Process Theology

Whitehead's process philosophy treats the basic units of reality not as enduring substances persisting unchanged through time but as momentary events of experience, each one arising, taking account of, prehending, everything that came before it, and then passing into the past to be taken account of by subsequent events in turn; applied to God, this metaphysics suggests a deity who is not a static, complete being standing entirely outside this process but who has, in Hartshorne's later systematic development, two aspects, an abstract nature that remains constant, and a concrete nature that is itself an ongoing process, genuinely enriched and affected by every experience occurring anywhere in the world, so that the world's joys and sufferings become, quite literally, part of God's own unfolding experience rather than remaining external to an unmoved divine spectator. On this view, God does not coerce outcomes by unilateral, overriding power, since genuine novelty and freedom in the world require that creatures retain real self-determination, but persuades, offering each moment of becoming its best possible aim toward value while leaving the actual outcome genuinely open and undetermined by God alone, a picture process theologians argue makes God's goodness more intelligible in the face of suffering and evil than classical omnipotence does, since a persuasive rather than coercive God is not simply choosing not to prevent every evil that a fully unilateral power could have prevented outright.

Process theology developed explicitly as a critique of theistic personalism and classical theism's shared commitment to divine immutability and impassibility, arguing that a God incapable of being moved or changed by the world's suffering is, whatever its logical elegance, harder to reconcile with genuine divine love and responsiveness than a God who is; theistic personalists have generally answered that process theology, in revising immutability this far, ends up compromising divine sovereignty and perfection more than it gains in relational adequacy, since a God still becoming, still growing in experience, seems on classical terms to fall short of the complete, lacking-nothing perfection theism has traditionally ascribed to the divine.

The position sits closer to panentheism than to either strict pantheism or classical theism, since it wants God to genuinely include and be affected by the world's becoming, panentheism's core commitment, while still preserving some abstract, transcendent divine pole that keeps process theology from collapsing fully into pantheist identity between God and world. Eternalism poses the sharpest metaphysical challenge to process theology from outside theology altogether, since a block universe in which the future already, timelessly exists sits uneasily with process theology's central claim that the future is genuinely open and not yet decided even for God, which is why process theologians have generally sided with presentism, or some comparably open picture of time, over eternalism's completed block.