Divine Stability: Participation as an Apologetic Response to Process Theology

The rise of Process Theology in the modern West—particularly in association with the ever-growing “deconstruction” movement—is an under-addressed concern among Evangelical Christians. Process Theology, a radically “open” theological system in which all beings, including God, are composed of ever-changing processes, is the Christian-identifying outgrowth of Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process Philosophy.” As articulated by process theists like Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, David Griffin, and Catherine Keller, it provides a dramatically innovative and iconoclastic vision of the Christian faith with a powerful emotional and intuitive appeal to many modern Western individuals. This study will present participatory metaphysics as a more philosophically coherent, historically faithful, and emotionally satisfying explanation for the relationship between God and creation than process theology and therefore as an ideal theological and apologetic response to it. The study will proceed by offering a brief introduction to both process theology and participatory metaphysics (as articulated by Andrew Davison, Sebastian Morello, and Thomas Aquinas among others) before moving to a comparison of their competing notions of creation itself and their differing accounts of the creator/creature relationship, including categories such as interdependence, freedom, likeness, and non-competitive powers. This comparison will shed light on the apologetic utility of participatory metaphysics in addressing Process Theology with the goal of spurring Evangelical retrieval of these categories.