not God's fault. He is doing His best. His best just is not enough to eliminate evil unilaterally.

Griffin has been especially articulate on this point. His book God, Power, and Evil (2004) argues that traditional theism's insistence on divine omnipotence makes the problem of evil insoluble. If God is all-powerful and perfectly good, why does He not prevent evil? The traditional answers — free will, soul-making, greater goods — are, Griffin argues, ultimately inadequate. The only real solution is to deny that God has the power to prevent evil. Once we accept that God can only persuade, the problem of evil dissolves: God is doing everything within His power, and His power simply does not include the ability to override creaturely freedom.³⁶

This solution has a certain logical elegance. But it purchases that elegance at a terrible price. It solves the problem of evil by redefining God — and the God that remains is not the God of the Bible.

Consider the following. The God of the Bible does intervene in history with sovereign power. He sends the flood to judge a wicked world. He sends plagues on Egypt. He parts the Red Sea. He brings down the walls of Jericho. He sends fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. He raises Jesus from the dead. These are not acts of gentle persuasion. They are acts of a God who can and does exercise coercive power when His purposes require it. If the process God is the real God, then all of these events must be reinterpreted — and the most natural reading of the biblical text must be abandoned.

Furthermore, the process solution to the problem of evil only works if you are willing to give up hope. I mean this quite seriously. If God cannot guarantee outcomes, then God cannot guarantee the final defeat of evil. He hopes to defeat evil. He is working toward the defeat of evil. But He cannot promise it. For the person in the midst of terrible suffering — the parent who has lost a child, the prisoner of conscience, the victim of genocide — the process God can say, "I understand your pain, and I am doing my best to make things better." But He cannot say, "I will wipe every tear from your eyes. Death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). He cannot say these things because He does not know if they will come true. And a hope that is not grounded in certainty is a fragile hope indeed.³⁷

I do not pretend that the problem of evil is easy. It is one of the most agonizing questions in all of theology. But I believe there are better answers available within the framework of orthodox theism — answers that preserve both God's sovereign power and human freedom — than the process solution of simply reducing God's power until the problem goes away. For a fuller discussion of divine providence and human freedom, see Chapter 29.

Process Christology: Can the Process God Become Incarnate?

The Incarnation — the central mystery of the Christian faith — provides another revealing test case for process theology. Traditional Christian orthodoxy, as defined by the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), confesses that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures: fully divine and fully human. The eternal Son of God took on human nature and became a human being, without ceasing to be God. This is the doctrine that makes Christianity what it is.

Process theology cannot affirm this doctrine as traditionally understood. In process thought, God does not "become" anything. God does not take on a new nature. God does not enter into a hypostatic union with a human nature. Instead, process Christology typically interprets the Incarnation in terms of God's special presence or influence in Jesus. Jesus was a human being in whom God's aims were more fully received and actualized than in any other person. God's primordial vision was more completely embodied in Jesus than in anyone else. But Jesus was not God incarnate in the Chalcedonian sense — not God the Son who took on human flesh.

Cobb, for example, developed a process Christology that understands Jesus as the person in whom God's "initial aim" was most perfectly received. Jesus was maximally responsive to God's lure. He actualized the divine aims more completely than any other human being. This makes Jesus unique, even supreme — but it does not make him God incarnate. It makes him the most God-responsive human, not the God-man.³⁸

For those of us who confess the Nicene Creed — "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God... who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man" — process Christology is inadequate. It reduces the Incarnation from a metaphysical event (God becoming human) to a relational or experiential event (a human being maximally open to God). These are fundamentally different claims. The first is the foundation of the Christian faith. The second, however moving, is not.

As I have argued in my companion book, The Word Made Flesh, the Incarnation is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for divine temporality. God the Son genuinely entered time, was born, grew, suffered, died, and rose again. This requires a God who can act in time — who is temporal, not timeless. But it also requires a God who is genuinely God — the transcendent Creator, the second Person of the Trinity, the one through whom all things were made. Process theology gives us the temporality but takes away the transcendence. We need both.³⁹

Process Eschatology: Can the Process God Deliver on Hope?

The problems with process theology become even more apparent when we consider eschatology — the doctrine of "last things," the final destiny of creation and humanity. Traditional Christian eschatology is breathtaking in its scope and certainty. God will raise the dead. God will judge the world. God will destroy evil. God will make all things new. Christ will return in glory. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. These are not merely hopes or aspirations — they are promises, guaranteed by the sovereign God who controls the outcome of history.

Process eschatology offers something very different. Since God cannot determine outcomes, He cannot guarantee the final triumph of good over evil. The future is open, and while God is working toward a beautiful conclusion, He cannot promise one. Marjorie Suchocki, in The End of Evil, developed a process eschatology that speaks of "objective immortality" — the idea that our experiences live on in God's consequent nature even after our bodies perish. Our lives contribute to God's ongoing experience forever. But this is not the robust, bodily resurrection promised in Scripture. It is a kind of being-remembered-by-God rather than being-raised-by-God.⁴⁰

Paul's great resurrection chapter makes clear what is at stake: "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:19–20, ESV). The Christian hope is not objective immortality. It is bodily resurrection — a new body, a new creation, a new world, all brought about by the sovereign power of the God who raises the dead. This hope requires a God who can do what He promises. The process God, by His own admission, cannot.

For those of us who believe in the intermediate state — the conscious survival of the soul between death and resurrection, as I have argued in Beyond the Grave — the process framework creates additional problems. If human persons are not enduring substances but merely series of momentary occasions of experience, what endures after death? What is it that survives? Process theology's rejection of substance metaphysics makes the very concept of a "soul" that persists through death problematic. The biblical hope of conscious existence after death, in the presence of Christ (Philippians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 5:8), requires that there be something — a soul, a self — that endures beyond the death of the body. Process metaphysics struggles to account for this.

Process Theology and the Doctrine of God: A Comparison

It may be helpful at this point to lay out clearly how process theology compares with both classical theism and the position I am defending in this book — neoclassical theism, or what I have been calling "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access." This will make the boundary lines clear and show why my affirmation of divine temporality does not lead to the process conclusions.

On creation: classical theism and neoclassical theism both affirm creation ex nihilo. Process theology denies it. The world is co-eternal with God in process thought.

On divine sovereignty: classical theism affirms God's comprehensive sovereign control (though there is debate about how far this extends). Neoclassical theism affirms genuine divine sovereignty — God can and does act with power to accomplish His purposes — while also affirming genuine human freedom. Process theology denies divine sovereignty in any robust sense. God can only persuade.

On omniscience: classical theism affirms exhaustive divine knowledge of all truth, including future truths. Neoclassical theism affirms exhaustive foreknowledge — God knows everything that will happen, including future free choices. Process theology denies that God knows the future with certainty.

On temporality: classical theism typically affirms divine timelessness. Neoclassical theism affirms divine temporality — God genuinely experiences sequence and succession. Process theology also affirms divine temporality. On this point, neoclassical theism and process theology agree against classical theism. But the agreement stops there.

On passibility: classical theism typically affirms divine impassibility — God cannot be affected by anything outside Himself. Neoclassical theism affirms qualified passibility — God freely allows Himself to be affected by creatures, and He genuinely experiences emotions in response to what happens in the world. Process theology affirms unqualified passibility — God is necessarily affected by everything that happens, and His being is partly constituted by creaturely experiences.

On God's aseity and independence: classical theism and neoclassical theism both affirm God's complete self-sufficiency. God does not need the world. Process theology denies this. God needs the world to have a consequent nature.

On the Incarnation: classical theism and neoclassical theism both affirm the Chalcedonian definition — Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. Process theology reinterprets the Incarnation as God's special presence in Jesus rather than a genuine hypostatic union.

On eschatology: classical theism and neoclassical theism both affirm that God will bring history to its appointed conclusion — resurrection, judgment, new creation. Process theology cannot guarantee this outcome.

Why Process Theology Continues to Attract — And Why Its Attractions Are Available Elsewhere

Given all these problems, why does process theology continue to attract thoughtful Christians? I believe there are several reasons, and I want to address them honestly because I think the attractions of process theology point to genuine needs that must be met by any adequate theology.

First, many people are drawn to process theology because they have experienced the pastoral failure of classical theism. When a child dies and the pastor says, "God ordained this for His glory," many people cannot accept that. When a person is told that God is completely unaffected by their suffering — that He watches from a position of timeless, undisturbed bliss — they rightly sense that something is wrong. Process theology offers an alternative: a God who genuinely shares their pain. And this pastoral instinct is absolutely correct. The problem is not the instinct — it is the metaphysical system attached to it. You do not need process theology to say that God suffers with His people. Neoclassical theism says the same thing, while preserving God's ability to actually help.⁴¹

Second, many people are drawn to process theology because of the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful and perfectly good, why does He not prevent suffering? Process theology's answer — God cannot prevent it — seems to get God "off the hook." But as I have argued, this solution creates far worse problems than it solves. A God who cannot prevent evil is a God who cannot guarantee the defeat of evil. The problem of evil is genuinely difficult, but the process solution purchases relief at the cost of hope.

Third, many people are drawn to process theology because of its emphasis on freedom and non-coercion. The idea of a God who respects creaturely freedom, who invites rather than compels, is deeply appealing. And again, this instinct is sound. God does respect human freedom. He does invite. He does not typically coerce. But there is a difference between saying "God usually works through persuasion and invitation" and saying "God can only work through persuasion." The first is biblical (think of God's patient dealings with Israel, His call to repentance, His offer of salvation through Christ). The second is a metaphysical straitjacket that denies God the very power that makes His love effective.

Fourth, some are drawn to process theology because of its engagement with science, particularly evolutionary biology. The process emphasis on creativity, emergence, and the openness of the future resonates with the scientific picture of a universe that is still unfolding, still developing, still producing novelty. This is a legitimate insight. The universe is dynamic, and God's relationship to it must be dynamic too. But you do not need process metaphysics to affirm this. A neoclassical, temporalist theology fully affirms that God interacts with a dynamic, developing creation. He guides it, shapes it, and works within it — while also being sovereign over its ultimate outcome.

Every genuine insight of process theology is available within the framework of orthodox, neoclassical theism. You can have a temporal God without denying creation ex nihilo. You can have a relational God without making Him dependent on the world. You can have a passible God without subjecting Him to creepy emotions. You can have a God who respects freedom without denying His sovereignty. You can have a God who suffers with you and a God who can save you. You do not have to choose.

The Historical Development of Process Theology

A brief historical sketch will help us understand how process theology developed and why it has taken the form it has. This is important because process theology did not emerge in a vacuum. It arose at a particular moment in intellectual history, in response to particular challenges, and its shape reflects those origins.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) began his career as a mathematician and logician. He co-authored Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) with Bertrand Russell, one of the most important works in the history of mathematical logic. In his later career, however, Whitehead turned to metaphysics — the study of the fundamental nature of reality. His great work, Process and Reality (1929), was an attempt to develop a metaphysical system that could account for the dynamic, changing character of the natural world as revealed by modern science. Whitehead was deeply influenced by the developments in physics during his lifetime — quantum mechanics and relativity — and he believed that the traditional substance metaphysics of Western philosophy (going back to Aristotle) was inadequate to account for these discoveries.⁴²

It is worth noting that Whitehead was not primarily a theologian. His interest in God arose from his metaphysical system, not the other way around. In Whitehead's philosophy, God plays a necessary functional role in the system — He provides the primordial ordering of eternal objects (possibilities) that makes the process of becoming possible. But this is a philosophical God, a God required by the system, not the personal God of the Bible who acts, speaks, and saves. Whitehead's famous description of God as "the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands" comes at the very end of Process and Reality and represents a suggestive but undeveloped theological aside rather than a worked-out doctrine of God.⁴³

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) was the thinker who most fully developed Whitehead's philosophy into a theological program. Hartshorne spent decades at the University of Chicago and later at the University of Texas, developing what he called "neoclassical theism" (a term that, as Mullins notes, was later superseded by "process theism" once the movement became established enough to have its own identity).⁴⁴ Hartshorne's most distinctive contribution was the concept of divine dipolarity — the idea that God has two aspects, a primordial and a consequent nature — and his argument that God's perfection requires that He be affected by the world. For Hartshorne, a God who cannot be affected is less perfect than a God who can, because responsiveness is a perfection. This is a version of "perfect being theology" — but it reaches very different conclusions from traditional perfect being arguments like those of Anselm and Aquinas.

The movement grew significantly in the mid-twentieth century, especially at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Claremont School of Theology. John Cobb Jr. became the most prominent process theologian of the latter twentieth century, writing widely on process theology's implications for Christology, ecology, economics, and interfaith dialogue. Cobb's Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (co-authored with David Ray Griffin in 1976) became the standard introduction to the field and remains widely read.⁴⁵ Griffin developed process theology's implications for the problem of evil and also engaged in extensive dialogue with the scientific community. Suchocki explored process eschatology and the concept of objective immortality.

In recent decades, process theology's influence has waned somewhat in academic philosophy of religion, where analytic approaches have become dominant. But it remains influential in certain theological circles, particularly in liberal Protestant theology, ecological theology, and feminist theology. Its emphasis on relationality, interconnectedness, and non-coercive love resonates with many contemporary theological movements.

Process Theology's View of Time: What It Shares and Where It Diverges

Since this is a book about God's relationship to time, we need to be precise about what process theology says about time specifically. As Natalja Deng notes in her survey of the field, process theology represents one version of what she calls "Pure Temporalism" — the view that God is in time in fundamentally the same way creatures are, differing only in the infinite extent of His temporal experience. God has existed through an infinite past and will exist through an infinite future, experiencing succession just as we do.⁴⁶

Deng observes that a process theology version of Pure Temporalism is "perhaps particularly susceptible to the problem" of making God seem "powerless in relation to time" because process thought "tends to emphasize the metaphysical ultimacy of time." In other words, in process theology, time is not something God creates or controls. Time is a fundamental feature of reality itself, and God is subject to it just as much as creatures are. God does not transcend time in any meaningful sense. He is fully within it, bound by its constraints, shaped by its passage.⁴⁷

This is where my position diverges sharply from process theology's view of time. I affirm that God is genuinely temporal — He experiences real sequence and succession. But I also affirm that God is not bound by creaturely clock-time. He transcends it. He can access all of time — past, present, and future — through His unique divine capacity. He is temporal but not trapped. He experiences sequence but is not locked into the present the way we are. This is what I have been calling "dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access," and it is a fundamentally different view from process theology's Pure Temporalism.

The difference matters enormously. If God is subject to time in the same way creatures are, then He is genuinely limited by it. He cannot know the future (because it has not happened yet). He cannot act on the past (because it is gone). He is stuck in the present moment, doing His best with what He has, and hoping for the best. That is the process God. But the God of the Bible is greater than this. He "declares the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:10). He knows the future with certainty. He is sovereign over time, not subject to it. He is in time but not of time — temporal in His experience but transcendent in His access.

The difference can be illustrated by returning to the NDE (near-death experience) analogy I have used throughout this book. NDE researchers consistently report that experiencers describe a mode of temporal awareness that is qualitatively different from ordinary clock-time. Events can be experienced both sequentially and simultaneously. Time can be "stretched" or "compressed." The experiencer is aware of temporal succession but is not bound by it in the ordinary way. I do not claim that NDEs prove a particular theory of divine time. But they illustrate the conceptual possibility of a mode of temporal experience that is genuinely sequential (not timeless) but also transcends the ordinary creaturely limitation of being locked into the present moment. This is suggestive of the kind of temporal transcendence I attribute to God — and it is a far cry from process theology's purely creaturely temporalism. (For the full discussion of NDEs and time, see Chapter 33.)⁴⁸

Responding to Process Theology's Defenders

Before closing, I want to engage briefly with several arguments that process theologians have offered in defense of their position. Fairness demands that I give these arguments a hearing, even though I ultimately find them unpersuasive.

First, process theologians argue that their view is actually more biblical than traditional theism. Griffin, in particular, has argued that the earliest strata of the biblical tradition — before the influence of Greek philosophy — present a God who is limited in power and who works with pre-existing material. Genesis 1, he argues, does not teach creation ex nihilo but creation from chaos — God shaping the formless void (tohu wabohu) into an ordered world.⁴⁹

I find this argument unconvincing for several reasons. While it is true that Genesis 1:2 mentions the "formless and void" state of the earth, the opening declaration of Genesis 1:1 — "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" — clearly asserts that God is the originator of all that exists. The phrase "the heavens and the earth" is a merism (a figure of speech in which two opposites are used to represent the totality), meaning "everything." God created everything. The tohu wabohu is a stage in the creative process, not pre-existing material that God merely reorganizes. Furthermore, as noted above, the New Testament is unambiguous: "All things were made through him" (John 1:3); "what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). The early church fathers explicitly defended creation ex nihilo against precisely the kind of view that process theology advocates.

Second, process theologians argue that divine omnipotence is logically incoherent. If God is truly all-powerful, Griffin asks, why can He not make a world without evil? The traditional answers (free will, etc.) are inadequate, Griffin insists, because an omnipotent God could have created beings with free will who always freely chose the good. Since He did not, either He is not omnipotent or He is not perfectly good.⁵⁰

This argument has force, but it does not require the process conclusion. The premise that an omnipotent God could create beings who always freely choose the good is debatable. Many philosophers argue that genuine libertarian freedom requires the real possibility of choosing wrongly — that "free will that always chooses the good" is not genuine freedom but a disguised form of determinism. Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, while not settling the issue conclusively, demonstrates that the logical problem of evil — the claim that God's existence is logically incompatible with the existence of evil — can be resolved without denying divine omnipotence. The deeper question of why God permits evil (the evidential problem of evil) remains genuinely difficult, but difficulty is not the same as impossibility. The process solution — reducing God's power until the problem disappears — is not the only option available.⁵¹

Third, process theologians argue that their view better accounts for evolution and the natural sciences. The process emphasis on creativity, novelty, and emergence resonates with the scientific picture of an evolving universe. This is a fair point, but it does not require process metaphysics. A neoclassical theist who affirms divine temporality can also affirm that God works within and through the processes of nature — including evolution — without denying His sovereign oversight or creative power. God can use natural processes as His instruments without being limited to them.

Conclusion: Temporality Without Heresy

Let me draw together the threads of this chapter. Process theology has done valuable work in emphasizing aspects of God's nature that traditional theism sometimes neglected: His temporality, His relationality, His emotional responsiveness, His willingness to be affected by the world. These are genuine biblical insights, and I am grateful to process theologians for pressing them. In a theological landscape dominated for centuries by the static, impassible, timeless God of strict classical theism, process theology served as a needed corrective.

But process theology overcorrects. It does not merely adjust the traditional picture — it replaces it with something fundamentally different. The process God is not the God of the Bible. He is not the Creator who made all things from nothing. He is not the sovereign Lord who controls the outcome of history. He is not the omniscient God who declares the end from the beginning. He is not the mighty Savior who conquers death and raises the dead. He is a fellow-traveler, a companion, a sympathetic presence — but not a Savior in the robust biblical sense.

What I have been arguing throughout this book is that we do not face a choice between the timeless, impassible God of strict classical theism and the limited, dependent God of process theology. There is a third way: dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access, set within the framework of orthodox, neoclassical Christian theism. This position affirms everything that process theology gets right — God's temporality, relationality, and emotional responsiveness — while also affirming everything that process theology wrongly denies: creation ex nihilo, divine sovereignty, exhaustive foreknowledge, genuine omnipotence, and the certainty of God's promises.

If open theism was one bridge too far — crossing the line by denying foreknowledge — process theology is another bridge too far, crossing the line by denying sovereignty, creation ex nihilo, omniscience, and the very metaphysical framework of Christian orthodoxy. We can and must do better. The God of the Bible is temporal, relational, and passible — but He is also sovereign, omniscient, self-sufficient, and the Creator of all things. He suffers with us and He saves us. He feels our pain and He conquers our enemies. He walks with us in time and He guarantees our future. That is the God I believe in — the God beyond the clock, who is in time but not of it, who experiences our world from the inside while holding all of history in His hands.

In the next chapter, we will begin a new section of the book: a historical survey of how the debate about God and time has developed from the ancient Greeks to the present day. Understanding this history is essential for evaluating the arguments we have considered in Part II and will continue to develop in the chapters ahead.