Part II: The Three Positions

Chapter 5

Process Theology

A Bridge Too Far

Introduction: Drawing the Line

If you have been reading this book from the beginning, you know by now that I believe God genuinely feels. He truly loves, truly grieves, truly rejoices, and truly burns with righteous anger. I have argued that the classical tradition's portrait of an utterly impassible God — a God who cannot be affected by anything outside Himself — fails to do justice to the overwhelming biblical witness (as we will see in Chapters 11–21) and raises serious philosophical problems (as we will explore in Chapters 22–25). In Chapter 4, we examined neoclassical theism's case for a God who is genuinely responsive, emotionally engaged, and relationally involved with His creatures — all without compromising His sovereignty, goodness, or self-sufficiency.

But here is the thing: if we are going to argue that God genuinely feels, we need to show where the line is. Not every version of divine passibility is equally faithful to Scripture. Not every attempt to make God relational and responsive ends up with a God who is recognizably the God of the Bible. And that brings us to process theology.

Process theology is, in many ways, the most radical version of divine passibility on the market today. It takes the insight that God is genuinely affected by the world and pushes it to its absolute extreme. In the process (no pun intended), it ends up with a God who is dependent on the world, who cannot create from nothing, who does not know the future, who cannot act with sovereign power to rescue His people, and who can only stand by as a sympathetic companion while evil rages unchecked. That is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That is not the God who parted the Red Sea, who raised Jesus from the dead, and who promises to make all things new.

This chapter is about drawing the line. I want to affirm — loudly and clearly — that God genuinely feels. But I also want to show that process theology crosses a boundary that Scripture does not allow us to cross. Process theology is a bridge too far.

What Is Process Theology?

Before we can evaluate process theology, we need to understand it. And that means starting with its founders and its basic ideas. I want to be fair to this tradition. Process theologians are serious thinkers who have made genuine contributions to our understanding of God's relationship with the world. But fairness does not mean agreement. After we lay out the view as clearly and charitably as we can, we will examine where it goes wrong.

The Founders: Whitehead and Hartshorne

Process theology has its roots in the philosophical work of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a British mathematician and philosopher who spent the later years of his career at Harvard University. Whitehead developed a comprehensive metaphysical system — a grand theory of everything — in his dense and difficult book Process and Reality (1929). Whitehead was not a theologian in the traditional sense. He was a philosopher trying to describe the fundamental nature of reality. But his system had enormous implications for how we think about God, and it quickly attracted the attention of theologians.¹

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) took Whitehead's philosophical ideas and developed them into a more explicitly theological program. Hartshorne argued passionately that the classical view of God — as timeless, immutable, impassible, and self-sufficient — was deeply flawed. In works like Man's Vision of God (1941) and The Divine Relativity (1948), Hartshorne insisted that God must be genuinely related to the world, genuinely affected by what happens in it, and genuinely growing in His experience as history unfolds.²

Later process theologians have carried this tradition forward. John B. Cobb Jr. has applied process thought to a wide range of theological topics, including Christology, ecology, and interreligious dialogue. David Ray Griffin has developed process theology's implications for theodicy — the problem of evil. Marjorie Suchocki has explored process theology's potential for understanding prayer, eschatology, and the nature of evil. Together, these thinkers represent a vibrant and influential school of thought that has shaped much of modern theology's conversation about God and the world.³

The Process Worldview: A Complete Metaphysical System

Here is something important to understand from the start: process theology is not just a view about God's emotions. It is a complete metaphysical system — a comprehensive theory about the fundamental nature of reality itself. When process theologians talk about God, they are drawing on a whole set of assumptions about what reality is and how it works. To understand the process God, we need to understand the process worldview.

In traditional Christian theology (and in ordinary common sense), reality is made up of enduring substances — things that persist through time. A rock is a rock. A person is a person. God is God. These things exist continuously, and while they may change in certain ways, they remain fundamentally the same things over time. This is called "substance metaphysics," and it has been the dominant framework for Western philosophy and theology since Aristotle.⁴

Whitehead rejected substance metaphysics. In its place, he proposed what we might call a "process metaphysics" or an "event metaphysics." On Whitehead's view, reality is not made up of enduring substances but of momentary "occasions of experience" — tiny, fleeting events that arise, experience their environment, and then perish, giving way to the next occasion. Everything that exists — from an electron to a human being to God — is a series of these momentary occasions of experience, linked together in a stream of becoming.⁵

Think of it this way. In traditional thinking, you are a person — a single, enduring self who exists continuously from birth to death. In process thinking, "you" are actually a rapidly flowing series of momentary experiences, each one building on the previous one. There is no enduring "you" underneath the flow — the flow itself is all there is. Reality is not made up of things; it is made up of happenings.

This may sound strange. It is strange. But Whitehead believed it was the only way to make sense of a world that is genuinely dynamic, creative, and relational. And it has massive implications for how we think about God.

The Process God: Five Key Features

When process theologians apply this worldview to God, they arrive at a picture that looks very different from the God of classical Christian theism. Let me lay out the five most important features of the process God in terms that anyone can understand.

First, God is dipolar. This is one of Hartshorne's most distinctive ideas. Classical theism says God has one nature — a single, unified, unchanging essence. Hartshorne said God has two aspects or "poles." One pole is God's "primordial nature" — His eternal vision of all the possibilities that could ever be realized, His unchanging character and purposes. The other pole is God's "consequent nature" — His experience of the actual world as it unfolds in time. The primordial nature never changes. But the consequent nature is constantly growing as God takes in (or "prehends," to use Whitehead's technical term) every event that happens in the world. Think of it like this: God's character and values never change (primordial nature), but His experience is always expanding as He lives through history alongside His creatures (consequent nature).⁶

Second, God is not omnipotent in the classical sense. This is perhaps the most striking departure from traditional Christian belief. In classical theism, God is all-powerful — He can do anything that is logically possible, and He can act unilaterally to bring about any state of affairs He chooses. In process theology, God's power is limited to persuasion. God sets before every occasion of experience an "initial aim" — a vision of what that occasion could become at its best. But the occasion is free to accept or reject that aim. God lures, invites, and attracts, but He never coerces. He is like a wise teacher who inspires his students but cannot force them to learn.⁷

Third, God does not create ex nihilo — out of nothing. In the Bible and in traditional Christian theology, God created the entire universe from nothing (Genesis 1:1; John 1:3; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 11:3). Before God created, there was nothing but God. In process theology, however, the world is co-eternal with God. There was never a time when God existed alone without some world to relate to. God works with pre-existing material — He shapes, organizes, and guides the world, but He does not bring it into existence from nothing. The world is as eternal as God is.⁸

Fourth, God does not know the future exhaustively. In classical and neoclassical theism alike, God knows everything — past, present, and future. He knows what will happen tomorrow, next year, and at the end of history. But in process theology, the future is genuinely open even for God. This is because, on the process view, future events do not yet exist. Since they do not exist, there is nothing there to be known. God knows everything that can be known — all of the past, all of the present, and all of the possibilities for the future — but He does not know which possibilities will actually be realized, because that depends on the free decisions of creatures that have not yet been made.⁹

Fifth, God is affected by everything that happens in the world. This is the process version of divine passibility — taken to its maximum extent. Every event that occurs in the universe becomes part of God's experience. Every joy, every sorrow, every triumph, every tragedy is "prehended" (taken in and experienced) by God in His consequent nature. Hartshorne put it vividly, describing God as the one who "endures infinitely more evil than we can imagine."¹⁰ The world contributes to God's own experience, enriching and expanding it as history goes on. In a striking metaphor, Hartshorne even described the world as "God's body" — the physical reality through which God feels and experiences everything.¹¹

What Process Theology Gets Right

Before I explain what is wrong with process theology, I want to be honest about what it gets right. Fairness demands this. And besides, understanding what is genuinely insightful about process theology helps us see why it has attracted so many thoughtful people — and helps us preserve those insights within a more biblical framework.

Process theology gets at least four things right.

First, it insists that God is genuinely relational. Process theologians have reminded us — against centuries of abstract philosophical theology — that the God of the Bible is not a remote, self-enclosed deity floating above the world in perfect detachment. He is a God who creates, sustains, guides, speaks, listens, responds, and engages. The process emphasis on God's genuine relatedness to the world is a healthy corrective to traditions that have made God so transcendent that He becomes practically irrelevant to daily life.

Second, it insists that God is genuinely affected by the world. When your child is suffering, process theology says, God is not observing from a state of undisturbed bliss. He is genuinely touched by that suffering. He takes it into Himself. It matters to Him — not just in some abstract, propositional way, but experientially. This resonates deeply with the biblical portrait of a God who hears the cries of His people (Exodus 3:7), who is moved with compassion (Matthew 9:36), and who weeps (John 11:35).

Third, it emphasizes divine love as invitational rather than coercive. Process theology has drawn attention to the fact that God's love does not override human freedom. God woos, invites, and draws — He does not force. There is a genuine biblical truth here. God's grace is resistible (Acts 7:51). God longs for people to return to Him but does not compel them (Matthew 23:37). The process emphasis on the persuasive, invitational character of divine love captures something important about how God relates to free creatures.

Fourth, it affirms that the world genuinely matters to God. Against the classical claim that nothing in creation can affect God's inner life (what we called "value swamping" in Chapter 3), process theology insists that every creature, every event, every moment of history has genuine value and genuinely contributes to God's own experience. This resonates with the biblical teaching that God delights in His creation (Genesis 1:31), numbers the hairs on our heads (Matthew 10:30), and notices when a single sparrow falls to the ground (Matthew 10:29).

These are real insights. They are not wrong. The problem is not what process theology affirms about God's relationality and responsiveness. The problem is what it denies about God's sovereignty, power, knowledge, and independence. And that is where we must now turn.

What Process Theology Gets Wrong

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, process theology crosses a line that Scripture does not allow us to cross. It takes genuine biblical insights about God's relational character and wraps them in a philosophical framework that distorts and ultimately destroys the biblical portrait of God. Let me walk through the major problems one by one.

Problem 1: Process Theology Compromises Divine Sovereignty

This is the most devastating problem, and it strikes at the heart of the biblical message. If God can only persuade but never act unilaterally — if He can lure and invite but never intervene with sovereign power — then God cannot guarantee the outcome of history. He cannot ensure that evil will ultimately be defeated. He cannot keep His promises with certainty. He cannot rescue His people when they cry out to Him.

Think about what this means in practice. The God of the Bible parts the Red Sea (Exodus 14). He topples the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6). He sends fire from heaven on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). He raises Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11). He promises to create a new heaven and a new earth where there will be no more death, mourning, crying, or pain (Revelation 21:1–4). Every one of these acts requires a God who can do more than persuade. They require a God who can act — decisively, powerfully, unilaterally — to accomplish His purposes.

The process God cannot do any of this. He can set before each creature a vision of what it might become. He can invite, encourage, and inspire. But if the creature says no — if the cancer cell refuses to respond to God's lure, if the tectonic plate declines God's gentle suggestion, if the tyrant rejects God's invitation to justice — God has no recourse. He cannot override the creature's self-determination. He is left watching, hoping, and suffering alongside.

David Ray Griffin, one of process theology's most articulate defenders, has been refreshingly honest about this. He acknowledges that the process God cannot prevent genuine evil, cannot guarantee that history will end well, and cannot make the kind of absolute promises that fill the pages of Scripture.¹² For Griffin, this is a feature, not a bug — it is the price we pay for a God who respects creaturely freedom absolutely. But for anyone who takes the Bible seriously, this is a staggering price. A God who cannot keep His promises is not the God of the Bible.

As Rob Lister has observed, the process view effectively strips God of the ability to act as sovereign Lord over creation. The God who declares, "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose" (Isaiah 46:10, ESV), is simply not the God of process theology. Process theology gives us a God with good intentions but limited capacity — a God who means well but cannot always deliver.¹³

Problem 2: Process Theology Denies Creation Ex Nihilo

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo — creation "out of nothing" — is one of the most foundational teachings of the Christian faith. It means that before God created, there was nothing but God. No matter, no energy, no pre-existing stuff. God spoke, and the universe came into being from nothing at all. This doctrine is grounded in the opening words of the Bible — "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1, ESV) — and it runs throughout the entire biblical witness.

The New Testament affirms it just as clearly. John's Gospel begins by declaring, "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3, ESV). Paul tells the Colossians that "by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... all things were created through him and for him" (Colossians 1:16, ESV). The author of Hebrews states, "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).

Process theology rejects all of this. On the process view, the world is co-eternal with God. There was never a time when God existed alone. God has always had a world to relate to, and He always will. God does not bring matter into existence from nothing; He organizes, shapes, and directs material that is already there. As Whitehead framed it, God serves as a companion alongside the world rather than as the sovereign source from which creation springs.¹⁴

This is not a minor theological adjustment. Creation ex nihilo is what establishes the fundamental distinction between Creator and creature — the most basic truth of the biblical worldview. If God did not create the world from nothing, then the world is just as ultimate as God is. God and the world become co-equal, co-eternal realities, neither one more fundamental than the other. This collapses the Creator-creature distinction that runs through every page of Scripture.

Furthermore, creation ex nihilo is what grounds God's sovereignty. Because God made everything from nothing, everything depends on Him for its existence. Because everything depends on Him, He has authority over everything. Take away creation ex nihilo, and you take away the foundation for divine sovereignty — which is exactly what happens in process theology.¹⁵

J. D. Kim rightly notes that the process denial of creation ex nihilo is one of the clearest markers that process theology has stepped outside the boundaries of the Christian tradition. Whatever merits the process system may have as a philosophical exercise, it cannot claim to be a faithful interpretation of the biblical creation narrative.¹⁶

Problem 3: Process Theology Compromises Omniscience

In both classical and neoclassical theism, God knows all things exhaustively — past, present, and future. As I noted in the author's theological position statement (see Part One), I reject open theism — the view that God does not know future free choices. I believe God knows the future completely and infallibly. He knows who will be born tomorrow, what decisions they will make, and how history will unfold from now until the end of the age. This is what makes His promises trustworthy. When God says, "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, ESV), we can trust that promise because God knows exactly what the future holds and has the power to keep His word.

Process theology denies this. On the process view, the future is genuinely open — not just for us, but for God. Future events do not yet exist, so (process theologians argue) there is nothing there to be known. God knows all of the past, all of the present, and all of the possibilities for the future, but He does not know which possibilities will actually be realized. He is, in a sense, waiting to find out — just like we are, though with far greater wisdom and far greater powers of anticipation.¹⁷

The problems with this are enormous. If God does not know the future, then He cannot make unconditional prophecies. He cannot tell Isaiah what the name of the Persian king Cyrus will be a century and a half before Cyrus is born (Isaiah 44:28–45:1). He cannot tell Daniel the sequence of world empires that will rise and fall over the coming centuries (Daniel 2 and 7). He cannot promise Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5) — because He does not actually know whether that will happen. All of God's promises become, at best, educated guesses — statements of good intentions rather than guaranteed outcomes.

For the author of this book, this is simply unacceptable. The God who declares, "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9–10, ESV), is a God who knows the future exhaustively. As I have argued in my companion book The God Beyond the Clock, God's temporal experience — His ability to live through moments of time with His creatures — does not require ignorance of the future. A God who experiences each moment as it unfolds can still know in advance how the story will end.¹⁸

Problem 4: Process Theology Makes God Dependent on the World

One of the most important distinctions in all of theology is the distinction between a God who freely chooses to be affected by His creatures and a God who has no choice but to be affected by them. Neoclassical theism (as described in Chapter 4) affirms the first option. Process theology affirms the second — and that makes all the difference.

In neoclassical theism, God is a se — a Latin term meaning "from Himself." It refers to God's complete self-sufficiency. God's existence and essential nature do not depend on anything outside of God. He did not create the world because He needed it. He was not lonely or incomplete without it. The triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — enjoyed perfect fellowship, love, and joy within Himself from all eternity. He created the world freely, out of love, and He freely chose to be affected by it. His emotional responsiveness to creation is an expression of sovereign love, not a sign of ontological need.¹⁹

In process theology, by contrast, God needs the world. God's consequent nature — His experience of actual events — can only exist if there is an actual world for Him to experience. Without a world, God would have only His primordial nature: an abstract vision of possibilities with no concrete content. The world is not a gift that God freely chose to create; it is a necessary component of God's own being. Hartshorne made this explicit when he described the world as "God's body" — the physical reality without which God's experience would be incomplete.²⁰

This collapses the distinction between God's free choice to be affected and God's ontological dependence on being affected. And it has serious theological consequences. A God who needs the world is not the self-sufficient, sovereign Lord of the Bible. He is a God who is just as dependent on us as we are on Him — a co-dependent deity, if you will. As Mullins has observed, the neoclassical theist carefully distinguishes God's essential nature (which does not depend on creation) from God's emotional responsiveness (which is a free expression of His love for creation). Process theology blurs this distinction by making God's very experience constitutionally dependent on the world.²¹

Problem 5: Process Theology Reduces God to a Fellow-Sufferer Who Cannot Save

Perhaps the most famous line in all of process theology comes from Whitehead himself, near the end of Process and Reality. He describes God as "the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands."²²

That sentence is beautiful. It is moving. And taken on its own, it captures something genuinely biblical about God's character. The God of the Bible is indeed a companion who understands our suffering. He has entered into our pain through the incarnation and the cross. He weeps with those who weep (Romans 12:15). He is close to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18).

But here is the devastating problem: in process theology, that is all God can do. He can understand your suffering. He can share in it. He can feel it with you. But He cannot stop it. He cannot rescue you from it. He cannot promise you that it will end. He cannot guarantee that good will triumph over evil. He cannot raise the dead. He cannot make all things new.

I want to say this as gently but as clearly as I can: a God who suffers with you but cannot rescue you from suffering is not the God of the Bible. He is a well-meaning bystander — the ultimate sympathetic friend — but He is not a Savior. And a God who is not a Savior is ultimately a recipe for pastoral despair. What comfort is there in knowing that God is suffering alongside you if He cannot actually do anything about it?²³

Contrast this with the biblical vision: "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1, ESV). "He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces" (Isaiah 25:8, ESV). "In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33, ESV). "He who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new'" (Revelation 21:5, ESV). These are not the words of a God who can only sympathize. These are the words of a God who can — and will — act.

As Lister has carefully documented, the process conception of divine power leaves us with a God who is, at the end of the day, unable to intervene against evil. David Bentley Hart has been even more pointed, arguing that process theology strays "far beyond the identifiable boundaries of the Christian story."²⁴ This is a view that prioritizes philosophical consistency over biblical faithfulness — and in doing so, loses the very heart of the gospel.

The "Creepy Emotions" Problem: A Preview

There is one more problem with process theology that deserves attention here, even though we will treat it in full depth in Chapter 24. It is sometimes called the "creepy emotions" problem, and it was first raised by the philosopher Richard Creel as an objection to unqualified divine empathy.²⁵

Here is the issue. Process theology says God experiences everything His creatures experience — He prehends every creaturely event and takes it into His own experience. But if that is true, does God experience all the feelings of all creatures? Does God feel what a torturer feels when he enjoys inflicting pain? Does God feel sexual arousal when His creatures do? Does God experience the irrational fury of a man in a fit of rage?

Creel raised this objection with characteristic bluntness: Does the process God experience sexual arousal?²⁶ The question is deliberately provocative, but it makes a serious point. If divine empathy means sharing in every creaturely emotion without distinction, then we end up with a God who has some deeply troubling emotional states. Mullins calls these "creepy emotions" — emotions that, if attributed to God, would make God morally problematic or rationally inconsistent.²⁷

Mullins identifies what he calls "Simplistic Divine Empathy" — the view that (i) God feels exactly what His creatures feel, and (ii) God agrees with the emotional evaluation of His creatures. Both conditions create serious problems. Condition (ii) gives us a God who shares the sadist's enjoyment of cruelty — what Mullins calls the "Problem of Emotional Agreement." Condition (i), even without (ii), gives us a God who experiences sexual arousal and irrational stupidity — the "Problem of Mere Feeling."²⁸

The process theologian has no principled way to exclude these troubling emotions from God's experience. If God prehends every creaturely event without exception, then He prehends the torturer's sadistic pleasure just as surely as He prehends the victim's pain. There is no built-in filter in the process system that would allow God to share in some emotions but not others.

The author's mediating position avoids this problem entirely. Because I do not affirm that God must share in every creaturely emotion, I can say that God empathizes with the victim without sharing the perpetrator's twisted pleasure. God's empathy is filtered through His perfect moral nature. He understands creaturely emotional experience — He knows what it is like — but He does not agree with sinful emotional evaluations, and He is not corrupted by morally deficient emotions. Just as a perfectly wise and compassionate counselor can understand a patient's destructive impulses without sharing them, God can comprehend our emotional lives without being corrupted by them. We will explore this in much greater detail in Chapter 24, where we will examine Zagzebski's omnisubjectivity proposal and the "Maximal God" option that Mullins develops.²⁹

Process Theology and the Atonement: A God Who Cannot Save

One area where the inadequacy of process theology becomes especially clear is the doctrine of the atonement — the Christian teaching that Jesus Christ died on the cross to save sinners. The atonement is the beating heart of the Christian gospel, and it requires a God who can do far more than process theology allows.

Consider what the New Testament says about the cross. Paul writes, "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV). The author of Hebrews says that Christ "offered himself without blemish to God" and "is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance" (Hebrews 9:14–15, ESV). Peter declares, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed" (1 Peter 2:24, ESV).

Every one of these passages assumes a God who can act decisively and unilaterally to accomplish salvation. The cross is not a suggestion. It is not God's best attempt to lure humanity toward reconciliation. It is a sovereign act of God — planned before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20), executed in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4), and accomplished once for all (Hebrews 10:10). The process God, who can only persuade and never act unilaterally, cannot do any of this. He can inspire Jesus to live a sacrificial life. He can set before Jesus the "initial aim" of going to the cross. But He cannot guarantee that the cross will actually accomplish salvation — because on the process view, God cannot guarantee any outcome.³⁹

This has devastating consequences for the gospel. If the cross is merely God's best attempt at salvation rather than God's accomplished work of salvation, then our hope is built on sand. We cannot know for certain that our sins are forgiven, that death has been conquered, or that eternal life is secured. Everything depends on whether creatures freely cooperate with God's lure — and God Himself does not know whether they will.

The biblical gospel, by contrast, announces accomplished facts. "It is finished" (John 19:30). "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1, ESV). "I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand" (John 10:28, ESV). These are the words of a sovereign God who has the power to accomplish salvation and the knowledge to guarantee its outcome. A God of mere persuasion simply cannot underwrite these promises.

Process Theology and Prayer: Does It Make a Difference?

Another area where process theology's weaknesses become painfully apparent is the practice of prayer. Christians pray because they believe that God hears, cares, and can act in response to their requests. "Ask, and it will be given to you," Jesus says. "Seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7, ESV). James writes, "The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working" (James 5:16, ESV). The entire biblical practice of petitionary prayer — asking God for things — presupposes that God has the power to grant what is asked.

What happens to prayer on the process view? On one hand, process theology takes prayer more seriously than strict classical theism in at least one respect: since the process God is genuinely affected by everything that happens, He genuinely receives our prayers and is genuinely moved by them. Our prayers enter into God's consequent nature and become part of His experience. That is a positive contribution — and it is one that the classical tradition, with its emphasis on God's immutability and impassibility, sometimes struggled to articulate.⁴⁰

But on the other hand, what can the process God actually do in response to our prayers? He can adjust His "initial aims" for future occasions of experience. He can lure, invite, and persuade. But He cannot intervene. He cannot heal the sick person, unless the cancer cells respond to His lure. He cannot provide for the family in need, unless other people happen to cooperate with God's persuasive purposes. He cannot protect the child in danger, unless all the relevant occasions of experience freely align with God's aims.

This is not the kind of God we cry out to in our darkest moments. When a mother prays desperately for her dying child, she is not asking God to adjust His initial aims for the cancer cells. She is asking God to act — to heal, to intervene, to save. The biblical God can do this. The process God cannot. And that difference is not academic. It is the difference between genuine hope and well-intentioned helplessness.

Process Theology and Eschatology: Can God Keep His Promises?

The problems compound when we consider eschatology — the doctrine of "last things," the biblical teaching about how history will end. The Bible is emphatic: God will bring history to a definitive and glorious conclusion. Christ will return. The dead will be raised. Evil will be judged. Creation will be renewed. God will dwell with His people forever. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and 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, ESV).

These are not tentative suggestions. They are unconditional promises. And they require a God who can guarantee outcomes — who knows how history will end and has the power to bring it about. The process God can do neither. He does not know how history will end (because the future is genuinely open), and He does not have the power to bring about any particular outcome (because He can only persuade, never coerce). The process eschatology, if we can call it that, offers no guarantee of ultimate victory. Evil might endure forever. Suffering might never end. The new creation might never arrive.⁴¹

Suchocki has attempted to develop a process eschatology, but even she acknowledges that it looks radically different from the biblical vision. In the process framework, there is no definitive end to evil, no final judgment, no guaranteed resurrection, no return of Christ in power and glory. What there is, instead, is an ongoing process of divine persuasion that may — or may not — gradually move creation toward greater harmony. For the process theologian, hope is a disposition, not a certainty. It is the hope that God's lure will eventually be effective — but without any guarantee that it will be.⁴²

I find this deeply unsatisfying — both theologically and pastorally. The Christian hope is not a disposition of vague optimism. It is a confident expectation grounded in the character and power of a sovereign God. "For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38–39, ESV). Paul is not expressing a hopeful wish here. He is stating a fact — a fact that only a sovereign, omniscient, omnipotent God can underwrite.

Process Theology and the Bible: A Fundamental Mismatch

Throughout this discussion, I have been pointing to specific biblical passages that contradict process theology's claims. But the problem goes deeper than individual proof-texts. The fundamental issue is that the entire narrative arc of Scripture presupposes a God who is radically different from the process God.

The God of the Bible creates the universe from nothing by the sheer power of His word (Genesis 1; Psalm 33:6). He makes unconditional promises to Abraham, David, and the prophets — and He keeps them, sometimes centuries later (Genesis 12:1–3; 2 Samuel 7:12–16; Isaiah 9:6–7). He delivers His people from slavery in Egypt with mighty acts of power (Exodus 14–15). He sends His Son into the world to accomplish a definitive work of salvation — not to try His best, but to succeed (John 3:16; 19:30). He raises Jesus from the dead, conquering sin and death once and for all (Romans 6:9; 1 Corinthians 15:54–57). And He promises to bring history to a glorious conclusion — creating a new heaven and a new earth where evil, suffering, and death are no more (Revelation 21:1–5).

Every single one of these central biblical themes requires a God who can act with sovereign power, who knows the future exhaustively, and who created the world from nothing. The process God can do none of these things. This is not a matter of a few problematic verses that might be explained away. It is a fundamental mismatch between the entire biblical storyline and the process metaphysical system.

We can sharpen the point by considering how process theology handles the miracles of the Bible. What do we do with the parting of the Red Sea, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the raising of Lazarus, and supremely, the resurrection of Jesus? These events require a God who can intervene directly and powerfully in the physical world — who can override the normal course of nature when His purposes require it. The process God simply cannot do this. He can lure the water molecules to part and the dead cells to come back to life, but He cannot make them do so. If process theology is right, then either these miracles never happened (which contradicts the clear testimony of Scripture), or they happened through some naturalistic process that God merely nudged along (which empties them of their theological significance). Neither option is acceptable for those who affirm the full authority of Scripture.⁴³

I appreciate the honesty of process theologians who acknowledge this tension. Griffin, for example, has been forthright in admitting that his view requires significant revision of traditional biblical interpretation. But for those of us who believe that Scripture is God's authoritative self-revelation, significant revision of the biblical portrait of God in order to accommodate a twentieth-century philosophical system is not an acceptable option.³⁰

The Attraction of Process Theology: Why People Are Drawn to It

If process theology has so many problems, why has it attracted so many thoughtful people? This is a fair question, and answering it honestly helps us understand what is really at stake in the passibility debate.

I think there are at least three reasons process theology appeals to people.

First, it takes the problem of evil seriously. The most powerful attraction of process theology is its answer to the question, "Why does God allow suffering?" The process answer is simple and emotionally compelling: God does not "allow" suffering; He cannot prevent it. He does not have the power to stop every evil, override every free choice, or prevent every natural disaster. He does the best He can with limited power. This relieves God of moral responsibility for evil — and for many people, that is deeply comforting.

But as we will see in Chapter 28, this comfort comes at too high a price. A God who cannot prevent evil is also a God who cannot guarantee that good will ultimately triumph. The process answer to theodicy solves the problem of evil by sacrificing the hope of eschatological victory — the biblical promise that God will one day make all things right. I believe there are better ways to address the problem of evil that preserve both God's goodness and His power (see Chapters 28–30).

Second, it resonates with modern democratic values. We live in a culture that values equality, autonomy, and non-coercion. Process theology's God fits neatly into this cultural framework: He does not impose, He invites. He does not command, He persuades. He does not overwhelm, He woos. For people who are uncomfortable with the idea of divine authority and sovereignty, this is an appealing picture. But theology should be shaped by Scripture, not by cultural preferences. And the God of Scripture, while certainly loving and invitational, is also a King, a Judge, and a Lord who has the authority and power to act decisively.³¹

Third, it provides a philosophical home for genuine passibility. Before process theology came along, the dominant philosophical frameworks available to theologians (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism) all pointed toward impassibility. Process theology offered the first comprehensive philosophical framework that made passibility central. Many theologians who were drawn to process thought were not really attracted to Whitehead's metaphysics per se — they were attracted to the idea that God genuinely suffers, genuinely relates, and genuinely cares. They adopted the process framework because it was the only one on offer that supported passibility.

But — and this is crucial — process metaphysics is not the only framework that supports passibility. Neoclassical theism (Chapter 4) provides a way to affirm genuine divine passibility without any of process theology's problematic baggage. You do not need Whitehead's occasions of experience, dipolar theism, or the denial of creation ex nihilo in order to say that God genuinely feels. You just need a God who freely chooses to be affected by His creatures — which is exactly what the biblical narrative portrays.³²

The Historical Context: How Did We Get Here?

It helps to understand the historical forces that gave rise to process theology's influence. As J. D. Kim has documented, the passibility movement began to gain momentum in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in British and German theological circles. Theologians like Gottfried Thomasius began reconstructing Christology with attention to the self-limitation of the Son, and this naturally raised questions about divine passibility more broadly. By the early twentieth century, a growing number of scholars — from the Russian theologian Nicolas Berdyaev to the Japanese Lutheran Kazoh Kitamori to the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann — were publishing robust arguments in favor of a God who genuinely suffers.³³

Whitehead's process philosophy entered this stream of thought and provided it with a comprehensive metaphysical foundation. Before Whitehead, theologians who wanted to affirm divine passibility had to borrow and modify categories from classical philosophy — categories that were originally designed to support impassibility. Whitehead offered something entirely new: a complete philosophical system built from the ground up on the assumption that reality is relational, dynamic, and processual. For theologians who felt that classical categories could not do justice to the biblical portrait of a responsive God, this was enormously attractive.³⁴

It is worth noting, as Kim observes, that the passibilist trajectory was not exclusively a product of process thought. The rise of passibilism had multiple roots: a renewed attention to the suffering of Christ as revelatory of God's eternal nature, the devastating impact of two world wars (which made the classical picture of an undisturbed God seem obscene in the face of mass suffering), and a growing awareness among biblical scholars like Abraham Heschel and Terence Fretheim that the Old Testament consistently portrays God as passionately and emotionally engaged with His people. Process theology was one expression of a broader cultural and theological shift — but it was far from the only one, and it was not the most faithful to Scripture.

The relationship between Moltmann's hugely influential work and process theology is instructive. Moltmann's The Crucified God (1974) argued powerfully that the cross is an event within the life of the Trinity — that God the Father suffers the death of the Son, and God the Son suffers abandonment by the Father. Moltmann drew more on Hegel's idealism than on Whitehead's process metaphysics, but his conclusions overlapped significantly with process theology at certain points. Both Moltmann and the process theologians affirmed a genuinely suffering God. But Moltmann retained divine sovereignty, creation ex nihilo, and eschatological hope — all of which process theology compromises. This shows that one can take the suffering of God with utmost seriousness without adopting the process framework.⁴⁴

But we should not confuse the historical usefulness of process theology with its theological adequacy. The fact that process theology helped theologians break free from rigid classical categories does not mean that process theology itself is the right answer. A medicine that cures one disease but causes five new ones is not a good medicine. Process theology cured the disease of rigid classical impassibility, but it introduced a host of new theological ailments — compromised sovereignty, denied creation ex nihilo, limited omniscience, ontological dependence, and pastoral despair. The cure was worse than the disease.

The Author's Position: Freely and Sovereignly Passible

Let me now state as clearly as I can where I stand in relation to process theology. My position is that God is freely and sovereignly passible. Let me unpack what I mean by each of those words.

Freely. God chose to create the world. He did not have to. He was not lonely, incomplete, or lacking anything in His triune life. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enjoyed perfect love, fellowship, and joy before the foundation of the world (John 17:5, 24). God created because He wanted to — because it pleased Him to share His love with creatures who could know Him, love Him, and enjoy Him. And having created, God chose to be genuinely affected by His creatures. His emotional responsiveness is not a deficiency — it is a free expression of His love. He could have remained detached. He chose not to.

Sovereignly. God's passibility does not compromise His sovereignty. He is not at the mercy of His creatures' actions. He is not overwhelmed by their pain or manipulated by their behavior. His emotional responses are always appropriate, always measured, always under His control. He grieves over sin, but His grief does not incapacitate Him. He burns with anger at injustice, but His anger does not cloud His judgment. He rejoices over repentance, but His joy does not make Him naive. In this qualified sense — and only this sense — I affirm what Chapter 3 called "impassibility": God cannot be overwhelmed, destabilized, or controlled by His emotional life.

Passible. God genuinely feels. His love is not a mere decision to act benevolently; it is an emotional reality. His grief is not a metaphor; it corresponds to something genuinely real in God's inner life. His anger is not an impersonal mechanism; it is a passionate response to the evil that destroys His creatures. His joy is not a static state of beatitude; it overflows and expands as His creatures respond to His love. The over 400 passages of Scripture that describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures are telling us something true about who God is (as we will see in Chapters 11–21).

This position preserves everything that is genuinely insightful about process theology's emphasis on God's relational character — while rejecting everything that process theology gets wrong. God is genuinely relational and responsive (against classical impassibility). But God is also sovereign, omniscient, omnipotent, self-sufficient, and the Creator of all things from nothing (against process theology). The mediating position holds both truths together.

A Note on Open Theism

Before we close this chapter, a brief word about open theism is in order. Open theism is a view associated with theologians like Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, and William Hasker. It shares some features with process theology — particularly the claim that God does not know the future exhaustively — but it differs from process theology in important ways. Open theists affirm creation ex nihilo, divine omnipotence, and the possibility of miraculous intervention. They reject process metaphysics. Their main distinctive is the claim that God does not know future free choices because such choices do not yet exist to be known.³⁵

I want to be clear: I reject open theism. As stated in the author's theological position (Part One), I believe God knows all things exhaustively — past, present, and future. But I also want to be fair. Open theism is significantly closer to the biblical portrait of God than process theology is. Open theists affirm creation ex nihilo, divine sovereignty (in a qualified sense), and God's ability to intervene powerfully in history. They are not process theologians, and they should not be confused with them.³⁶

Pinnock himself was candid about his relationship to process thought. He acknowledged that both classical theism and open theism are influenced by philosophers, but argued that open theists had done a better job of avoiding unbiblical compromise with process philosophy than classical theists had done with Hellenism.³⁷ I disagree with Pinnock's conclusion about divine foreknowledge, but I appreciate his desire to take Scripture seriously while being honest about philosophical influences.

The key point for our purposes is this: you do not need to deny divine foreknowledge in order to affirm divine passibility. As argued in my companion book The God Beyond the Clock — and as we will explore more fully in Chapter 25 — God's exhaustive knowledge of the future does not negate the genuineness of His emotional responses. A parent can know in advance that their child will undergo painful surgery and still weep when the moment arrives. Foreknowledge and genuine emotion are not incompatible.³⁸

Conclusion: The Right Kind of Passibility

Let me close this chapter by pulling together the threads of our argument.

Process theology gets some important things right. It reminds us that God is genuinely relational, genuinely affected by the world, and genuinely engaged with His creatures. These are biblical truths that the classical tradition has sometimes neglected, and process theologians deserve credit for insisting on them.

But process theology gets far too many things wrong. It compromises divine sovereignty by reducing God's power to mere persuasion. It denies creation ex nihilo, collapsing the Creator-creature distinction that is the foundation of the biblical worldview. It compromises divine omniscience by denying that God knows the future. It makes God ontologically dependent on the world, turning the free and sovereign Lord of the Bible into a co-dependent deity. And it reduces God to a fellow-sufferer who cannot save — a compassionate companion who means well but cannot guarantee that good will triumph over evil.

The result is a God who is not recognizably the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Not the God who said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). Not the God who promised David an eternal throne. Not the God who raised Jesus from the dead and declared, "Behold, I am making all things new" (Revelation 21:5, ESV).

I believe there is a better way. In the coming chapters, we will continue to build the case for a mediating position that affirms genuine divine passibility — a God who truly feels, truly is affected, and truly responds — without any of process theology's theological compromises. We will see that the biblical evidence for divine emotion is overwhelming (Part IV, Chapters 11–21). We will examine the philosophical arguments that support passibility without requiring process metaphysics (Part V, Chapters 22–27). And in Chapter 34, we will put it all together into a comprehensive model of divine emotion that is both philosophically rigorous and biblically faithful.

Process theology is a bridge too far. But the bridge it tried to cross — from the icy detachment of classical impassibility to the warm, responsive engagement of a God who genuinely feels — is a bridge worth crossing. We just need to cross it the right way.