1924–1947

Whitehead and Process Theology: The Dipolar, Suffering and Persuading God

Process theology rests on the "philosophy of organism" of Whitehead (at Harvard from 1924, died 1947) and Hartshorne: reality is not a static substance but a process of "actual entities," and God is one of them, not an exception to metaphysical principles. God is dipolar: the primordial nature contains the potentialities, the consequent nature takes the world into itself. Hence three postulates: God is interdependent with the world and immanent in it, acts by persuasion rather than coercion, and suffers with the world. This is "panentheism," or "neoclassical theism": the world is "God's body." Critics reproached the school for the loss of transcendence, for abandoning creation from nothing and for making God a "prisoner of time."