New Podcast Thomas Jay Oord | Uncontrolling Love

Faith & Science Conversation
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For clarification Thomas Oord was a student of John B. Cobb who is the Dean of Process Theology. Process Theology is the effort to improve theology by basing it on a new understanding of philosophy called Process Philosophy developed by the distinguished thinker Alfred North Whitehead.

Traditional philosophy focuses on the One and discriminates against change. Traditional theology follows traditional philosophy. Whitehead focused on the Many, which meant it encouraged change, which he thought was be more suitable for science which dealt with a changing world.

For instance Creationism teaches that God created a perfect world, so there is no need for evolutionary change. (Change was the product of sin.) Evolution teaches that the universe is in constant flux and change is good because humans are a product of change.

Process theology is well intentioned and useful, but in my opinion a failure because it, like traditional theology, fails to accept the basic fact that God is not One or Many. God is One And Many.

Some process theologians like Dr. Oord have moved on to Relational Theology, which shows more promise, but in most cases still falls short. This is because they build their theology on dualistic One or the Many Greek thought instead of on One And the Many relational thought.

The issue of the nature of Love is the key. @mitchellmckain. What did you think of his book, The Nature of Love?

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Still reading. One more chapter to review. 5 - Essential Kenosis. We already have the gist in the previous chapter, but in what I have read so far of this chapter, he connects this up with the kenosis passage of Philippians 2, the first chapter of the gospel of John to discuss the role of Jesus, the love passage of 1 John, and the first&second greatest commandments.

Following along with Oord’s desire for a God bound by involuntary love and incapable of preventing evil, Oord makes a distinction between “voluntary kenosis” and “essential kenosis.” Rejecting the idea of open theism that God voluntarily self-limits, Oord extends the traditional theological notion of necessary love in the trinity to a necessary love for creation as well. This requires God to sacrifice power, control, or sovereignty in order to give freedom of will to His creatures. I would go in the opposite direction to say that all love is voluntary – both within the trinity and with His creation. It is only the free choice to love and do good, as well as to sacrifice power and control for its sake, which makes God worthy of admiration. At most I would only say that God’s nature does make this a sensible choice for Him.

Oord shows that love is the foundation of Christian ethics as shown by Jesus words about the greatest of commandments being foundation and essence of all the law and the prophets. And quoting 1 John 4, Oord shows that there is no relationship with God without love. I agree and would even suggest that verse 19 suggest that something of the human notion of love has an other worldly aspect to it and not derived from the laws of nature.

So far I would say that the book has much to recommend reading it. It has certainly had a profound impact on me from revealing how theologians have twisted Christianity away from love to make all these aspect of Christianity nothing but a lie. It was quite shocking. Furthermore, the book strongly confirmed my own position as an open theist as well as my opposition to process theology. While I read Whitehead’s “Process and Reality,” I was not so familiar with where the theologians had gone with this. So I learned that I was no more in favor of what they have done in process theology than with Whitehead wrote. I remain strongly opposed to Plato and his influence upon Christianity which I think process philosophy and process theology has tried to resurrect.

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Oord calls his new love based theology “Essential Kenosis,” because like myself he is very taken with the Christian notion of a God become man, or as Oord puts it, God as both creaturely and divine, reconciling the world to Himself in the person of Jesus. Oord then goes on to explain that lacking God’s omnipresent nature we cannot love all of creation directly but only in part. From this Oord concludes that Christ’s love is not entirely knowable. There is a quantitative character in that notion of love which I do not like very much, and I would say the opposite that God’s love is precisely what is knowable of God and it is His nature as an infinite being which surpasses our understanding.

It seems to me there is something just a little bit panentheistic in Oord’s understanding of creation. Choice is one of the two functional differences I can see between theism and pan(en)theism. The other is the independent existence of what God has created as opposed to God required to hold the universe together as if it were only a dream. With the removal of choice to answer the question of why God does not stop evil, Oord makes creation something which happens to God rather than something which He does by His own will.

This involuntary nature of God’s love also seems to lead to a likewise involuntary nature of our own redemption, with a renewal of God’s image of love being something which happens to us rather than something we choose to embrace. To be sure there an aspect of redemption which we cannot accomplish because sin destroys free will. But liberation from sin only brings us back to the freedom of choice Adam had – to choose once again between love/life and fear/death. If that choice could be made for us by God, then why did Adam & Eve have to make that choice for themselves?

But when it comes to the multi-dimensional character of God’s love, Oord and myself are very much on the same page. We can reflect God’s love for his creation in so many different ways, even choosing to devote our lives to the understanding of a single species of beetle.

But back to the “essential” part of Oord’s “essential kenosis” theology which claims God cannot coerce because He Himself has been coerced by His own loving nature. To me this is absurd and the only coercion I see, is on the part of Oord and other theologians who rip the power to be as He chooses away from God, enslaving Him to their theology. This is in contrast to a overarching principle of my own theology that always says that God CAN and never says that God cannot in regards to anything. What then? Can God make a square circle and other such contradictory nonsense? Sure. We all can – in our dreams, where rational coherence does not hold. That is more about the nature of what is created than any limitation upon God – or a limitation upon what we ourselves can meaningfully say about God.

Next Oord returns to his rejection of creation ex-nihilo and proposes an alternative which he calls “creation out of creation because God’s nature is love.” Now Oord examines the part of John 1 about creation, equating creation through the word with “creation through love.” Oord does conform this to the Bible/Christian-tradition in denying an eternal dualism between good and evil, first creating out of pre-existing materials, or creation out of Himself, or any dependence upon His creatures for His own existence. I have previously observed that a lot of this has been made a mute point because the scientific understanding of energy has dissolved the distinction between thing and action, meaning God’s action of creation is sufficient for any needed substance of what He creates. But with these cautions, near as I can tell then, the point of Oord’s doctrine of creation is only that God’s creation is not entirely free because the motivation derived from love dictates limitations. On this I certainly agree.

Oord observes that the creation account can be seen as one of sharing power, i.e. giving power of things over different aspects of His creation. On this we can also agree, and I would point out that the this is an essential part of an act of love as well. There is no love without sharing and in that is an innate vulnerability which is also a part of what love is.

But now we get to the nitty gritty as Oord lists 7 aspects to his doctrine of creation:

  1. God’s essential nature of love motivates God’s creating activity.
  2. It brings into being something entirely new (without any pre-existing form).
  3. But God then creates out of what He has previously created.
  4. God does not coerce when creating.
  5. Creating in love is a necessary part of God’s nature.
  6. Creatures depend on God’s creative activity to exist. God does not depend on them to exist.
  7. Creatures play a role in what comes to be, as created co-creators.

My disagreements with this are subtle.

  1. God creates from a choice of love and freedom over power and control.
  2. Bringing into being something entirely new is all that creation ex-nihilo means.
  3. God’s continued work of creation is not ex-nihilo but from what He has previously created.
  4. God creates an independent existence which exists and operates according fixed rules. These laws of nature are certainly coercive but not absolutely. There remains some liberty within them in which He can interact and with which his creatures can make their own choices.
  5. Creating in love is a choice – or it is not love. God is not a computer in the sky following some fixed programming dictated by all-powerful theologians.
  6. The existence of creatures depends on these independent rules God has created. And God does not depend on either on these laws of nature or His creatures for His own existence.
  7. Living creatures play a role not only the creation of the world by altering it, but also in the creation of themselves. This is what it means to be alive.

I will stop here. I am now halfway through the last chapter. I must finish with this book by September 9 when the inter-library loan book is due to be returned.

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@mitchellmckain, I think that you might misunderstand Oord’s thinking. Essential here refers to the understanding that God is “being.” “Esse” is a part of the Latin verb “to be.”

The philosophical/theological thinking go thus. God is by nature or being, Love. Since no one can go against their nature, God is compelled or coerced to love by God’s nature, rather than by God’s choice.

The way to solve this “problem” is to say that Love is not God’s nature, but God’s character, which means God chooses to love, because God chooses God’s character.

This also means that properly our understanding of Reality must be based on relationships, or character which is dynamic, rather than Being or nature, which is fixed.

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This morning I began to wonder what Oord’s position was on predestination for that would explain his preoccupation with this problem of God not preventing evil. I found, however, from here that Oord rejects both the predestination of human destiny and universalism as examples of using coercion on his creation… so no problem there. We quite agree about that! I only add that the presence of sin which destroys free will does allow God to manipulate people (as in Pharoah) or predict people (as in Peter’s 3 denials), without trespassing on our free will.

But that of course only increases my puzzlement over Oord’s concern with God not preventing evil, since it is already clear that God does not control the future. For me it is obvious that the choice for love and freedom over power and control is a choice of vulnerability to the possibility of evil. It is a risk that every parent takes when having children and giving over responsibility to them, that they might do evil. I certainly think love is worth that risk but apparently Oord does not. I find the taking of such a risk to be admirable but apparently Oord does not.

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Ok time to finish this up.

Oord talks about difficulties in accepting his doctrine of creation starting with an inability to fathom what it is like to have no beginning and to exist forever. But this is a falling into the habit of thinking in terms of absolute time which has already been discarded in science. In rejecting the traditional nonsense about God being timeless and thus incapable of real relationship, Oord is confronting the problems which that traditional solution had done away with. But the choice between these has been made obsolete by the scientific rejection of absolute time. The time we experience is part of the space-time structure of the created universe and thus part of what God created, but that does not mean that God cannot employ time for Himself to order events in His own experience and choices, and this does not require God to be enslaved to some absolute time either, where we must ask what God has been doing for an infinity of time before the creation of the universe.

Oord’s notion of “creation out of creation” becomes more clear as meaning that God creates out of the stuff of creation, which He has created previously. The point seems to be that God doesn’t just make things appear by magic, but works through a rational process using the laws of nature in agreement with cosmology where each aspect of our existence come into being in order from that which was created before. But I think it is a bit of a strawman to equate “creation ex nihilo” with magical creation and contrary to the orderly creation of things we see in cosmology.

But Oord take these basically obsolete objections as justification to make God out to be a creator from His own essence of love rather than choice, and thus incapable of avoiding the possibility of evil. This is our fundamental disagreement. I see God as intentionally taking a risk which is an important and unavoidable part of the choice of love and freedom over power and control. Oord apparently cannot fathom a God who can take such risks. I believe that makes the whole notion of God’s love on which he founds his theology to be a love which is rather shallow.

Ord disputes Karl Barth’s assertion that freedom from the world is essential to God’s nature, claiming instead that God’s loves creation out of necessity. But the logical implication of this is that God must love any evil which arises in His creation. This is a far greater problem for theodicy than his concern about God not preventing evil. Thus I go with the open theists in the opposite direction from Karl Barth to repudiate this notion that love is God’s necessary nature, but real love requires taking the risk and making a choice. Oord embraces only that part of open theism which rejects that the future is already written and that God has exhaustive knowledge of what is going to happen. In this we see a fundamental inconsistency in Oord’s theodicy – where Oord can recognize and accept the necessity of the possibility of evil but God cannot!?! Why must God be forced to accept the risk of evil, when even Oord can see that love requires it?

Part of Oord’s argument and thinking is that we must reject the notion that freedom is more important than evil – as if nothing people do is bad enough to cause God to revoke our freedom. But this simply does not agree with the Biblical account. God makes it clear that the evil we do is frequently bad enough for Him to intervene and put a complete end to whole populations if that is needed. And yet we can acknowledge that God does not do this consistently. So the question is NOT whether the things we do are bad enough but rather why doesn’t God do this consistently – why doesn’t God always prevent the worst of evil. It isn’t really a question of freedom because at that point of enslavement to sin there is very little freedom anyway. But there is another reason: responsibility. God will show us His repudiation of evil but He will not take away our own responsibility in preventing evil. God doesn’t want the eloi sheep-people of H.G. Well’s “Time Machine.” We constantly demonstrate that only by hitting rock bottom and hurting innocent people will cause us to turn away from self-destructive behavior. How then can we think that we can manage to repudiate evil without confronting and having to fight evil in all its horror and perversity?

Next Oord discusses miracles which he seeks to redefine just as I do. But where I shift it from breaking the laws of nature to anything with God’s involvement in bringing about events in our lives, Oord shifts it from intervention and control to God being a part of the laws of nature. Not only is this back to the fundamental distinction I make between theism and pantheism in God’s choice and the independence of the physical universe, but Oord even acknowledges the pantheistic nature of his theology. Oord’s primary concern in this, however, is not God’s choice but ours – to say that none of God’s miracles are coercive because it requires our acceptance in faith – and that without this the miracles do not happen. But faith is only involved in the cases of healing and not in most miracles at all. The simple fact is that the laws of nature ARE coercive and no they do not operate according to divine whim but according to fixed mathematical equations. Oord sees only one miracle as special: Jesus resurrection. This it seems to Oord is more than just persuasive power and so he argues at length why it is not coercive. For me it is obvious that Jesus resurrection simply has nothing to do with the laws of nature, for as Paul explains in 1 Cor 15 this is a spiritual body not a physical/natural body.

In the remainder of Oord’s book, however, we are in good agreement and I shall present these in a list.

  1. Human cooperation is required in eschatological outcome of history. Our reasons for this are different. While Oord asserts that God is simply not able to coerce an outcome, I only think the outcome is not independent of the means and thus coercion cannot produce the outcome desired.
  2. Eternal life is not just eternal existence but also quality of life which we experience both before death and afterwards. I explain further that this is about the fact that there is no end to what an infinite God has to offer us and no end what we can learn, receive and become in a relationship with Him.
  3. Divine predestination of ultimate human destiny to heaven or hell is incompatible with love. But universalism is just as coercive.
  4. Oord ends with the conclusion that we must seek after love as if our life depended on it because it does.

In conclusion, I reiterate and clarify this comment from earlier: The book has much to recommend reading it. It has certainly had a profound impact on me from revealing how theologians like Augustine have twisted Christianity away from love that we can recognize as such.

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