Charles Hartshorne and Thomas Oord: Is the World God's Body?

Charles Hartshorne and Thomas Oord:
Is the World God's Body?

Thesis: Open and relational theology can retain its rich interpersonal images of God while grounding them in Hartshorne's idea that the universe is the body of God. God can be understood as the Living Whole of the universe itself, with each entity present in God's life as cells. And just as our cells have creativity of their own, so we, as cells in God's body, have creativity of our own. And yet, seeing the world as God's body adds a sacramental dimension to open and relational theology. When we look at the world we are looking at part of God's life,

Introduction

When hearing live music that carried me through life’s ups and downs, I experienced a Transcendent response. I went to a U2 concert and ended up worshiping Someone without an instrument! Music can point to a Musician alongside musicians.

Oord, Thomas Jay. A Systematic Theology of Love: Volume 1: God and Creation (p. 64). SacraSage Press. Kindle Edition.

All theology relies on analogies drawn from creaturely experience; the real question is not whether we use analogies but which analogies most adequately illuminate the relation between God and the world.

Charles Hartshorne argues that we develop our understandings with help from two analogies or metaphors: the mind-body analogy and the interpersonal relation analogy.

Hartshore proposes that the the mind-body analogy is preferable, because the interpersonal analogies inevitable turn God into an object 'alongside' the world. Thomas Oord disagrees, arguing for interpersonal analogies, albeit doing his best to avoid the suggestion that God has a "localized" body and often speaking of God in more expansive terms as Spirit. Still, for him, points to a Musician alongside musicians.

As I read this passage I wished that he had made his point in a more Hartshornian way. I wished that he had said: "Music can be a window through which we meet the divine Musician, whose very body is the universe itself."

My proposal is that open and relational theologians, including Thomas Oord, can retain their rich interpersonal images of God as parent, teacher, friend, and guide, but understand these as ways in which creatures experience the one divine mind whose body is the universe. I recommend that open and relational theology become more Hartshornian.

Thomas Oord - Is the World God's Body?

Is the World God’s Body?

"Some say that the world/universe must be God’s body. This way of thinking builds from the human mind-body relationship, with God as the mind and creation the body. A position saying the world is God’s body can be strengthened if one believes Creator and creatures both have material and mental aspects. A mental-material divine mind could interact with mental-material creation, analogous to how creaturely minds interact with bodies.

We find several drawbacks to saying the world is God’s body, however. One important one: minds and bodies are creaturely. Saying the world is God’s body could easily be interpreted as pantheism, thereby destroying Creator-creature distinctions. I think we should affirm real differences between the creaturely universe and divine Spirit, and I’ll take many opportunities in later chapters to describe those. I’ll proffer a version of panentheism that maintains distinctions between God and creation, although I think the two also have similarities and are relationally entangled.

Many people of faith say humans are God’s “hands and feet,” and the Apostle Paul talks about believers as the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 4:15–16). Insofar as creatures cooperate with the Spirit’s leading, we can rightly consider them God’s metaphorical hands and feet. They function as God’s body, in this sense. But creatures can also fail to cooperate and, thereby, cause evil. When doing evil, they are not acting as God’s body. To avoid attributing harm, sin, and evil to the Spirit, we should say creatures can be God’s metaphorical body, but they aren’t literally so. I’ve presented a view of God as a universal spirit without a localized divine body.63 The Spirit has mental and material aspects, but we can’t perceive those aspects with our five senses. We have direct access to God through nonsensory perception, between the creaturely universe and divine Spirit, and I’ll take many opportunities in later chapters to describe those.

I’ll proffer a version of panentheism that maintains distinctions between God and creation, although I think the two also have similarities and are relationally entangled. Many people of faith say humans are God’s “hands and feet,” and the Apostle Paul talks about believers as the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 4:15–16).61 Insofar as creatures cooperate with the Spirit’s leading, we can rightly consider them God’s metaphorical hands and feet. They function as God’s body, in this sense.62 But creatures can also fail to cooperate and, thereby, cause evil. When doing evil, they are not acting as God’s body. To avoid attributing harm, sin, and evil to the Spirit, we should say creatures can be God’s metaphorical body, but they aren’t literally so. I’ve presented a view of God as a universal spirit without a localized divine body.63 The Spirit has mental and material aspects, but we can’t perceive those aspects with our five senses. We have direct access to God through nonsensory perception, However, as I’ll explain in later chapters. The Spirit is present to all creatures and all creation, but the world isn’t literally God’s body, and we aren’t literally divine appendages. But creatures can be rightly considered God’s metaphorical hands, feet, body, and so on, when they cooperate with the Spirit’s call to act justly, create beauty, and express love. The world isn’t God’s literal body, but when we love, we enact divine desires."

Oord, Thomas Jay. A Systematic Theology of Love: Volume 1: God and Creation (p. 126). SacraSage Press. Kindle Edition.

Commentary by Jay McDaniel

In his Systematic Theology of Love, Volume One, Thomas Oord affirms that the world is metaphorically God's body while emphasizing that it is not literally God's body. He likewise insists throughout the book that God does not have a localized body. He is particularly passionate about how such a view can suggest images of a deity that can present evil (an idea he rejects).

A solution to the problem of evil also involves noting that God is a bodiless spirit. God doesn’t have a localized divine body with arms, hands, wings, feet, teeth, or tail. Consequently, an incorporeal Spirit can’t prevent evil that embodied creatures sometimes can.

Oord, Thomas Jay. A Systematic Theology of Love: Volume 1: God and Creation (p. 57). SacraSage Press. Kindle Edition.

One of his critiques of the claim that God literally has a body is that, in his view, it imagines God on the analogy of one kind of creaturely relationship: namely, the relation of a creaturely mind to a creaturely body. Yet, as Charles Hartshorne repeatedly reminds us (and here Oord agrees) every conception of God inevitably relies on analogies drawn from creaturely experience. The question is never whether we will think analogically, but which analogies best illuminate the relation between God and the world.

In this respect, Oord does not avoid creaturely analogies; rather, he privileges one kind over another. His understanding of God is developed primarily through interpersonal analogies: the relationship between a loving person (God) and the recipient of that love (a creature).

Although Oord speaks of God as Spirit, thereby discouraging us from imagining God in localized bodily terms, much of the language throughout the book suggests that the image of a cosmic Person interacting with a creaturely world as a parent might interact with a child, or as a teacher with a student, remains paramount.

Here he diverges from Charles Hartshorne. In Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, Hartshorne argues for the primacy—and indeed the superiority—of the mind-body analogy over interpersonal analogies. See the passage below. He does not deny the value of interpersonal metaphors. Rather, he understands them as grounded in the more fundamental reality of God as the World Soul and the universe as God's body.

In Hartshorne's view, we encounter the divine mind as loving, guiding, forgiving, and faithful. But these interpersonal metaphors are best understood as ways in which creatures experience the divine mind, not as the primary metaphysical model for understanding what God is.

Below I present some aspects of Hartshorne's point of view, hoping that they may encourage readers to read Hartshorne for themselves.

Charles Hartshorne - Two Ways of Understanding God:
Interpersonal and Mind-Body Analogies

"To appreciate the idea of a divine body, we need to remind ourselves that any idea of God must in some way make use of analogies, or at least metaphors.... We have no alternative to the use of comparisons with phenomena in our experience. These fall basically, for theological purposes, into two kinds or classes:
There is the class of interpersonal relations. Thus God is thought of as related to a creature as a parent to its child or as a ruler to a subject or citizen of a country. Other variations are the teacher-pupil relation, or a writer and director of plays as related to the actors and actresses who perform the plays, or a musical composer-conductor as related to the musicians performing the music. In Judaea only the interpersonal analogy seems to have been actually used.

The other is the mind-body analogy. Here indeed we have something like what we need. Each cell in our body is almost as nothing in comparison with ourselves as conscious individuals. Yet each may contribute something directly to our awareness, at least each cell in our brain's cortex may do so....
God, the World Soul, is the individual integrity of 'the world,' which otherwise is just the myriad creatures. As each of us is the supercellular individual of the cellular society called a human body, so God is the super-creaturely individual of the inclusive creaturely society."

— Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), Chapter 2, "The Physical and the Spiritual."

Commentary by Jay McDaniel

In reading the literature of open and relational theology, one often senses that theologians are working primarily with metaphors drawn from interpersonal relations. For those who come from traditional Christian backgrounds, these are the metaphors that make the most immediate sense and that enable them to retain an understanding of God in personal terms: God as one side of an interpersonal relationship, human beings and other creatures as the other side. They then emphasize that humans and other creatures are loved by God who, like a cosmic parent or friend, wants them to flourish.

Even when these theologians insist that God is Spirit, one often gets the impression that the God whose Spirit this is is something like a benevolent father, mother, teacher, guide, or friend—except without a body. To be sure, they may also speak of God as a force or energy: love-power, for example. Still, it seems to me, God remains the nominative subject—the individualized one who acts, guides, calls, persuades, and loves in ways analogous to another person.

In appealing to the notion of God as the World Soul and the universe as God's body, Charles Hartshorne offers an alternative way of understanding not only God but also ourselves. His argument is that, following Plato, we imagine God on the analogy of our own psyches, selves, souls, consciousness, or lived first-person experience. Here I use these terms interchangeably to refer to that unified seat of awareness, a mind that each of us is in the immediacy of experience.

Hartshorne adds, however, that this seat of awareness is not self-contained in the way that a father is distinct from a son or one person is distinct from another. Rather, it is the subjective unity—and thus the integrity—that unifies through its feeling the almost countless entities that compose the body, including the neurons of the brain.

These many entities are not external to our minds. They are the very content of mind. The mind cannot be separated from them. As minds we are compound individuals.

On this view, the entire universe is the body of God, and God is the mind of the universe.

This does not mean that the entities within the universe are merely manipulated by the divine mind, just as our own neurons are not merely manipulated by our minds. Our neurons have forms of agency of their own that are not reducible to our conscious awareness, even as our conscious awareness has forms of agency that are not reducible to the activity of the neurons. Mind and body are internally related without being reducible to one another. So it is, Hartshorne argues, with God and the world.

Is God, thus understood, still personal? The answer is yes, insofar as the divine mind has aims and purposes for the universe, is affected by what happens in the universe, and has, as Hartshorne believes, something like love as its very essence.

But the divine mind is not other than the universe in the way that a father is other than his children, nor are creatures other than God in the way that children are other than a parent. The relationship is more intimate than that. The world is not simply related to God; it is God's living body.

This has sacramental and spiritual implications which are lacking in Oord. When we look up at the stars, into the faces of our neighbors, into the eyes of animals, and into the worlds of microorganisms, we are seeing the very body of God. We are encountering an aspect of the divine life: the very content of God's experience, which is part of God's life and existence. Hartshorne thus offers a way of affirming divine consciousness without relying primarily on metaphors drawn from interpersonal relations. He shifts the central analogy from person-to-person to mind-and-body.

For open and relational theology, this shift has the potential to be liberating. It frees us from imagining God primarily as a cosmic non-compound individual who is in relationship with the world. Instead, it invites us to imagine God as the all-inclusive subject whose own life includes the lives of all creatures. God is not outside the world looking in, nor merely alongside the world in dialogue. God experiences the world from within, as the living unity of the world's own becoming.

This is one way of reenchanting God. Instead of seeing the universe as a collection of entities standing over against a disembodied deity, we come to see the universe itself as the living body of the divine life. In that vision, every creature becomes more than an object of God's attention. Each is a participant in God's own experience.

The practical implication for open and relational theology is not that it should abandon interpersonal metaphors. On the contrary, they remain indispensable. We rightly experience God as one who calls, loves, forgives, comforts, challenges, teaches, and inspires, and these experiences are naturally expressed through the language of parenthood, friendship, teaching, guidance, and covenant.

Hartshorne's suggestion, however, is that these interpersonal metaphors should be understood through the more fundamental mind-body analogy. God is not first a cosmic parent who also happens to have a body. God is first the all-inclusive divine mind whose body is the universe. Precisely because this divine mind feels the lives of all creatures from within, creatures can experience God in richly personal ways. The mind of the universe can be encountered as a loving parent, a wise teacher, a faithful companion, a gentle guide, or even a fellow sufferer. These are not competing conceptions of God but different ways in which creatures experience the one divine consciousness as it is mediated through their own histories, needs, cultures, and relationships.

In this way, the interpersonal analogies are preserved without becoming the controlling metaphysical model. They are expressions of how the divine mind is experienced rather than literal descriptions of what God most fundamentally is. Hartshorne's mind-body analogy thus does not replace the interpersonal analogies; it grounds them. It explains why the mind of the universe can genuinely be encountered as personal while remaining intimately present in every creature and every event, as our own minds are to our brains.