God-Talk and Process New Thought

In this series of blog posts about re-claiming Unity's Christian heritage, one area that I'm interested in addressing is our God-talk -- i.e. the ways in which we go about formulating language about God.

Not Limiting Our God-Language

Perhaps many people of faith are like me and find it rather difficult and sometimes intimidating to talk about God. It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t engage in God-talk. But, for many of us, there can be some ambiguity and lack of clarity about how we choose to speak of God, what kind of language to employ. It can be overwhelming sometimes when we start to try and put words to our experiences of the Divine. I think this is primarily because language doesn’t really do justice to our experiences, feelings, and thoughts about… well, anything, really. And this is even more true when we’re talking about God, the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being.

Have you ever had a situation where you couldn’t find words to describe an experience you went through? Even something as seemingly menial like, say, a strawberry. How would we tell someone what a strawberry tastes like to someone who has never tasted a strawberry? It would be hard, no doubt. We might take recourse to analogies, symbols, and metaphors, but ultimately the explanations would break down. Indeed, language fails to completely convey our experiences. However, we nonetheless still need to speak, to talk, to communicate our experiences to others and create meaning for ourselves, which fundamentally requires the use of linguistic structures and formulation.

So, how do we talk about God in Unity? A lot of different ways, no doubt. Contrary to a lot of classical understandings of God as totally outside and distant to us, the Second of the Five Basic Unity Principles (first formulated by Connie Fillmore Bazzy) claims that we are created and exist in the image of God - that we are of God - and that God is within us, and that thus our true nature is fundamentally good - the Christ. Therefore, we are endowed with inherent dignity and worth as human beings. We in Unity tend to speak of God as the Life, Love, and Wisdom within all creation, being inside us.

But is God only within? Is this the only legitimate way to talk about God’s relation to us in the Unity movement? Perhaps, friends, we could take a both/and rather than an either/or view, a more generous, inclusive understanding, and not limit our God-language to one exclusive spatial metaphor – God within.

If we hold to the Truth that God is everywhere present, that God pervades all that is, and that it is God in whom we live, move, and have our being, then we may also claim that God is both within us and outside of us, all around us – in every person, place, and being we meet and also outside of them, too. In our times of prayer, meditation, contemplation we certainly experience God within ourselves, and yet we can also encounter God through our experience in relationship with other persons, places, and things that are outside of ourselves. When we think and speak of God we can do so confidently, recognizing that God is immanent as well as transcendent, within and beyond.

This awareness of God as both within and beyond not only breaks down all tendencies to put God in a box of limitation, but it also frees us to the possibility of experiencing God’s presence whenever and wherever we are – if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. When we recognize God’s unbounded, ubiquitous presence, we find the liberation of continual transformation and growth into ever greater depths and heights of experience of the ever-abiding yet always-more Life of God the Good.

Process-Relational Theological Paradigm

In a context of growing religious-cultural plurality and ambiguity, the impact of postmodernism (de-centralizing, de-absolutizing; affirming subjectivity, relationality, and contextuality), and the influence of new discoveries in the sciences (such as like Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory, the language of how we talk about God, humanity, and the world must change or become increasingly irrelevant. Though we often in Unity speak of God, humanity, and the world in terms that are distinct from what is often known as "traditional" Christianity, nonetheless the predominant theological language employed by our founders and presently is largely still based in what I call "substance metaphysics" (seeing reality as being composed of fundamental unchanging, impenetrable substances, e.g. "mind" vs. "matter"). And this paradigm is still very similar to classical/traditional Christian theology.

What I'll do with what follows is briefly state the difficulties with traditional Christian and Unity substance metaphysics and then outline the basics of process theology and its helpfulness for creating a new theological language or interpretive paradigm in our present context of plurality, postmodernity, and new sciences.

For those who aren't aware, process theology is based on the work of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It is a coherent and complex philosophical system that asserts the constantly changing nature of all reality - everything is in process and fluctuation. Grounded in everyday human experience, process thought views existence as fundamentally and thoroughly dynamic and relational. Process thought accepts the scientific position (in both natural/physical and social sciences) that the universe is made up of dynamic relations at all levels, but at the most basic level, pulses of energy. Process thinkers see these bursts of energy as feeling or experiencing ("prehending" according to Whitehead) one another at various levels and intensities, and are thereby inextricably interrelated. Earlier occasions of experience influence later ones, and developing ones have at least a measure of freedom to choose (unconsciously for most of them) how they will incorporate and unite the past and the possible into the present moment. In other words, all of reality is a web of living experiences. This whole cosmology/metaphysics rejects the understanding of reality as composed as unchanging, underlying substances, and instead views reality as made of inherently, internally interrelated events of experience/feeling at various degrees of complexity and intensity. This is basically a pluralistic idealism: all that exists is experience - feeling, deciding, remembering, thinking, cognizing, etc. - but there are innumerable individual minds doing the experiencing.

It's common (perhaps especially in most of New Thought, but also in classical Christianity) to view mind as an enduring, immutable thing (i.e., substance), but, on a process outlook, mind is really a process of momentary, developing, yet enduring, experiences. Some who claim mystical experience speak of there being only one mind (God). However, that conclusion leads to unsolvable problems of the actual reality (rather than mere illusion or appearance) of our own and others' individuality and of the free will to make real choices required for all genuine morality, value-systems, relationships, transformation, time and space, and thus all existence as we experience and know it.

The God that process theology speaks of is the perfectly loving God, who guides and inspires us (as well as all other existing experiences) by offering/presenting to us the best possibilities for our specific circumstances, and then perfectly preserving the completed experiences after they have come to pass through uniting the past and the God-given potentials. God is the ultimate person. This does not mean that God is a human being, anthropomorphically, but rather that God is the reality most supremely self-conscious, rational, relational, and value-oriented (presents the best for each moment of experience and willfully acts toward realizing this). Contrary to how personhood is often conceived in Unity and New Thought, a person is a unified and enduring experience or a series of experiences (feeling, thinking, desiring, deciding, etc.). While experiences range in their quality, the most perfect Reality, who supports and coordinates of all of it, cannot be less than the supreme, self-conscious, rational, relational, value-oriented enduring experience, exercising most fully what philosophers and cognitive scientists term "personality" or simply "person" (not to be confused with a human persona). As C. Alan Anderson aptly says, "God could not be fully impartial if God were not fully personal. God’s complete reliability is a personal moral quality, not a mechanical one" (C. Alan Anderson, "Our Great Companion in Co-Creation"). In other words, the truth that God is impartial and reliable is best understood as a moral-value characteristic of perfect personhood, not that of an unfeeling, unmoving, static principle.

On a process view, the universe is contained within God, which means that God experiences the plurality of individual experiences that make up the world. Moreover, each experience in the universe also experiences God, and thus contains God (i.e., God within). God is within and beyond the world. There is no such thing as unchanging substances, only momentarily developing experience. What we call space is the interpenetration and interdependency of experiences, and time is the movement of transition from one experience to the next, to the next, etc. This is the true meaning of co-creation.

Process New Thought

New Thought could be characterized as an American movement of practical spirituality that centers on practices and teachings geared towards transforming unconsciously held assumptions and conscious beliefs, attitudes, and expectations so that one experiences greater contentment, well-being, and prosperity. The metaphysical or philosophical system employed to underpin and ground these pragmatic teachings and help them to make reasonable in critical analysis.

Rather than re-formulating the important points of integrating process theology and New Thought, I'll simply quote Alan Anderson's excellent outline:

"[Process New Thought] is down-to-earth, applied in readily understandable ways. It is exceedingly simple, although it requires constant practice. It uses familiar New Thought techniques, such as affirmative prayer, visualization, spiritual mind treatment, and meditation. In its theory, it is superbly, elegantly

1. Rational, yet thoroughly respectful of mystical experience.

2. Personalistic: God is not anthropomorphic, but is impartially personal (self-conscious, rational, value-oriented) without the limitations of human personality.

3. PanENtheistic, not pantheistic. God is not all, but is in all; and all is in God (by means of prehension, the feeling of the feelings of others).

4. Panexperientialistic: there is nothing actual except experience, meaning any sort of awareness, from subatomic to divine.

5. Relational: everything is related to everything else and is nothing apart from relationships.

6. Idealistic, in both popular and philosophical senses, yet maintaining a realistic idealism of a vast number of minds/experiences, none of which is dependent for its existence on being perceived by any other unit of experience" (C. Alan Anderson, "A Practical Spirituality: Process New Thought").

While this post is rather lengthy, it nonetheless is a yet another point in furthering the conversation with in Unity, New Thought, and wider theological discourse.