​Silence of the Lamb

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"Many Christian philosophers and theologians have proposed a variety of explanations over the centuries for why a God of love might exist yet seem so silent and hidden. The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of God and Christ considers these arguments, particularly those of the philosopher, J. L. Schellenberg and a variety of post-Reformation theologians. Ultimately, Silence of the Lamb focuses particular attention on the ideas of Process Theology and Open and Relational Theology. These recent theologies envision a God who loves, who longs to relate to us, and who is in time sharing our suffering with us. Their explanations for God’s hiddenness, by dispensing with notions like God’s omnipotence, are more straightforward than the explanations of earlier traditions.

In the final chapters, Silence of the Lamb uses Process and Open and Relational ideas, sometimes pushing a little beyond them, to propose three scenarios that illustrate how our hopes for glorious afterlives might be justified. A fourth scenario suggests that God might have evolved from a creator more concerned with the technical side of designing universes into a sustainer devoted to love and relationship. This evolving God desires our help, and even needs our help, to turn reality into the glorious, everlasting community God dreams it can become."

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​God both Hidden and Unhidden

Tim Miller

Response to review by Jay McDaniel.
​Scroll down for the review.


 
Now Through a Glass Darkly 
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There are three reasons I got interested in the topic of God’s hiddenness. Let’s call them the 3 S’s—self, sisters, Schellenberg.  
 
My experiences of God’s presence have been very spotty. A few times, often triggered by tragedy or music evocative of tragedy, I’ve felt overwhelmed by deeply sorrowful emotions accompanied by a powerful sense that God, with me or beside me or within me, is experiencing the same feelings. A few other times I’ve seemed to receive information right into my consciousness that answered persistent questions I was having. And a few times, a series of coincidences or serendipities happened that left me with a sense that God was nudging me, trying to get my attention. After every such experience I felt touched by God, but just minutes later the feelings faded and I found myself questioning the God connection. Was it just my brain, my unconscious mind, simply plain old coincidence? I had to see the episodes through the eyes of faith in order to take the God connection seriously. At other times, when I really wanted to feel God’s presence, when I needed God’s emotional support or wisdom to help me navigate through choppy moral waters, God would never show up. It’s hard to avoid thinking that God shows up when God feels like it, not when I do. 
 
So while I’ve had occasional episodes of feeling God’s presence, my two sisters never have. Earlier in life they told me that if only God would reach out to them like he seemed to do to me now and again, if just once he would nudge them or give them a feeling of being cared for, they might believe like I appeared to do. But about 8 years ago, as both moved into their 70s, they confessed feeling that it was too late. They were just not open anymore. A lifetime of experience had shown them what’s what. I couldn't help asking myself—and God—why didn’t God reach out to them? They are such good people, so loving, so moral. Why leave them bereft of divine presence? 
 
Then in 2018 I happened upon John Schellenberg’s book The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God. Schellenberg lays out and unpacks a detailed logical argument which he claims proves that divine hiddenness equals divine nonexistence. His logic seems very tight. But of course he makes a number of assumptions about what God is like and what reality and human consciousness are like, and both process theology’s and open and relational theology’s views are based on very different assumptions. Of course Schellenberg realizes what his assumptions are, and his final chapter posits a “nonpersonal ultimate” lying at the heart of reality, an ultimate we are so far from grasping that it will likely take thousands or millions of years for our intellectual descendents (who may not even be human) to begin to have any sort of handle on what’s really going on in unseen reality. 
 
Soon after my Schellenbergian encounter, I entered seminary, and with visions of divine hiddenness dancing in my head, I reached the point of having to choose a dissertation topic. I made the obvious choice. Eventually I finished the dissertation and it became the book Jay McDaniel has been gracious enough to review a chapter of—the process theology chapter, chapter five, right after the chapter on Schellenberg’s argument. 
 
Jay describes eloquently three ways in which God reveals herself. “God is unhidden in the world, for the world is, as it were, the body of God: the objective content of the divine life. God is unhidden in love, for in love we participate in a feeling for others—and for ourselves—that is both human and divine. And God is unhidden in prayer, in the quiet yet powerful sense that there is a fellow sufferer who understands—a presence who shares in our pain from within and offers companionship in our vulnerability. In these three ways, and perhaps many more, we know God even amid our unknowing.” 
 
I think Jay’s last one, prayer, gives a ready glimpse into what you have to do to recognize the ways God is not hidden. And it is what I said I have to do to recognize what I called the God connection in my episodes of sensing God’s presence. I have to view them through the eyes of faith. That makes me think of my sisters. They don't see things through the eyes of faith. They used to be open to the idea of doing that if only God would tip his hand first, give them a little sign. But, it seems, any sign would have to be seen through the eyes of faith to even be recognized as a sign.  
 
That is where Schellenberg is coming from too. His logic hinges on the idea that, if God truly loved as a person loves, only moreso, then God would make herself known to everyone without requiring eyes of faith in order to embark upon a relationship of mutual love. 
 
Jay, when he says God is unhidden in the world, raises the idea that the world is God’s body. I raise a similar idea in chapter six of my book, the open and relational theology chapter. I raise it to try to explain why God can’t get through to people who do not see through the eyes of faith. That whole chapter details why, to use Tom Oord’s classic phrase, “God can’t” make herself known to everyone. God simply does not have the power to singlehandedly make things happen in physical reality. God’s power lies not in omnipotence, but rather in love--amipotence. And amipotence is inherently uncontrolling. 
 
The world-is-God’s-body section of chapter six is very short, so let me quote it in full. 
 
These ideas lead some people to imagine the whole universe as God’s nonlocalized body. Perhaps we can use this notion, or metaphor, to visualize why, much of the time, God can’t reach us consciously. Just as in our bodies we can move our arms and legs but not individual cells, molecules, or atoms, maybe God can make some things happen in giant regions of the universe over vast eons but not at our level of perception and on time scales we can perceive. Similarly, we struggle to make small parts of our bodies feel better (e.g. a tiny wound, or an ulcer deep within), and so God might have to struggle, or fail to be able, to make creaturely bodies and brains feel better or sense the presence of God's mental pole. We can’t share our thoughts explicitly with cells or the molecules that make up cells, and likewise, our vast God might struggle to share divine thoughts with beings as miniscule as we are. 
 
God wants to reach us, I feel when I see through the eyes of faith, and God does everything God singlehandedly can to effect that. But God can’t forcibly break through human reluctance or doubt to make people see through the eyes of faith. That’s one reason the book offers for why my sisters and Schellenberg see God as so thoroughly hidden as to be nonexistent. 
 
But Then Face to Face 

Jay mentions that in the last few highly speculative chapters, I float the idea of virtual worlds or realities as ways God might be less hidden to us in our afterlives. I do float that idea, but I also play with the idea of physical realities into which God could resurrect us immediately after death and be very present with us. But why bring up afterlives at all? 
 
Some process theologians think we have objective immortalities but not subjective ones. Objective immortality, as I understand it, means that everything we experience is both stored in full fidelity in God’s vast consciousness, continuing to exist there forever, and also ripples out into the universe causing effects by entering into the initial aims of every other occasion of experience that comes after things we decide and do. Subjective immortality means that our experiencing and choosing and co-creating would go on forever, transcending death. 
 
Most Christians seem to hope that we get subjective immortalities in addition to objective ones. And that our subjective immortalities will be wonderful. But God is not controlling, as process theology and open and relational theology hold, and the state of existence in our universe now is still pretty rough, though God, with the help of some of us, is trying to draw and lure it toward ever better states as time endlessly passes. God’s very essence is to be uncontrolling, so God is not suddenly going to become controlling right after we die. This means that the “best” God can do for the foreseeable future is draw and lure a vast assemblage of often recalcitrant occasions of experience toward betterness. And that is not going to change just because we die. So if God, say, resurrects us into this same universe right after death, what we experience then is likely to be little better than what we experience now. Or so one might imagine from a process point of view. 
 
In the book, I address this worry by speculating on two physical resurrection scenarios that might provide very pleasant, near-problem-free afterlives that begin the moment after we die. I will very briefly describe them here, but if they seem interesting to you, the book goes into a lot more detail.  
 
In one scenario, God does not resurrect us right away. Instead, God stores our objective immortalities safely in God’s vast memory and keeps drawing reality toward universal goodness, beauty, flourishing, and love. After vast ages, hopefully God will finally succeed. At that point, God could resurrect each of us using a process like this: God could uncontrollingly draw or lure an amazing body into existence, a body with far greater capabilities than our current ones. This body would have barely any objective immortality of its own (yet), and if it is willing to receive a vast objective immortality from one of us, God could draw or lure whatever mechanism the body has for storing memories into a state that reflects and contains the entirety of one stored objective immortality. (Let’s call that process downloading from now on). Say it’s your objective immortality. Suddenly, a stream of awareness would contain all your memories, nothing forgotten in full fidelity, and “you” would just have flickered back into existence. Since you did not exist in the vast ages while God lured reality to an optimal state, to you it will feel like you woke up in an amazing body the instant after you died. 
 
The second scenario is very much like that, except, if reality is a certain way, God does not have to wait vast ages to resurrect you in an idyllic environment. Perhaps physical reality is a multiverse rather than a single universe. If that is the case, many universes perhaps cannot support conscious life, but a number of them might be able to. And occasions of experience in some of them may have been more cooperative or aligned with God from the beginning so that, at the moment of your death, God has already been able to draw those universes to near perfect states and can resurrect you there using the same downloading process described earlier. Again, you would wake up the subjective instant after you died in an amazing body, all your memories intact, only this time you didn't need to “lie dormant” for vast ages. 
 
Both of those fanciful ideas I call "Resurrection of the Body.” As Jay noted, I also float the possibility of resurrection into a virtual reality, and I call this possibility “Resurrection of the Soul.” The advantage of a virtual reality is that God can create a very good one (or more) out of God’s own consciousness, which God can do quickly because God has total control over God’s consciousness. Then God can create virtual bodies capable of virtually experiencing, ready to have objective immortalities downloaded into their virtual brains (or whatever virtual organ God designs to hold memories and manage consciousness). After the moment of creation of a virtual body, God can no longer singlehandedly control that body because God never controls entities capable of experiencing. If the virtual bodies God creates are willing to receive objective immortalities, God downloads one into each virtual being, and again we flicker back into existence immediately after death in subjective time in a reality God controllingly designed to be exquisite. And from then on, we along with God will take it in new and amazing directions (and perhaps even in bad directions if we haven’t learned our lessons sufficiently in this life. In the book, I explore how God might be able to uncontrollingly head off or minimize such a possibility). 
 
The book extends the idea of a virtual reality created out of God’s own consciousness to suggest another idea, that God evolves. Process and open and relational theologies already assume that God evolves in some ways. God is in time, not outside it, and so, as time passes, God learns new things. For example, God learns what decisions we make and the results of actions we take. So God’s knowledge evolves. Things we do induce God to change God’s mind, and thus to imagine new directions to lure things toward. So God’s creativity evolves. As Jay writes, “in being part of God, the world helps create God.” 
 
But process and open and relational theologies don't usually entertain one thought, and that is that God’s goodness evolves. They usually hold that God is and has always been entirely loving and has always had sufficient wisdom and insight to avoid moral mistakes, especially ones that affect others.  
 
I wonder about that sometimes. Mainly I wonder when I think of evolution by natural selection acting on mutations and its consequences, predation and parasitism. Plus the law of entropy which ensures that everything with structure, in time, decays. These laws have meant that vast suffering has been present in the universe almost all the time that any entity capable of suffering has existed. Is it really reasonable to think that God did not wish this and only the choices of fledgling occasions of experience pulled the universe in that direction against God’s drawing and luring? 
 
I sometimes suspect that the following is more likely: God, without prior experience of observing vast realities, imagined drawing one into existence in which lifeforms would arise through evolution, and would engage in mutually beneficial symbiosis to form an immense community of love and sharing. God saw how it could be drawn into existence by her striving to establish certain patterns which, holding for a while, would tend to solidify into “laws” of physics. But never having done this before, God could not have anticipated everything that could go wrong. Remember, God’s knowledge evolves. God could perhaps have imagined that things might go wrong, but it all seemed likely that evolution would go well. So God took the risk and went ahead. And we see how that has played out. Things did go in unanticipated directions (through choices fledgling occasions of experience made), got solidified into the laws of physics our scientists have been uncovering over the last few centuries, and evolution through natural selection led to predation and parasitism. Much to God’s dismay! Yet God was the one who at least somewhat knowingly took the chance and lured evolution into existence. 
 
But God is still very loving, and God, as Jay (and Whitehead) say, is a fellow sufferer who understands and experiences what we experience including all the anguish and pain. The risk God took, while lacking knowledge and wisdom coming from experience, was not completely, 100% moral. Taking chances with other people’s lives is not and cannot be seen as 100% moral. But through the experiences of all the beings who have ever evolved, and God’s sharing of those experiences, God has evolved far greater goodness. Perhaps even absolute moral perfection. Or perhaps not quite, not yet. As divine and creaturely experience accumulates, God’s (and our) evolution will move all of us ever closer to moral perfection. 
 
This is very speculative, obviously. But why would I want to imagine God lacking moral perfection? There are some reasons why it is good if God has evolved morally. For one, we too are evolving morally. If God has preceded us in moral evolution, and God has become so spectacularly good, it gives us hope that someday, following paths God has already mapped out, we may actually have a shot at moving ever closer to moral perfection ourselves. (I’m imagining, of course, that our evolution is going to take more than just this single human lifetime. It will have to continue for a long time in our afterlives). It also means that when we screw up, God understands because God screwed up too. God is not so frostily perfect that we have to quail in terror before her. She understands. She is not just a fellow sufferer, but a fellow screw up as well! 
 
And this leads to another “benefit” of God’s being subject to moral evolution. It makes sense of the atonement. God has given us the immense and amazing gift of life. But life in this universe that God had a major hand in drawing into existence is rough. And God wants to show us that, not only does she understand and sympathize with our suffering, she wants to make it up to us. She wants to show that she is willing to endure what a certain vision of justice demands. The cross shows us that God experiences the reality we experience by suffering and dying, but it also shows that God understands she has a debt to pay and she is willing to pay it. It is not our sins that Jesus paid for on the cross. It is God’s screwup, to put it crudely. God, incarnated as Jesus, paid recompense on the cross for taking risks with our lives. 
 
And there is yet another reason that having a God who morally evolves benefits us. God must have had a reason for taking such a risk in choosing to lure our universe into existence. Maybe it was as simple as that God was fascinated with the technical aspects of how a universe with natural selection would function. That would mean God let technical interest override moral concern. Definitely not morally perfect. But I suspect God knew conscious life would arise. I suspect God wanted intelligent conscious life to arise. God wanted a community of intelligent beings choosing to help each other flourish maximally forever. God wanted us! This is immense, to actually be wanted by God. God didn't just think we should exist because her goodness needed to be exercised. That’s how traditional Christianity sometimes sees it. No, God actually wanted to relate to you and to me, and to help us flourish and to let us help her flourish. God is not a frosty goodness. God is a warm and loving imperfection wanting us all to perfect together. What meaning this imparts to the gift of life! 
 
These are a few of the ideas the book explores, though in more detail than I have been able to do here. Again, I wish to thank Jay for taking the time to read and review the book. It means so much to me. 
 
 


Where is God, Anyway?

Responding to Tim Miller's
Silence of the Lamb

“I believe God is both hidden and unhidden. Hidden—because we do not see God face to face, and in moments of heartbreak we cry out, ‘Why?’ or ‘Couldn’t you have done something?’ Or, at the very least, ‘What do I do now?’ These questions come from a deep place. And yet, I believe God is also unhidden—in the world itself, which is God's body, aching and alive; in every act of compassion, which carries a divine pulse; and in the silence of prayer, where sometimes we feel more than hear: ‘I understand, and I am with you.’ God does not erase suffering but enters it with us, quietly, tenderly, unbearably near.”

— Naomi Chen, hospice nurse and interfaith contemplative

If God is a God of love, why is God so hidden?

The question is not merely theoretical. Many people who believe in a God of love struggle with it, not in moments of abstract speculation, but in the depths of suffering—during depression, in hospital rooms, at gravesides, in times of loneliness or despair. And also in moments of horror: a mass shooting at a school, a war zone lit with fire and grief, a child pulled from the rubble after an earthquake. The silence feels not only personal, but cosmic. Where is God in the chaos? Why does God not intervene—more clearly, more obviously, more loudly?

In The Silence of the Lamb: Exploring the Hiddenness of God and Christ, Tim Miller explores the question from a variety of perspectives: classical, traditional, and contemporary. He does not minimize the ache or try to resolve it with easy answers. Instead, he considers the possibility that Process Theology and its cousins, Open Theisms, and Open and Relational Theology, may offer a more compassionate framework—one that takes the silence seriously while also affirming God's love.

In these theological traditions, God is not conceived as an all-controlling, omnipotent being who could prevent all suffering but chooses not to. Rather, God is envisioned as deeply relational and persuasive, not coercive. God offers possibilities, shares in the world’s joys and sorrows, and suffers with us—but does not override our freedom or the integrity of natural processes.
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This means that in moments of senseless violence—when hatred manifests in bullets and bombs—God is not pulling strings behind the scenes but is present as the inner lure toward compassion, toward empathy, toward restraint, toward peace. When these lures are ignored or resisted, tragedy results. But even then, God is there, not as an unmoved mover, but as a deeply moved companion.

And when natural disasters strike—when floodwaters rise or tectonic plates shift—God is not the cause of destruction, nor the absent ruler who allows it. Rather, God is present in the resilience of those who survive, in the courage of those who respond, in the aching hearts of those who grieve. God’s power is not in suspension of natural law, but in the possibilities for healing and solidarity that emerge in the aftermath.

Process Theology

In Chapter Five Miller presents a process approach to divine hiddenness. Drawing upon the work of John Cobb, Catherine Keller, Bruce Epperly, and Whitehead’s concepts of concrescence, transmutation, eternal objects, and the primordial and consequent natures of God, he proposes that God seems hidden to us because we cannot directly prehend or feel God's acts of communication. This is due to the transmutational nature of our own prehensions: God’s lures are received and transformed into what feel like our own desires, aversions, and intuitions. Miller’s focus is on how God communicates with us—on divine immanence within us—even though we may not easily perceive it.

Yet there is another crucial aspect of God in process theology that Miller does not emphasize: namely, how we—and the entire universe—are immanent within God. In prehending the world, God includes all actualities—quantum events in the depths of atoms, living beings on Earth, stars and galaxies—as part of God’s own existence and life. The manyness of the world is taken up into the manyness of God. In this sense, God is not hidden at all. God is the world itself—present in every moment, every event, every being. When we see and experience the world, we are also seeing and experiencing God. The world is the unhidden side of God.
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This does not mean that everything that happens in the world is God's will, or that it reflects God's desires. The world has its own self-creativity and spontaneity—not unlike the way embryos within a womb have their own emergent creativity and unfolding life. Though nurtured and sustained by the larger whole, they are not controlled by it. In a similar way, many things—both beautiful and tragic—occur in the world that are not the direct expression of divine aims. Still, the world itself is part of God: the unhidden side. As some way, the world is God's body, and we see this body directly. Indeed we are part of this body. What remains hidden is God's inner response to what we see—and that, to some extent, may always elude us.

Or does it? Miller's emphasis is on how we might experience God through initial aims—fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness, available within the depths of our own experience, which come from God but which we transmute into what feel like our own motivations. But it is possible to consider other ways we might experience God beyond such initial aims.

Consider, for example, our experiences of loving and being loved. Might not these, too, be ways in which God's presence is felt—not as a lure toward a possibility, but as a direct sharing in feeling? As a resonance that bridges hearts?
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To approach this question, I turn to a passage from Part V of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, where he speaks of divine love not as distant or abstract, but as an overflowing presence. Here’s how he puts it:

“What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

Here, divine love is not only an aim but a living current—a cyclical movement of shared experience. In moments of deep love, compassion, or solidarity, we are not merely responding to God's aims for us; we may be participating in God's own experience, God's own feeling. God's response—the hidden side—may in these moments break through, not as a voice or idea, but as presence, intimacy, and communion.
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Moreover, insofar as God is a fellow sufferer who understands, we may also experience God in moments of prayer—not so much when we are listening for initial aims, those subtle callings toward healing or transformation, but when we feel listened to. In such moments, what we encounter is not merely an internal echo or comforting thought, but a loving presence that is more than us—not located in space, yet palpably real. It is the sense of being held, of our pain being received, not with explanation but with compassion. In these moments, we do not simply reach toward God; we are received by God. This, too, is an experience of divine immanence—less about guidance, more about accompaniment. A quiet knowing that, even in the silence, we are not alone.

All of this suggests that divine hiddenness, while real, is not the whole story. There are also moments—quiet, luminous, often overlooked—in which God is unhidden. These moments do not erase mystery, but they offer glimpses of intimacy and presence. 

Let me summarize what I've said so far:

1. The World as the Content of God's Life

In process theology, the world itself is part of God's life and existence. Every actual occasion—whether a quark, a tree, a person, or a galaxy—is included in God’s experience. When we see the world, we are seeing God—not as a controlling power, but as a living companion who receives, feels, and remembers everything. The world is the unhidden side of God. We may not always perceive God's response to the world, but the world itself is God's body, God's presence made visible.

2. Love as Divine Love 'flooding back' to Earth

In moments of authentic love—when we give or receive kindness, mercy, or affection—we may be participating in the divine life itself. As Whitehead writes, “the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world.” Love, in this sense, is not merely human. It is divine energy in circulation. When we love or are loved deeply, we touch something of God. In such moments, God is not hidden, but radiantly near.
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4. The Feeling of Being Listened to by a Loving Presence

In prayer or vulnerability, we may feel not just that we are reaching toward God, but that we are being received—that our pain, longing, or gratitude is being held by a presence more than our own. This is not necessarily the reception of divine guidance, but the experience of divine attention. To be listened to without judgment, without answers, but with understanding—is this not one of the most healing experiences we know? In these moments, God is not hidden, but quietly companioning us, the great fellow sufferer who understands.

I realize that some more traditional Christians will be troubled by the claim that the world is God, or at least part of God, even as they may appreciated the other two forms of unhiddenness. So a final, slightly more technical note may be helpful.

​Technically speaking, this means that the objective world—including ourselves—is the objective content of God’s own experience, and thus part of God’s very life. In this sense, God is not hidden at all. The world around us, and our own lives, are woven into the very fabric of God’s being. The tragedies and joys, the poignancies and cruelties, the conflicts and harmonies, the growth and decay, the loves and hatreds, the atomic events and the galactic events—all are part of who and what God is.

From Monadism to Concrescence

The deeper issue, I think, is that some theologians—including process and open and relational theologians—still conceive of God in monadic terms: as a unified subject whose existence and identity are entirely distinct from the world’s existence and identity. God is One, but not—as Whitehead insists--a Many becoming One. Or, if they do recognize the manyness of God, they sometimes reduce the Many to God’s internal prehensions—mere recollections of worldly occasions, abstracted from the world’s living actuality.
But this is not Whitehead’s view. He maintained that each moment of concrescence—including each moment of divine concrescence—includes the world itself.

Here is how he puts it:

“The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes.”

And elsewhere:

“An actual entity is concrete because it is such a particular concrescence of the universe.”

Divine Manyness

If this is true, then when we see the universe that God concresces, we are seeing part of God. Not the whole of God, but a real and living part. We are seeing God's manyness.

In Part V of Process and Reality, Whitehead speaks of this manyness:

"It is as true is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many."

"It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World."

"It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God."

The immanence of the world in God means that God is many as well as one, and that in being part of God, the world helps create God. When we see the world around us and within us, we are seeing part of a cosmic Love - a Father who are in heaven, a Mother who holds the world in her heart - whose very life, like our own lives, is partly self-creative and partly other-created. Relationality does not simply mean mutual influence, it means mutual immanence.

This does mean that God does not transcend the world in God's intentions and hopes or that we do not transcend God in our freedom.

'It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God."

Mutual immanence and mutual transcendence are twin sides of relationality. But it does mean that part of God is unhidden - indeed visible - in the world itself.  My suggestion is that, in addition to seeing the world as part of God, we can also experience God through love (both given and received) understanding it as recycled from God's own life, and we can experience God in the act of prayer, by feeling listened to by a loving presence.

Certainly there are still aspects of God that remain hidden to most of us, and sometimes beautifully so. God's transcendence give us space to be free, and our transcendence of God give God space to freely respond to our own spontaneous agency. But in the three ways noted, we are rightly amazed, and sometimes also gladdened, by natural revelations of the holy one.

Life after Death: The Unhidden Sides of God Intensified

In the final part of his book, Miller turns to speculative possibilities for life after death—imagining a realm in which God becomes less hidden and we might encounter the divine face to face. He speaks of the 'worlds' that a soul after death might experience after death as 'virtual' worlds. I leave it to readers to explore Miller’s reflections for themselves, but I want to note that, from a process perspective, such speculations are not as far-fetched as skeptics might assume. And the worlds he imagine may indeed be actual in their way - no less actual than hills and rivers, trees and stars, albeit in other dimensions of what Whitehead calls the 'extensive continuum' of the universe. A continuum which includes more than three dimensions of space, but which can be inhabited by actual entities, including souls after death.

Among process thinkers, David Ray Griffin, for example, has made a compelling case for the plausibility of a continuing journey after death—one in which personal experience persists beyond the dissolution of the physical body. Drawing upon Whitehead’s metaphysics, Griffin proposes that the soul—or enduring center of experience—may continue its becoming in a different mode of existence, supported by God’s consequent nature and the wider cosmic process.

In such a journey, the three forms of divine unhiddenness discussed earlier--awareness of the world itself as part of God’s own existence and life, participation in love as a sharing in the divine life, and openness to God as a deep and loving listening experienced in prayer—may all be intensified.

In the first place. the soul, no longer distracted or encumbered by the limitations of bodily life, might awaken more fully to the divine presence within and around it—that is, to whatever worlds are experienced by the concrescing subject after death, worlds which may well include other spirits, other lives. These other spirit and lives would be felt, not as separate from God, but as part of God's very existence, albeit with agency of their own.

In the second place, the soul might be better able to participate in acts of love as a direct sharing in God's own relational life. And one might draw closer to the receptive side of God—the consequent nature of God—who “feels the feelings” of each and all, such that God feels closer and still closer, as if seen face to face.

In the third place, this awakening could include a fuller attunement to the divine presence as loving listener, and a more immediate sense of being received, understood, and held in sacred intimacy. The one who was felt in prayer - the deep Listener - becomes closer and closer, as if seen face-to-face, albeit not displacing the other lives and spirits.

While such ideas remain speculative, they are not incoherent within a process-relational worldview. On the contrary, they represent an effort to take seriously both the subjective richness of experience and the possibility that the universe is more hospitable to meaning and purpose than materialist reductionism allows. In this light, life after death is not simply wishful thinking—it is one way of affirming that the story of a person’s becoming may not end with physical death but may enter into new forms of relational depth, intimacy, and even divine companionship

Open Horizons