A God Who Persuades Rather Than Commands

Process and Reality proposed a metaphysics in which every actual occasion, from a subatomic event to a moment of human experience, both inherits the influence of everything that came before it and makes its own irreducible creative decision in becoming what it becomes, a picture Whitehead offered as a genuine alternative to both mechanistic materialism and classical theism's static, unchanging deity. His account of God followed the same logic: God has a primordial nature that holds the timeless realm of pure possibility, and a consequent nature that takes the actual world's becoming into itself and is genuinely changed by it, offering each occasion a persuasive lure toward its best possible outcome rather than determining that outcome by decree.

That account, which denies God unilateral coercive power over events while preserving a God intimately involved in and affected by the world's suffering and creativity, was systematized by Whitehead's student Charles Hartshorne and carried into explicitly Christian theology by John Cobb and others as process theology, a movement that has shaped strands of liberal Protestant thought, interfaith dialogue and, more recently, open theism's rejection of divine foreknowledge as fixed. Whitehead's own religious commitments remained loosely defined even as his metaphysics became one of the twentieth century's most consequential frameworks for thinking about the relationship between God, time and change.