Does God think in Metaphors?
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Notes on Process Theology, Open Theism, Embodied Mind Theory,
Cognitive Linguistics, Sacred Texts, and the Theology John Sanders

11/19/2019

Photo: Susannah Stubbs, Artist in Residence, Open Horizons

Recently a friend of mine, the Muslim philosopher Farhan Shah, asked me how process philosophy might include and learn from cognitive linguistics and, more specifically, the concept of metaphor-making.  Shah has many essays in Open Horizons; see Farhan Shah.

​I was glad to have his question because I wanted to think about the matter myself.  As a Christian I did not grow up thinking that the Bible is the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God.  I am a United Methodist Christian and we Methodists see the Bible as a dialogue partner not an overwhelming authority.  We feel like we can disagree with some of its contents and still be Christian,

However, I knew and know Christians who do think of the Bible as verbally inspired and inerrant; and I was well aware of many (perhaps even all) Muslims who think in similar terms.  For inerrantist Christians as for inerrantist Muslims, the question become:  Might the content of our sacred texts include humanly-crafted metaphors?  If so, how might our recognition influence how we understand our texts?  Even if the principles of our texts are timeless, might the language of our texts be human-influenced and, for that matter, context-dependent? 

And then there's a deeper and somewhat speculative question.  Might God think in metaphors, too?  Might God communicate to us by drawing upon diverse sources and combining them into those meaningful contrasts we call "metaphors"?  The question will make no sense to cognitive linguists who believe that all metaphors derive from bodily experience, because, after all, God has no body.  But if, with process theologians, (1) we imagine the universe as a whole as God's body, and (2) we imagine God feeling the feelings of everything that happens in the universe as it happens, not unlike the way we feel what happens in our bodies; and if, again with process theologians, (3) we see this divine "feeling of feelings" as akin to physical experience, then it might follow that God thinks in metaphors, too.  God gathers materials from various sources for the sake of understanding.  This would mean that our own human capacities for metaphor making participate in God's own experience of metaphor-making.

I assumed that Shah was asking the first set of questions, if not for himself, then at least for kindred Muslims.

*

Shah has strong interests in process philosophy.  I wished that I could point him toward a process philosopher who already integrated process philosophy and cognitive linguistics, but I couldn't do so.  However, I thought of the work of John Sanders, who is known to many as a Christian advocate of open theism and also as a leading exponent of cognitive linguistics.  Sanders' The God Who Risks lays out an "open theist" way of thinking about God which resembles that of process theology, and his Theology in the Flesh shows the relevance of cognitive linguistics to an understanding and interpretation of biblical texts.  Sanders is not a process theologian, but I believe that his ideas can enrich process approaches in many ways and also that process ideas can enrich his own ideas.  See my  Let the Blurring Begin: Learning from Process Theology and Open Theism.  I'm sure this page entails a bit of that blurring, not only between process theology and open theism, but also between process theology and cognitive linguistics.  Whitehead's cosmology of creative synthesis, and the theology of John Sanders.  ​

​Getting Started

Several years ago, long before I received the query from Farhan Shah, I developed a series of videos called What is Process Thought?, hoping that it might help friends in China and other parts of the world read Whitehead's Process and Reality.  It consisted of twenty-one short lessons, the twelfth of which was on Whitehead's idea of propositions.

It is only after making this video that I began to learn about cognitive linguistics, chiefly from my colleague John Sanders, who is one of the world's leading experts in linking cognitive linguistics with Christian theology.  In conversations in the hallway and with help from a few articles John would pass my way, I began to realize that cognitive linguists were thinking quite deeply about a creative activity in the human mind that is immensely important to those of us influenced by Whitehead, and that they were thinking much more deeply and carefully about conceptual metaphors than were those of us in the Whiteheadian community.  It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that those of us in the process world have much to learn from cognitive linguists, and also that Whitehead's philosophy might offer a cosmology that lends religious and philosophical support to the insights of cognitive linguistics.  
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If, as cognitive linguists propose, the mind is a metaphor maker, then process philosophers heartily agree and add that the metaphor making in which the mind engages, both consciously and unconsciously, is an expression of, not an exception to, a blending activity that also occurs throughout the natural world and in the divine reality as well.  

By blending I mean gathering images, events, experiences, sounds, and ideas from different sources and weaving them into experienced wholes -- it is, for process philosophers, the very essence of existence.  Conceptual metaphors as made by humans are outcomes of this blending, but the blending itself takes many other forms, as when animals form mental maps, individual cells respond to multiple influences in unified ways, and (so process philosophers believe) God blends the many experiences of the universe, moment by moment, into the blended whole of an ongoing divine experience.  

Of course the cosmology of blending offered by Whitehead is itself a combination of many, many conceptual metaphors.  It is not an absolute perspective to be taken literally or as a final word on all important matters; but rather, in his words, a "likely story" given what we know from science, aesthetics, and religion.   

When it comes to the human side of things, Whitehead's general idea is that human cognition is a creative process integrating words, images, ideas, and experiences from the past into new and sometimes unexpected wholes, consciously and unconsciously. Whitehead speaks of these wholes as propositions and proposes that, as outcomes of blending, they function as sources of putative knowledge, lures for feeling, catalysts for action, and openings for novelty.  The creation of conceptual wholes is not creation out of nothing; we create them out of what Whitehead calls the physical pole of our experience: that is, the side of our experience which physically feels our bodies, the surrounding world, and the presence of others with whom we interact.  Thus our bodies play a crucial role in the making of conceptual wholes; and, for Whitehead, our body does not stop with our skin.  Our body is the world itself as physically felt.  

This means that our propositions -- our metaphors, if you will -- are made from what we receive through experience in the mode of causal efficacy, and the creativity lies in how we blend the many things we receive into unique gestalts. In the very act of blending, adds Whitehead, we create ourselves as well.  We form our identities, among other ways, through metaphor making.

Through example after example, study after study, cognitive linguists refine and deepen the kinds of proposals just shared, showing how these wholes take the form of what they call conceptual metaphors and metonymic analogies within and across cultures.  In so doing cognitive linguists invite and inspire not only an understanding of how the mind works, but also a spirit of openness to new meanings that can come from novel appropriations of inherited wisdom.  

For those of us whose faith is partly inspired by the wisdom of inherited traditions -- religious, philosophical, or cultural -- the message is clear and promising.  There need be no conflict between faith and novelty. As Fauconnier and Turner put it, we are always "making new meanings out of old ones." (Fauconnier and Turner)  

My suggestion, then, is that both in letter and in spirit, in empirical studies and in general approach, cognitive linguists have much to teach those among us influenced by Whitehead's way of thinking.   

On the other hand, Whitehead's philosophy offers a cosmology which lends strong support to conceptual metaphor theory by showing how metaphor making is continuous with, not discontinuous from, a similar kind of creativity within the depths of the natural world.  This is important because it encourages further research on metaphor making (or conceptual mapping) in the more-than-human world; but also because it invites a more general sensibility to the entire enterprise of thinking about the human mind.  

Western academic thought has itself been shaped by two ideas which have led to fairly disastrous consequences. One is that the natural world is like a machine that operates according to strictly deterministic impulses and lacks value in its own right, until assigned value by human beings.  The other is that the human mind is a disembodied agent locked within the body and cut off from the world by the boundaries of the skin or skull.  

Whitehead's philosophy offers a plausible alternative to these two habits of thought.  Blending insights from science, aesthetics, ethics,and religion, he offers an image of the universe as organic rather than mechanistic: a universe whose future is open, populated by living beings who have value in and for themselves, quite apart from whether they are assigned value by human beings.  And he offers an image of the human mind as a unifying, metaphor-making subject which gathers insights from the body and the world by means of the brain, in such a way that the world, while transcending the mind, is also present in the mind.  There is no world-less mind, says Whitehead, there is instead a mind that becomes concrete, moment by moment, by gathering the many of the world into the emergent whole of a unified experience, moment by moment. Whitehead's name for this gathering of many into one is concrescence.  

Moreover, this gathering of many into one is occurring everywhere throughout the natural world, of which humans are very much a part.  For Whitehead the creative blending found in metaphor-making and conceptual-blending is an expression of, not an exception to, a kind of creativity that also occurs throughout the natural world.  In a certain sense, then, human beings become co-creators with the natural world through their cognitive creative activities.  The hills and rivers, trees and stars, may not be creating metaphors, but they are creating something out of their own inherited resources. We live in a time when, for spiritual as well as environmental reasons, it can help humankind to remember its place in the wider scheme of a creative universe.  On this Whitehead's philosophy can help.  He offers a way of adding ecological sensitivity to cognitive linguistics.

Twelve Principles

connecting process philosophy
and cognitive linguistics
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1. A culture is a distinctive society, a group of people who share common propositions (metaphors) and the emotions associated with them.  
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​We can think of a distinctive culture as a society of people who share a pattern of meanings with similar subjective forms.  These meanings are evoked in most members is the society by common propositional feelings.  The subjective form of the entertainment of these propositions, that is the emotions associated with them, are also similar.  Accordingly they inform behavior and the way that behavior is understood. ( John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)
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​2. Metaphors are modes of thought.
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​The most recent linguistic approach to literature is that of cognitive metaphor, which claims that metaphor is not a mode of language, but a mode of thought. Metaphors project structures from source domains of schematized bodily or enculturated experience into abstract target domains. We conceive the abstract idea of life in terms of our experiences of a journey, a year, or a day. (Linguistic Society of America, LSA: About Linguistics, Retrieved 2012-03-04)
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3. Metaphors emerge out of bodily interactions with the world, they draw upon physical experience, and they can be accessed through physical experience.  
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Technically, Whitehead understands a “propositional feeling” to be a form of integrating a feeling that indicates a particular individual actual entity or, more commonly, a society of entities with a feeling of an abstract possibility or pure potential.  The indicative feeling is a “physical feeling” or a “transmuted feeling,” that is, one that integrates many physical feelings into one.  The feeling of the pure potential is a “conceptual feeling.”  The integration that is the propositional feeling is the feeling of that actual thing as characterized by that pure potential. (John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)
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4. Metaphors can be communicated in non-linguistic ways - urban design, art and architecture, gestures and rituals.  Religious architecture provides an example.
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Humans have historically spent immense communal effort and creativity on religious structures. In this study, we examine two famous and complex monuments: one the 9th-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur and the other the cathedral church of Chartres. We argue that metaphor, metonymy, and other blends are literally “built in” to the architecture and art to structure the experience of people in these spaces. Metaphoric mappings such as good is up and power is up are common to many religious traditions, and certainly participate in the design of both of these structures. 

-- Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser, “Borobudur and Chartres: Religious Spaces as Performative Real-Space Blends,” in Sensuous Cognition, ed. Rosario Caballero and Javier Diaz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 265–91.
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5. Metaphors cannot fully exist apart from being felt and acted upon (internally or externally) by their recipients. They are a halfway house between actuality and possibility.
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​​Propositions are a halfway house between actuality and possibility, combining elements of both ontological domains.  Considered in isolation, they combine ideas about how the world might be and how we (or other things) might interact with ideas acquired from the physical world.

They can be felt or, in Whitehead's words, entertained in the imagination without being actualized, and they can also be actualized or performed in physical ways.  Politics and economics, religion and art, rituals in daily life and habitual modes of interaction, are ways of performing propositions. (Jay McDaniel)
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6. In evaluating metaphors we need not be preoccupied with questions of truth and falsehood, but rather with questions of how they function.
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​​Many of the most important statements are not to be evaluated in terms of their truth or falsity.  They may inspire efforts to change reality.  They may bring comfort.  They may encourage people to follow their leaders into a disastrous war. (John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)
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​7. Ritual performances offer a means of accessing propositions.  We discover metaphors through movement.
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​Obviously, neither Christianity nor Buddhism claims that a glorious physical religious monument is necessary to achieve spiritual heights. But, as we examine the performative power of ritual – also performed in space, and specifically in the spaces of these monuments – we need also to consider the sources of performative power which reside in the physical spacesthemselves. Human creativity not only builds blends as complex as the Mass, it also builds material anchors to match and support them. -- Kashmiri Stec and Eve Sweetser, “Borobudur and Chartres: Religious Spaces as Performative Real-Space Blends,” in Sensuous Cognition, ed. Rosario Caballero and Javier Diaz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 265–91.
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8. There's no need to rank things.  Cultural differences make the whole richer.
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​​Whitehead’s philosophy helps us to see that, on the whole, cultural diversities enrich the world.  Ranking cultures hierarchically blocks our appreciation of one another.  In recent decades more Westerners have come to realize how inappropriate has been our condescension toward indigenous people and their cultural wisdom. ( John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)
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9. Different beliefs can be complementary not contradictory.
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​​However, the main lesson to be learned from Whitehead is that differences in cultural beliefs do not usually entail a call for judgments of truth and falsity.  Many beliefs held by Westerners may be true, within limits, without any denial of truth to different beliefs held by Chinese.   In this conference, for example, we are seeking to understand how both the Western understanding of the body and the Chinese understanding can be true.  That they are both true seems entailed in the effectiveness of both Chinese and Western medicine. (John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)
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​10. All language is ambiguous and there is no perfect dictionary.
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Thus Whitehead shifts the meaning of “proposition” from a linguistic statement to a way the world is.  This is important in several ways.  It frees him to accept the inherent and inescapable ambiguity of language.  The effort of philosophers to achieve full clarity and exactness has directed effort in the wrong direction.  It makes the error that Whitehead calls, the fallacy of the perfect dictionary.  It implies that there are unambiguous terms in which the ambiguous ones can be defined.  Whitehead notes that all terms are ambiguous, so that there is an infinite regression. (John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)

11. A concern with propositional truth should always occur in the large context of human values.
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​None of this means that we should be indifferent to truth, but when propositional truth is separated from a wider context of human values it becomes a secondary consideration. ( John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)
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12. Amid our differences, it is important to live with a sense of respect for persons and care for the well-being of life.
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​The recognition of cultural diversity has created problems for morality.  Most cultures have tended to treat their moral judgments as universal.  This has helped them in communicating this morality to successive generations.   Whereas recognizing the relativity of aesthetic values and cuisines does not threaten social order, the relativity of moral practice does.  We hope that a shift to Whiteheadian thought would enable people in many cultures to appropriate values that could guide us all without focusing on specific sets of do’s and don’ts. (John Cobb, "Whitehead on Propositions" in Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization)

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Process andTheology in the Flesh

a process response to bullet points in John Sanders'
explanation of key ideas in Theology in the Flesh
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John Sanders: ​"We use figurative language, particularly metaphors, in order to understand most of our really important religious ideas."

​Process Theologians: We, too, fully affirm the importance of figurative language.  Whitehead speaks of God as the poet of the world.  We suggest further that our acts of metaphor-making originate, not only with our embodied experience, but also with God's lure toward a creative blending of ideas, which is a fundamental part of our cognitive life.  Blending is itself a God-inspired activity.

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​John Sanders: "Americans commonly think of God as either an authoritative or nurturing parent and these two models lead to vastly different doctrinal and moral stances."

Process Theologians: We are on the side of those Americans who think of God as a nurturing parent. One of our primary luminaries, John Cobb, speaks of God as Abba.  See his Jesus' Abba: The God who has not Failed.  Like you we think that this metaphor is much better than God as strict taskmaster or holy warrior.

We worry that the latter metaphors have played far too prominent a role in historical Christianity and other Abrahamic faiths.  There is a need for the creative transformation of metaphors.

For Christians in the process traditions, creative transformation is a fundamental way that God is present in the world.  In Christ in a Pluralistic Age John Cobb proposes that the living Christ -- the Logos that was revealed but not exhausted in the healing ministry of Jesus -- is the spirit of creative transformation at work in the world.  John's work invites Christians to be open, deeply open, to Christ through a creative transformation of metaphors for the sake of the common good of the world.

John Sanders: "God as an agent (person) is the default conceptualization for humans."

​Process Theologians: We affirm this default conceptualization.  We recognize that people may conceive God differently: for example, as a cosmic energy of which all things are expressions, or the deep interconnectedness of all things. But for us God is an agent (person) whose life embraces and includes all lives in a compassionate way and who is active in the world as a lure toward creativity and wholeness.  

​As we see things, the universe as a whole is a communion of subjects, and not simply a collection of objects. There is subjectivity everywhere.  This means that conceiving God as agent is consistent with, not an exception to, the very nature of things.

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John Sanders: "Though there is tremendous cultural variation in concepts there are some panhuman concepts shared by all normal humans."

​Process Theologians:  We celebrate diversity, both human and ecological.  But we also agree with you that by virtue of common biology and ways of experiencing the world, we humans share concepts across cultures.  If evidence points in the direction of shared concepts across culture, this, too, can be celebrated.

Additionally, we believe that the commonalities extend to the realm of lived experience.  All human beings seek to live with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand; all seek harmony and intensity in their relations with the surrounding world. Shared concepts emerge out of a shared psychological aims.

For process theologians, it is an error to overemphasize cultural differences and to overemphasize cultural similarities.  The key is to be open to both.  Part of the wisdom of John's approach is that he is open in just this way.  ​

John Sanders: "Human embodiment plays a crucial role in our cognitive processes, including our thinking about God and the Christian life."

​Process Theologians: We agree completely. One of our axioms is that all experience, including all cognitive experience, originates in what we call the physical pole of experience.  The physical pole is that side of our lives by which we interact with, and are affected by, others.  It is bodily.

​We suggest that embodiment plays a role in God's cognitive processes, too. If God knows what we and other living beings feel, then God must "feel our feelings" in some kind of embodied way, thus being affected by them.

Feeling the feelings of others is more than inference about what others are feeling; it is sympathetic sharing in their subjective states, another name for which is empathy.

It is this capacity for sharing that makes God deeply relational: much more like a nurturing parent than a dominating father or self-preoccupied king.

​Feminist theologians rightly propose that images of God as Father, if not complemented by other images, both personal and transpersonal, run the risk of reinforcing overly patriarchal habits of thought, even if offered in the context of a God who risks.

For this reason process theologians strongly recommend countervailing metaphors, including God as Amma (mama).

For process theologians, there is a need in religious life for a playful approach to metaphors and, for that matter, a playful approach to life, cognizant that humor, no less than seriousness, is one way of walking with the God of all life.

The Blending Mind and
the Religious Heart
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The Blending Mind

If we humans are blending materials from diverse sources, the question emerges: Who, at the individual level, does the blending?  The answer, for Whitehead, is the individual subject of experience, understood as a creative and relational self.  This self can be understood from one or both of two points of view: a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. 

Understood from a first-person perspective, the subject is the first-person singular – the self – who does the blending.  Our self is the one to whom we are referring when we say the word  “I.”  We are not things; we are persons, and our self is the person whom we are.  

Understood from a third-person perspective, this self is what scientists, psychologists, and philosophers call the mind.   It is a thing -- or much better a complex activity – about which we speak, as if it were an object among objects in a visual field.  Both points of view are valuable.  We learn something from first-person accounts we cannot learn from brain mapping, and we learn something from brain maps we cannot learn from first-person experience.  

Fortunately, an increasing number of academics today propose that the self can be understood from first-person and third-person points of view and that these two approaches complement and balance one another.  Phenomenology begins with the first-person perspective; neuroscience begins with the third-person perspective; neurophenomenology, developing biological models of embodied cognition and conscious experience, joins ​

Process Philosophy and Embodied Cognition

From a Whiteheadian perspective as from a neurophenomenological perspective, the self is not a skin-encapsulated ego cut off from the world (including the past actual world) by the boundaries of the skin.  It is not a container with a sharply demarcated “inside” and “outside.”  To the contrary, the mind and the world overlap and intersect.  To say the same thing, the mind is in the world and the world is in the mind, albeit as mediated by the body and brain, which is where the mind and the world intersect.  This means that all blending, including all human cognition, is embodied even as its horizons may stretch to include trans-bodily realities: the minds of other people, spirits and ancestors, gods and goddesses, and in Whitehead’s philosophy, the Mind of the universe.  To say that all forms of cognition are embodied is not to say that all items of cognition are three-dimensional bodies.  It is simply to say that we learn about them through, not apart from, bodily experience.

Causal Efficacy and Source Domains

At the heart of bodily experience, says Whitehead, is an act of receiving influences from the world through our bodies.  Whitehead speaks of this as experience in the mode of causal efficacy, because in the receiving of them we are inwardly influenced and affected by them.  When cognitive linguists tell us that conceptual metaphors are items that are blended from different domains – a source domain and a target domain – those of us influenced by Whitehead think of items in the past and clusters of them that are given to experience in the immediacy of the moment, mediated by bodily experience.  And as cognitive linguists add that these source and target domains are concepts, we think of very abstract concepts (eternal objects) and more concrete ideas (propositions) which bridge the gap between actuality and possibility.  Conceptual metaphors are outcomes of blending these kinds of objects as inherited from disparate sources and combined in the immediacy of experience, conscious and unconscious.  They are the metaphors we live by.

God's Call to Metaphor Making

Our understandings of God are almost always metaphoric. Some might propose that God is Love is not a metaphor, because the very notion of Love is contained within the definition of God, but it seems as reasonable to suppose (as I do) that God names a source of novelty and order in the universe, who may or may not be loving.  Accordingly, to say that God is Love adds something to the definition, in a figurative way, that is not contained in the definition: namely the idea that God embodies something like what we human beings call love, except magnified by infinity.  God is Love is a metaphor drawing from two source domains: an intuition of something beyond us and all-encompassing, namely God, and our experience of love.  All of this is to say that Whitehead's notion of God as a Loving Agent in and beyond the universe is itself a metaphor.

If we accept the metaphor, six more ideas emerge that are relatively novel in the history of western theology and philosophy.  The first is that part of God's agency involves blending the experiences undergone by living beings in our world (and any other world) into an emergent whole, such that God understands each particular in its particularity and also how each is related to the others.  In this sense, God's own subjective agency would be, if not an act of metaphor making, then at least an act of blending.  If we understand metaphor making as rendering something relatively unfamiliar into familiar terms by drawing from different source domains, then God is not making metaphors, because all events are already fully familiar (fully known) by God.  But if we understand metaphor simply as blending separate events into emergent wholes, then God's own life is an ongoing act of metaphor making and that "making" is an act of love: that is, a blending that occurs with a tender care that nothing be lost.

The second is that God beckons or lures human beings to make metaphors that are truthful and honest to God's love. This luring presence would be continuous but omni-adaptive, forever changing its exact content relative to the situations at hand: social, environmental, historical. Different cultures and people would have different ways of making metaphors, because they would have different source domains.

The third is that, if God truly is a loving agent, then some metaphors may fall far short of God's love, and thus be forms of what biblical traditions call "missing the mark" or sin.  God as Warrior would be an example.

The fourth is that, if God wants to communicate with the world, then one way that God might communicate would be through metaphors. It is possible that in their imaginations human beings are inwardly beckoned, as individual agents and communities, to imagine God as Love, and that the very metaphor of God as Love is not simply something created by human beings but also, and at the same time, a possible metaphor by which humans can think, nested within the very heart of God.  God and human beings can share metaphors, such that humans discover metaphors with God's help.  We don't simply come to our metaphors,they also come to us, and some of them may be gifts of grace, mediated through our embodied cognition and metaphor-making minds.

The fifth is that, since metaphors can be elicited in verbal and non-verbal ways, it is possible that some of the ways that God communicates are non-verbal: liturgies, music, and loving persons.  They become, as it were, evocations of the idea that God is Love and also sources for the idea.  For Christians, this would mean that Jesus would be a source for metaphor making and that the idea that he is "God incarnate" would itself be a metaphor conducive to this end.  For Muslims, this would mean that the Qur'an would be a source for metaphor making and that the very sounds of the Qur'an, when recited, reveal the sweetness of God's care, and are thus metaphors in sonic form.  For Jews this would mean that Torah is itself a complex, polysemic metaphor from God which, when understood with a loving heart, is a way into a walk with God.  

The sixth is that non-metaphoric readings of sacred texts may, in their own way, not only be sources of conflict in the world, but a violation of the very will of God.  

Co-Blending with Nature

From Whitehead’s perspective we human beings are blenders. To be sure, we are thinkers and feelers, tool makers and meaning-makers, community-seekers and decision-makers. But we are also, and perhaps most deeply, blenders.  Moment by moment we receive experiences and concepts from the past and blend them into wholes in the present, which then become wholes we inherit in the future.  We do this in order to survive with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand and make meaning of our lives.  

Some of our blending is conscious but most of it is unconscious, lying beneath the surface (that’s a metaphor) of conscious perception.   Our blending includes an element of novelty in how we blend things together but our creativity is never "out of nothing."  Always we are blending from already existing experiences and concepts; in the language of cognitive linguistics they are the sources for our blending.

“Experiences and concepts” is a cover term for feelings, images, sounds, events, ideas and the agents involved in them. In a Whiteheadian context these agents include human beings and also, given a wider understanding of agency, energetic powers in the natural world: animals, plants, landscapes, waterways, storms.   We do not simply blend from our own internal sources or from what we receive from other people; we also blend from what we receive from creative pulsations of the natural world.  

Inasmuch as these multiple agents are sources for our blending, all blending is co-creative.  Blending is not simply an individual process that occurs in the isolation of a person’s mind, it is something that people do together, influencing one another along the way, consciously and unconsciously.   

Moreover, thinks Whitehead, they do this empathically.  Consciously and unconsciously they -- we -- feel the feelings of others and their feelings influence how we blend and what we blend.  In the case of conceptual metaphors, we feel their ideas, too, as shared through myriad forms of communication: verbal, gestural, visual, and musical, for example.  We are shaped by their concepts – their ideas – and become part of what we ourselves blend together.  Blending is a collective and relational enterprise.

Thinking about God​
John Sanders, Open Theism, and Process Theology
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John Sanders weaves together biblical, linguistic, and philosophical insights under the rubrics of "open theism" and "cognitive linguistics."  Sanders is not a process theologian, but his perspective resembles that of process theology.

Here are twelve similiarities. 

1. Both perspectives affirm that God loves all creatures and adjusts to new situations in order to provide them with fresh possibilities for satisfaction relative to circumstance.
2. Both envision God, not as Being Itself but rather as a Person or Agent who is filled with wisdom and compassion. 
3. Both think that the future is open or not-yet-determined, even for God. 
4. Both think that God knows what is possible in the future but not what it is actual until it is actualized.
5. Both think that God's love resembles that of a nurturing parent.  
6. Both believe that our images of nurturing parent and dominating taskmaster are metaphors, best understood figuratively not literally. 
7. Both believe that metaphors can be carriers of wisdom and that some metaphors carry more truth than others.  For example, the metaphor of God as nurturing parent carries more wisdom than that of authoritarian taskmaster.  
8. Both believe that metaphors and concepts do not drop from heaven, but instead originate out of embodied experience. 
9. Both believe that truth itself is a journey, not a set of propositions in a book. 
10. Both know that we are on that journey and do not have final answers. 
11. Both believe that the journey is enriched, not diminished, by openness to the points of view of others and dialogue. 

Amid these similarities there are at least four differences.

Creation out of Nothing or Out of Pre-existing Chaos

Amid these similarities there are also some differences.  One very important difference is that, for John Sanders, God creates the world out of nothing, whereas for many (but not all) process theologians, God creates the world out of chaos.  This means that, for Sanders, God could exercise unilateral control over the world but chooses instead to limit divine power, whereas for process theologians God's manner of acting in the world is, and must be, relational rather than unilateral.  

God's Manner of Knowing the World

A second difference conccerns God's manner of knowing the world.  For process theologians God has physical feelings.  This does not mean that God has a body located in space or time, but rather than God feels the feelings of every living being in the universe in a way that resembles the way we feel, and are moved by, the happenings within our own physical bodies.  In psychology this kind of feeling is called proprioception.  For process theologians, the universe unfolds within, not outside of, the ongoing and everlasting life of God, and God feels this unfolding through experiences in the mode of causal efficacy or physical feelings.  God's physical feelings are God's empathy: God's direct experience of what is happening in the universe, God's sharing in the subjective states of any and every living.  
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John Sanders speaks of God as knowing what humans (and by implication other animals) feel but does not speculate on what kind of knowing it is.  Process theologians propose that this knowing is not simply a matter of inference or even perspective-sharing, but rather intimate state-sharing.  For process theologians in the Christian tradition, such intimacy is part of what is revealed in Jesus' death on the cross.  As Jesus died on the cross, so Christians believe, God shared in the feelings of dying -- and does the same everywhere at all times.  I do not know if John believes God knows by direct experience; this may be an area of disagreement.

Intrinsic Value of Life

A third area of disagreement is that, in process theology, God does not assign intrinsic value but instead recognizes it.  Process theologians believe that even if God did not exist, all living beings would have what we call "intrinsic value."  In process theology a living being is a creature whose survival and well-being matters to itself, consciously or unconsciously.  Intrinsic value is this self-mattering.  Of course a living being may also have instrumental value; for example, a human being may well be valuable to others and to God as well as to himself or herself.   But a human being does indeed have value in and for herself, even if she is not valuable to others.  Imagine a woman who has been abandoned by her family and sits alone in a jail, unloved by anyone. 

Process theologians propose that she has intrinsic value and that her value is not assigned by God.  It is part of her very existence. Process theologians believe that the ethical life lies in being sensitive to this kind of value, not only in human beings but in all living beings.  What makes God good is not that God assigns value to life, as if it would not have value otherwise; it is that God recognizes, takes delight in, and celebrates the value of life, which carries such value in its own existence.  Again, I do not know if John would agree with this idea that value is inherent in life, and not a projection of God onto life.

Complementary Ultimates

A fourth area of disagreement it the idea, important in process theology, that different religions may have awakened to different ultimate realities, all of them real.  The idea begins with Whitehead, who proposes that every actuality in the universe -- from the smallest puff of energy in a distant galaxy, through a living cell on planet earth, to God as the inclusive whole of the universe -- is filled with some degree of self-creativity in the way it appropriates influences from others   The actuality receives influences from others and then creates itself, in the moment at hand, by responding to those influences consciously or unconsciously.  Whitehead sought a name for this self-creativity and he called it Creativity.  In Whitehead's philosophy this Creativity is the ultimate reality of the universe and God is its ultimate expression.  John Cobb puts it this way: Creativity is the ultimate reality and God is the ultimate actuality.  This means that there are at least two ultimates, each ultimate in a different way.  

This idea has led process theologians to consider the possibility that different religions may have awakened to, and be centered in, different kinds of ultimates.  Buddhists, for example, have awakened to still another kind of ultimacy: the absolute interconnectedness of all things and (in Zen) the primacy of the present moment of experience.  Daoists have awakened to the fact that the universe itself is a flowing reality rather than a static substance, and there is something ultimate about the flow itself.  The Abrahamic religions have awakened to the ultimacy of God as one in whom we can place our deepest faith and who loves all creatures deeply.  Interconnectedness is ultimate in its way; the fluidity of the universe is ultimate in its way, and God is ultimate in God's way.

A God Who Breathes

​​When I heard the title of John Sanders' new book --  Theology in the Flesh --  I thought of a book of essays by Walter Brueggemann called The God of All Flesh.​ In these essays Brueggemann makes the case that the Bible is "passionately and relentlessly material in its accent."  For those of us in the process tradition, this accent on materiality is appropriate in thinking about ourselves as persons and agents, and also in thinking about God as a person and agent.  With regard to human beings, process philosophers believe that the mind and brain are not precisely identical, but that they have an interactive relationship.  The chemistry in our brains influences our mind, and our acts of thinking influence our brains.  See John Cobb on Whitehead and Mind-Brain Relations.  And so as well does the entirety of our bodily experience along with the rest of the surrounding world.  In this sense we are embodied minds.  

It does not make sense to us to think of God as a disembodied soul, because such a perspective is too far removed from the realities of life in the world, including physical and cultural life.   Whitehead speaks of a side of God which enjoys and suffers physical feelings.

Please understand.  For us God is not located in one region of space at the expense of others. You cannot look at a piece of the world and say "God is here but not over there." God is everywhere (omnispatial) in some ways and nowhere (nonspatial) in others.  At least this is what process theologians believe. They -- we -- resist reducing God to a single, simple location. We believe in a God who is everywhere and nowhere.   

Nor can you look at a particular image in your own mind and say "This is God."  We all have our images of God, even if we think God does not exist. We may think of God as a cosmic person, or a deep energy, or an uncreated light, or a still small voice within the heart.  Our images may or may not carry grains of truth in them about what God is like, but none of them are exhaustive.  God is always more than our images of God. This is one of the truths of apophatic theology.  It is that God is never fully contained in our language or our images.  

Still, images are inescapable, and we process theologians propose that it is meaningful to speak of God's embodiment in two ways: in how we experience God and in how God experiences us.
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God's Breathing

In the first place, God is embodied within all human beings (and the whole of creation) as a lure toward healing and wholeness, toward positive well-being, relative to the situation at hand.  In human life the potential at issue may be for wisdom, compassion, courage, creativity, or sheer survival.  It is what is best in that situation and it is literally God's presence in that person's life.  Some process theologians speak of this indwelling presence as God's Breathing, because it has power in its own right.  Humans feel God's lure, not simply as a possibility but as an inner urging.  

God's Empathy

In the second place, God is embodied because God experiences, and thus shares in, the bodily experience of each and every living being.  This means that God knows and feels, intuitively and directly, not by inference, what it is like to be embodied. God knows what it is like to dance, cry, touch, be touched, and suffer.  Christians see this side of God as revealed in Jesus, suggesting that Jesus' life, healing ministry, and death are windows into the divine life.  We can imagine God on the analogy of Jesus.  

​This receptive and empathic side of God is consequent to the experiences suffered and enjoyed by living beings.  It comes after, and is responsive to, the actual feelings of living beings. Thus Whitehead calls it the consequent nature of God.  It is deeply and profoundly relational.  

John's Theology in the Flesh is not so much about how God lives in a covenant with all flesh, although he believes in this covenant. Nor is it about how we might experience the living presence of God in everyday life, although I am sure that he believes God is present.  Instead it is about how our concepts of God and our understanding of the Christian life inevitably emerge out of our own embodied experience.  My suggestion is that, as we take his thought ever more seriously, learning from it again and again, we might find ourselves grateful for God's embodied experience, too.  It is in fact the very center of our lives: where we meet God and God meets us.

see also:

See also Spirituality and the Embodied Mind

Should I Understand God Literally or Metaphorically?

Photo: Susanna Stubbs, Artist in Residence, Open Horizons