This is a continuation of “God and Contingency”, “Process, Time, and the Self”, and “The End of Self”. The earlier posts argued that a contingent world calls for a bipolar God, that divine power is persuasive rather than coercive, and that providence is the ceaseless offering of fresh possibility rather than the execution of a fixed plan. This one asks a different question: if that is what God is like, how do you actually live, pray, and hope in such a world?¹

Process theology is often introduced as a set of metaphysical claims about God and the world, and it is that. But from the beginning it has also been a proposal about spirituality: how to inhabit an unfinished universe with a God who is not the all-controlling architect but the “fellow sufferer who understands” and the “poet of the world.”² What follows is my attempt to describe what that looks like from the inside.

From Metaphysics to Practice

Process theology begins with a simple conviction that turns out to be surprisingly disruptive: reality is made of events and relations rather than static substances.³ Everything that exists, from electrons to human lives, is caught up in a web of becoming in which each new moment inherits a past, entertains possibilities, and then actualizes one of them. Whitehead called these building blocks “actual occasions” and described the universe as a “creative advance into novelty.”⁴

When process thinkers apply this to God, they do not conclude that God is just another process among others. Instead they argue that God is the one who gives coherence and direction to the whole advance, the source of possibilities and the one who receives every actuality into the divine life.⁵ Hartshorne spoke of a “neoclassical” theism in which God combines an abstract, unchanging pole with a concrete, changing pole, and is therefore both supremely stable and supremely responsive.⁶ Process theology, in this sense, is simply classical theism updated for a world that actually changes.

If that were all, it would remain a purely conceptual proposal, interesting for metaphysicians and perhaps for those who like to tidy up philosophical puzzles. But the moment you take seriously the claim that God is affected by what happens, something more existential comes into view. In a process frame God is not just the explanation of why anything exists at all; God is the one whose life is partly constituted by what we become, and who then works with what we have become to open up new possibilities for what might yet be.

That shift has consequences for how you think about trust, prayer, hope, and responsibility.⁷ The rest of this essay is an attempt to trace those consequences, at least far enough to show why I still find this God worth believing in and living before.

Trusting a Relational God

Classical theism often grounds trust in God’s control. God is the immutable source of being, the one whose will is the hidden script behind history, the sovereign who permits what happens and could have prevented any of it.⁸ If that is how you think of God, then trusting God means believing that, somehow, everything that happens fits into a plan that God could have chosen otherwise.

Process theology cuts that knot. It insists that a world with genuine contingency and creaturely freedom cannot be the execution of a finished blueprint hidden in the divine mind.⁹ It follows that God does not stand over against history as an all-determining cause, but is in history as its most faithful participant, the one who lures each new moment toward the best possibility actually available to it and then receives whatever we do with that lure into the divine life.¹⁰

On this view, trust cannot mean confidence that God secretly controls every outcome. Instead it means confidence in God’s character and constancy: that God will always offer the best possibilities compatible with the world as it really is, that God will never abandon what the world has become, and that nothing we are or suffer is ever discarded or forgotten in God. Trust becomes less about believing that everything happens for a reason, and more about believing that nothing, however senseless, is beyond God’s capacity to take up into some future work of healing and transformation.

This is not a sentimental adjustment. It costs something to give up the idea that God could have simply prevented a particular tragedy. It also changes the emotional tone of faith. Instead of trying to make peace with a hidden plan, you are invited to trust a God whose greatness lies in a different register: not in unilateral power, but in inexhaustible relational fidelity, in what Cobb and Griffin call “creative-responsive love.”¹¹

Prayer as Cooperation

Nowhere does this relational picture matter more, or feel stranger, than in prayer. If God does not possess coercive power to override the world’s causal structures at will, what exactly are we doing when we pray?

John Cobb has suggested that most traditional forms of prayer actually make more sense from a process point of view than from classical philosophical theism.¹² The reason is simple: if every event in the world is connected, and if God works in and through those connections rather than by intermittent interventions from outside, then our praying is one more real event that can enter into the web of causes and conditions God is already using. Prayer, in that sense, is not a supernatural exception to the way the world works; it is one way the world works.

Process thinkers are blunt about the negatives. Prayer is not magic, and it does not suspend the ordinary patterns of causality.¹³ A world where God could freely override those patterns at will, without abolishing creaturely freedom and the regularities that make action possible, is not a coherent world. But once that is cleared away, a surprisingly robust picture of prayer remains.

On the process account, God is present to every occasion of experience, offering an “initial aim” that reflects both the best possibilities inherent in that situation and God’s own purposes for richer, more just, more loving forms of life.¹⁰ Our decisions do not create the aim, but they do decide how fully it is received, distorted, or rejected. When I pray, I am not informing God of facts God does not know, nor am I trying to push God into doing what God is reluctant to do. I am, at minimum, opening myself more attentively to the divine lure in the situation, which changes how I act and, therefore, what God has to work with in the next moment.

Marjorie Suchocki puts it sharply: “God works with the world as it is in order to bring it to where it can be.”¹⁴ Prayer changes the “isness” of the world simply by being one of the things that happens in it; a world in which this specific praying occurs is not the same as a world in which it does not. On a relational view of divine power, that difference matters to God, because it alters the complex field of possibilities within which God is already at work.

This reframes intercessory prayer in particular. To pray for another person is not to route around their freedom or to ask God to suspend the medical, psychological, or social conditions that shape their life. It is to offer a concrete act of attention and desire that can enter into those conditions, changing what is possible for them and for God. That may look like a shift in my own behavior, a new capacity for compassion or persistence; it may look like a subtle change in the emotional field of a relationship; it may not look like anything I can see from the outside. But if the world is truly relational, and if God works persuasively within those relations, then prayer genuinely makes a difference, not because God was waiting for a quota of requests to be met, but because our praying is one of the ways God gains new avenues for gracious influence.

Hope without Guarantees

The hardest questions arise when you ask what this looks like in the face of suffering and death. Earlier in this series I argued that process theology can confidently affirm what Whitehead called “objective immortality”: every experience is taken into the consequent nature of God, where it is preserved and woven into the divine harmony.¹⁵ That already changes the stakes of our lives. Nothing that happens is simply lost to the void; everything remains eternally significant to God and can become material for future possibilities.¹⁶

But objective immortality is not the same thing as subjective immortality, and process thinkers are divided on whether the latter can be affirmed. Hartshorne was content with the former and skeptical about the latter; Griffin has argued, cautiously, for the metaphysical possibility of a continuing personal existence grounded in God’s ongoing provision of aims.¹⁷ What they share is a refusal to claim more than the metaphysics will support.

For me, the question is existential rather than technical: is it enough to know that my life will never be forgotten by God, if I cannot be certain that I will be there to experience whatever redemption God brings from it?¹⁸ Classical accounts of resurrection hold out the stronger claim that the one who suffered is also the one who is made whole, and there is a deep pull to that picture.¹⁹ Process eschatology, at least in its more cautious forms, cannot simply take that for granted.

Here I find myself pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, I do not want to domesticate God by attributing to God coercive powers that contradict the very relational picture that drew me to process thought in the first place.²⁰ If God cannot unilaterally determine the future without abolishing the kind of world that makes freedom and love possible, then God also cannot unilaterally guarantee a specific outcome for every person, at least not in a way that bypasses the real risks built into creation. On the other hand, I do not want to pretend that this leaves hope untouched. It does not.

What remains is a humbler, and to my mind more honest, hope. I can hope, with Griffin, that personal survival is metaphysically possible and that the God whose purposes are always directed toward well-being will realize such survival where it can be realized.²¹ I can trust that nothing in my story, or anyone’s story, is beyond God’s capacity to take up into some future good, whether that good is experienced by the person themselves or by others who are touched by their life. I can refuse to claim certainty where the best theological and philosophical work I know says that certainty is out of reach.

Hope, in this register, is less an assurance that “it will all work out” and more a stance toward God and the future: a decision to live as if love is never wasted, as if God is always working for the greatest possible good in every situation, and as if the meaning of our lives is held safe in a reality larger than any single outcome we can imagine.

Responsibility and Co-Creation

If God cannot simply fix things from outside, then responsibility shifts in a very concrete way. We are no longer participants in a drama whose ending has already been written; we are co-authors, with God and with one another, of a story whose next chapter genuinely depends on what we do. That is exhilarating on some days and heavy on others.

Process writers sometimes speak of “process spirituality” or “relational spirituality” to name this style of life.⁷ It is less about achieving a final product and more about learning to respond, moment by moment, to the divine call toward deeper compassion, justice, and beauty. It asks not “What has God already decreed?” but “What possibilities for good are present here, and how can I cooperate with them?”

In practice, this means that the ordinary choices of a day matter more than any abstract system. How I write code, how I speak to my children, how I spend my money, how I respond to injustice in my community, all of these become sites where God’s persuasive power is at work and where my response can either widen or narrow the possibilities available to others. There is no realm of “mere” nature or “mere” secular activity where this is not the case, because on a process view everything is relational, everything participates in the ongoing creative advance, and everything touches God’s life in some degree.

This does not mean that the weight of the world rests on my shoulders. God’s faithfulness does not depend on my performance, and process thinkers are clear that divine creativity is always at work, coaxing unexpected good even from failures and refusals. But it does mean that I cannot hide behind a belief that “if I do not act, God will take care of it anyway.” In a genuinely open world, some goods will only ever exist if someone, somewhere, cooperates with the lure that makes them possible.²²

A Way of Life in Process

If I had to compress all of this into a single picture of what it means to live faithfully before the God of process theology, it might look something like this.

You wake up in a world that is not finished, and you will go to sleep in a world that still is not finished. God has not written the last page of history in advance; God is writing it with us, responding with unexhausted creativity to what we and the rest of creation have already become. Every moment arrives with an invitation toward some richer, more just, more truthful way of being, tailored to the concrete conditions of that moment.¹⁰

Living faithfully means learning to notice those invitations, to welcome them more often than you ignore them, and to act on them in small and large ways. It means praying not to escape the world or to bend God to your will, but to become more available to God’s work in the world and more open to the costly possibilities that work entails. It means grieving honestly when the world breaks in ways that cannot be mended within the limits of this history, without rushing to explain those breaks as part of a hidden plan.

Above all, it means trusting that, even without a guarantee of a neat ending for every individual story, nothing is lost.¹⁵ The God who feels the world feels you. The God who remembers the world remembers you. The God who lures the world toward new forms of good includes every act of love, every fragment of courage, every small refusal of cruelty, in that work.

I do not pretend that this resolves all the questions the earlier essays raised. It does not. What it does give, at least for me, is a way to stand before God without having to choose between intellectual honesty and religious trust, between acknowledging the real risks of an unfinished universe and believing that my life, and the lives of those I love, matter eternally to the one in whom that universe lives and moves and has its being.

Footnotes

1. For continuity, see “God and Contingency,” “Process, Time, and the Self,” and “The End of Self,” which develop the basic metaphysical and eschatological claims that this essay presupposes. ↩

2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 348, 351. “God is the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who understands” (348); “He is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (351). ↩

3. Donald W. Viney, “Process Theism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), emphasizes that process theism begins from becoming and temporal passage rather than from timeless substance metaphysics. ↩

4. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21–28, 222. Whitehead calls actual occasions “the final real things of which this world is made up” (18) and describes the universe as a “creative advance into novelty” (222). ↩

5. John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 46–56, on God as the source of possibilities and the recipient of all actualities, and 48–56, on God’s integration of the world’s actualities into new possibilities. ↩

6. Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). Hartshorne’s “neoclassical” theism combines an abstract, immutable pole with a concrete, responsive pole. ↩

7. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2012). Suchocki develops the spiritual and ethical implications of process thought and the shape of a daily spirituality of attentiveness and compassion. ↩ ↩²

8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q. 22, on providence as the ordering of all things by the divine intellect, is the classical statement of the view being described. ↩

9. Cobb and Griffin, Process Theology, 52–56. See also Viney, “Process Theism,” sec. “Divine Knowledge and the Problem of Future Contingents,” on why an open future rules out a completed script. ↩

10. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 244. God provides “the initial aim from which [the subject’s] self-causation starts.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Cobb and Griffin, Process Theology, ch. 3, “God as Creative-Responsive Love.” ↩

12. John B. Cobb Jr., “Prayer,” Process & Faith Q&A, April 2000. Cobb argues that prayer is more intelligible on a relational view of divine power than on classical views of unilateral control. ↩

13. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1996). Suchocki develops a process account of prayer as relational cooperation and squarely rejects magical understandings of prayer. ↩

14. Suchocki, In God’s Presence, chs. 3–5. The quoted line encapsulates her account of God’s work with the world’s actual condition; prayer changes the “isness” of the world by altering the relational field within which God works. ↩

15. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 346. The consequent nature of God is “the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved.” See also 345–351 on the consequent nature as a whole. ↩ ↩²

16. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). Even evil, preserved in God’s consequent nature, is progressively transformed rather than merely remembered. ↩

17. Viney, “Process Theism,” sec. “Immortality.” See also David Ray Griffin, “A Whiteheadian Conception of Immortality,” Process Studies 18 (1989), and Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 292–298. ↩

18. John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 324–330, presses the importance of personal continuity for eschatological hope. ↩

19. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), a contemporary defense of bodily resurrection and the renewal of creation. ↩

20. Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 13–23. See also David Ray Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 269–281, on the incoherence of unilateral coercive control over self-determining beings. ↩

21. Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism, 292–298. Griffin frames subjective immortality as a genuine metaphysical possibility, not a logical certainty. ↩

22. Cobb and Griffin, Process Theology, 74–75, on God’s persuasive action upon what Whitehead called “the wreckage” of the world, and on the creaturely cooperation that some goods require. ↩