Theological Nudges: Whiteheadian Suggestions for Open and Relational Theology
The open and relational movement in Christian theology is not a monolithic tradition but a flowing stream with multiple currents. These currents are not sealed off from one another; they cross, overlap, and blend. Some are wide and forceful, shaping the direction of the whole stream, while others are narrower but bring fresh clarity and energy. Together they carry forward a vision of God as open, relational, and lovingly involved in the world. If sociologists were doing a studies of the movement, interviewing people who are shaped by it or participants in it,
1. The Biblical Current
This current draws its authority primarily from Scripture, emphasizing the biblical witness to God’s openness, covenantal love, and relational fidelity. Its strength lies in exegetical work and the attempt to show that open and relational theology is not an alien import from philosophy but an organic outgrowth of biblical revelation itself. This current consists of many people who are evangelical and post-evangelical Protestants.
2. The Process Current
Here, the intellectual grounding is Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and its theological development. Thinkers in this current emphasize metaphysical coherence, the logic of divine relationality, and concepts such as God’s persuasive rather than coercive power. It provides the systematic scaffolding for why divine openness and relationality are features of reality itself.
3. The Evangelical-Pastoral Current
This current grows from the lived experience of evangelical and pastoral ministry. It stresses how an open and relational vision speaks to ordinary believers—shaping prayer, preaching, discipleship, and congregational care. The focus is existential and practical rather than philosophical or exegetical, offering a God who is relationally near and pastorally trustworthy.
4. The Mystical-Experiential Current
Here the emphasis is on personal and collective experience of God as relational. This current often connects open and relational theology with contemplative practice, charismatic spirituality, or interfaith mysticism. It highlights the felt participation in divine love and mutual indwelling, pointing to the mystery of a God encountered as presence and intimacy.
5. The Liberationist/Justice-Oriented Current
This current connects open and relational theology with concerns for social, political, and ecological justice. It asks how divine relationality supports solidarity with the marginalized, critiques oppressive structures, and inspires activism for planetary well-being. Relationality here is not only a metaphysical claim but also an ethical-political commitment.
6. The Philosophical-Analytic Current
Some theologians, trained in analytic philosophy, articulate open and relational ideas in dialogue with contemporary philosophy of religion. They seek precision about divine foreknowledge, providence, freedom, and the metaphysics of time—often in a style distinct from process philosophy. This current aims for logical coherence and analytic clarity in defending openness and relationality.
7. The Popularizing/Communal Current
Finally, this current consists of networks, podcasts, conferences, and lay movements that carry open and relational thought beyond the academy. Its power lies in storytelling, community formation, and creating spaces where ordinary people can explore a God who is open and relational. It is the current of accessibility and movement-building, ensuring that the stream flows not only in classrooms but also in congregations, living rooms, and online communities.
These currents—biblical, process, evangelical-pastoral, mystical-experiential, liberationist, analytic, and communal—together form the broad and living stream of open and relational theology. Each brings its own depth, energy, and direction, and their intersections keep the stream dynamic. Many people swim in several currents simultaneously or, to say the same thing, swim in places where the currents intersect.
1. The Biblical Current
This current draws its authority primarily from Scripture, emphasizing the biblical witness to God’s openness, covenantal love, and relational fidelity. Its strength lies in exegetical work and the attempt to show that open and relational theology is not an alien import from philosophy but an organic outgrowth of biblical revelation itself. This current consists of many people who are evangelical and post-evangelical Protestants.
2. The Process Current
Here, the intellectual grounding is Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and its theological development. Thinkers in this current emphasize metaphysical coherence, the logic of divine relationality, and concepts such as God’s persuasive rather than coercive power. It provides the systematic scaffolding for why divine openness and relationality are features of reality itself.
3. The Evangelical-Pastoral Current
This current grows from the lived experience of evangelical and pastoral ministry. It stresses how an open and relational vision speaks to ordinary believers—shaping prayer, preaching, discipleship, and congregational care. The focus is existential and practical rather than philosophical or exegetical, offering a God who is relationally near and pastorally trustworthy.
4. The Mystical-Experiential Current
Here the emphasis is on personal and collective experience of God as relational. This current often connects open and relational theology with contemplative practice, charismatic spirituality, or interfaith mysticism. It highlights the felt participation in divine love and mutual indwelling, pointing to the mystery of a God encountered as presence and intimacy.
5. The Liberationist/Justice-Oriented Current
This current connects open and relational theology with concerns for social, political, and ecological justice. It asks how divine relationality supports solidarity with the marginalized, critiques oppressive structures, and inspires activism for planetary well-being. Relationality here is not only a metaphysical claim but also an ethical-political commitment.
6. The Philosophical-Analytic Current
Some theologians, trained in analytic philosophy, articulate open and relational ideas in dialogue with contemporary philosophy of religion. They seek precision about divine foreknowledge, providence, freedom, and the metaphysics of time—often in a style distinct from process philosophy. This current aims for logical coherence and analytic clarity in defending openness and relationality.
7. The Popularizing/Communal Current
Finally, this current consists of networks, podcasts, conferences, and lay movements that carry open and relational thought beyond the academy. Its power lies in storytelling, community formation, and creating spaces where ordinary people can explore a God who is open and relational. It is the current of accessibility and movement-building, ensuring that the stream flows not only in classrooms but also in congregations, living rooms, and online communities.
These currents—biblical, process, evangelical-pastoral, mystical-experiential, liberationist, analytic, and communal—together form the broad and living stream of open and relational theology. Each brings its own depth, energy, and direction, and their intersections keep the stream dynamic. Many people swim in several currents simultaneously or, to say the same thing, swim in places where the currents intersect.
Suggestions from Process Theology
Those who are in the process current of the open and relational movement—or at least familiar with it and enthusiastic about it—might suggest that Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy offers five particular insights that could enrich the wider stream. These are not dictates but invitations, meant to deepen conversation among the seven currents.
1. Theodicy and Tragic Beauty
Open and Relational Approach
Open and relational theologians often insist that God does not control the world and therefore cannot prevent evil. This non-coercive vision of God is vital for those who have been harmed by doctrines that portray God as willing evil “for a higher purpose.” The emphasis falls on divine empathy, God suffering with the world, and God doing all that is possible to heal creation without overriding freedom.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead agrees that God does not coerce, but he reframes the problem of evil in terms of tragic beauty. Instead of trying to resolve the problem, he invites us to see the cosmos as an adventure in which harmony and intensity often come with tragic loss. Beauty emerges when discord is woven into contrast rather than erased. Theodicy becomes less about justifying God and more about recognizing that the aim of life, even for God, is the creation of beauty out of the world’s suffering. This shifts the focus from defending God to participating in the aesthetic adventure of healing, improvising, and weaving tragic beauty.
Open and relational theologians often insist that God does not control the world and therefore cannot prevent evil. This non-coercive vision of God is vital for those who have been harmed by doctrines that portray God as willing evil “for a higher purpose.” The emphasis falls on divine empathy, God suffering with the world, and God doing all that is possible to heal creation without overriding freedom.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead agrees that God does not coerce, but he reframes the problem of evil in terms of tragic beauty. Instead of trying to resolve the problem, he invites us to see the cosmos as an adventure in which harmony and intensity often come with tragic loss. Beauty emerges when discord is woven into contrast rather than erased. Theodicy becomes less about justifying God and more about recognizing that the aim of life, even for God, is the creation of beauty out of the world’s suffering. This shifts the focus from defending God to participating in the aesthetic adventure of healing, improvising, and weaving tragic beauty.
2. The Primacy of Beauty Over Love Alone
Open and Relational Approach
Many open and relational theologians emphasize divine love as the central category of theology. They highlight God’s radical, uncontrolling love that embraces all creatures. Love is the divine essence, the very heartbeat of reality.
Whitehead’s Invitation
While affirming love, Whitehead argues that the ultimate category is beauty, of which love is a form. Beauty includes intensity, harmony, contrast, and zest. Love is central, but if love becomes the only lens, theology risks becoming moralistic or sentimental. By recovering beauty as primary, Whitehead reminds us that the cosmos aims not only at kindness but at richness of experience. This vision allows theology to embrace art, play, science, and even the darker, more ambivalent sides of existence as part of the divine adventure.
Many open and relational theologians emphasize divine love as the central category of theology. They highlight God’s radical, uncontrolling love that embraces all creatures. Love is the divine essence, the very heartbeat of reality.
Whitehead’s Invitation
While affirming love, Whitehead argues that the ultimate category is beauty, of which love is a form. Beauty includes intensity, harmony, contrast, and zest. Love is central, but if love becomes the only lens, theology risks becoming moralistic or sentimental. By recovering beauty as primary, Whitehead reminds us that the cosmos aims not only at kindness but at richness of experience. This vision allows theology to embrace art, play, science, and even the darker, more ambivalent sides of existence as part of the divine adventure.
3. Contemplative Openness to Mystery
Open and Relational Approach
In their efforts to rebuild faith, many open and relational thinkers stress clarity, transparency, and coherence. They want to offer accounts of God and the world that are intellectually honest and pastorally trustworthy. This often leads to an emphasis on theological explanation and argument, as a counterbalance to authoritarian dogma.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead reminds us that explanation cannot exhaust reality. The cosmos is more mysterious than our categories can contain, and God, too, is a mystery beyond metaphysical systematizing. His philosophy suggests that theology should also cultivate a contemplative side — an openness to silence, unknowing, and aesthetic receptivity. This contemplative stance allows theology to be not just argumentative but prayerful, not only reconstructive but mystical, resting in what Whitehead called “the peace that passes understanding.”
In their efforts to rebuild faith, many open and relational thinkers stress clarity, transparency, and coherence. They want to offer accounts of God and the world that are intellectually honest and pastorally trustworthy. This often leads to an emphasis on theological explanation and argument, as a counterbalance to authoritarian dogma.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead reminds us that explanation cannot exhaust reality. The cosmos is more mysterious than our categories can contain, and God, too, is a mystery beyond metaphysical systematizing. His philosophy suggests that theology should also cultivate a contemplative side — an openness to silence, unknowing, and aesthetic receptivity. This contemplative stance allows theology to be not just argumentative but prayerful, not only reconstructive but mystical, resting in what Whitehead called “the peace that passes understanding.”
4. The Manyness of God
Open and Relational Approach
Open and relational theologians emphasize God’s loving relationality, but in doing so they sometimes imagine God as something like a monad — a self-contained agent whose existence is not intrinsically constituted by other actualities. God is relational in spirit, but still conceived as a distinct subject who could, in theory, exist apart from the world. This tendency is reinforced by the subject–predicate structure of language itself, which encourages us to think of subjects as existing in isolation, prior to whatever relations or predicates are attached to them.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead stresses that God is not a monad but a complex unity in which the world is constitutive of divine reality. God is one, but God is also many. The many actualities of the world become part of God’s very nature—not merely as images, reflections, or prehensions, but as actualities themselves, as experienced by God. In God, the many become one, and this manyness is preserved as a living dimension of divine life. Divine unity, in Whitehead’s vision, is never a flattening of the many into sameness but an integration that holds together the richness of the world in God’s own being.
Open and relational theologians emphasize God’s loving relationality, but in doing so they sometimes imagine God as something like a monad — a self-contained agent whose existence is not intrinsically constituted by other actualities. God is relational in spirit, but still conceived as a distinct subject who could, in theory, exist apart from the world. This tendency is reinforced by the subject–predicate structure of language itself, which encourages us to think of subjects as existing in isolation, prior to whatever relations or predicates are attached to them.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead stresses that God is not a monad but a complex unity in which the world is constitutive of divine reality. God is one, but God is also many. The many actualities of the world become part of God’s very nature—not merely as images, reflections, or prehensions, but as actualities themselves, as experienced by God. In God, the many become one, and this manyness is preserved as a living dimension of divine life. Divine unity, in Whitehead’s vision, is never a flattening of the many into sameness but an integration that holds together the richness of the world in God’s own being.
5. The Physicality of God
Open and Relational Approach
Open and relational theologians often stress that God is not a physical being located in space and time, and therefore not embodied. This emphasis seeks to protect divine transcendence and to distinguish God from creaturely existence. As a result, divine relationality is often described in terms of empathy, compassion, and persuasion, but without appeal to physicality. God relates, but not as a physical presence; God shares our pain and joy, but not in any bodily or physical sense.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead offers a broader and more intimate vision. For him, God does indeed experience the world physically—not as an embodied being in three-dimensional space, but through what he calls simple physical feelings. Every actuality in the world is physically felt by God, so that creaturely experiences become part of God’s own experience in an immediate, non-abstract way. This wider view of physicality allows us to speak of divine intimacy in concrete terms: God feels us as we feel ourselves. Whitehead’s account portrays a God who does not merely empathize in the abstract, but who shares the very texture of creaturely experience, integrating it into the divine life.
Open and relational theologians often stress that God is not a physical being located in space and time, and therefore not embodied. This emphasis seeks to protect divine transcendence and to distinguish God from creaturely existence. As a result, divine relationality is often described in terms of empathy, compassion, and persuasion, but without appeal to physicality. God relates, but not as a physical presence; God shares our pain and joy, but not in any bodily or physical sense.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead offers a broader and more intimate vision. For him, God does indeed experience the world physically—not as an embodied being in three-dimensional space, but through what he calls simple physical feelings. Every actuality in the world is physically felt by God, so that creaturely experiences become part of God’s own experience in an immediate, non-abstract way. This wider view of physicality allows us to speak of divine intimacy in concrete terms: God feels us as we feel ourselves. Whitehead’s account portrays a God who does not merely empathize in the abstract, but who shares the very texture of creaturely experience, integrating it into the divine life.
6. The Role of Mathematics in the Divine Life
The Open and Relational Approach
Most open and relational thinkers emphasize God’s love, empathy, and relationality in ways that are accessible to human life and experience. Their focus often falls on God’s intimate presence within the flow of history, culture, and personal life. Mathematics, in this emphasis, can seem abstract and remote. Yet mathematics itself is a language of order, relation, and possibility. It is not only an instrument for describing the physical world but also a way of disclosing patterns of beauty, harmony, and novelty. To exclude mathematics from our reflection on God may risk narrowing divine relationality to the sphere of human concerns alone.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead reminds us that mathematics is not alien to divine life but intrinsic to it. In Process and Reality, he portrays God as the primordial envisager of potentialities, including the ordered relations that mathematics articulates. The beauty of number, symmetry, and proportion is woven into the very lure of the universe. Mathematics is part of God’s own “conceptual” life, shaping the possibilities God offers to the world. Whitehead thus invites open and relational theologians to see mathematics not as an abstraction outside of divine love but as one expression of divine eros for beauty and order.
Most open and relational thinkers emphasize God’s love, empathy, and relationality in ways that are accessible to human life and experience. Their focus often falls on God’s intimate presence within the flow of history, culture, and personal life. Mathematics, in this emphasis, can seem abstract and remote. Yet mathematics itself is a language of order, relation, and possibility. It is not only an instrument for describing the physical world but also a way of disclosing patterns of beauty, harmony, and novelty. To exclude mathematics from our reflection on God may risk narrowing divine relationality to the sphere of human concerns alone.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead reminds us that mathematics is not alien to divine life but intrinsic to it. In Process and Reality, he portrays God as the primordial envisager of potentialities, including the ordered relations that mathematics articulates. The beauty of number, symmetry, and proportion is woven into the very lure of the universe. Mathematics is part of God’s own “conceptual” life, shaping the possibilities God offers to the world. Whitehead thus invites open and relational theologians to see mathematics not as an abstraction outside of divine love but as one expression of divine eros for beauty and order.
7. The Role off the More-Than-Human World in the Divine Life
The Open and Relational Approach
Open and relational thinkers increasingly emphasize that God’s love is not restricted to human beings. They stress that God relates to every creature, cherishes every life, and suffers with every loss. The movement has helped widen Christian theology beyond an anthropocentric focus. Yet the conversation often orbits around human moral and spiritual concerns, with non-human creatures framed primarily as extensions or examples of divine love for all.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead presses us to take more seriously the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world in the divine life. He insists that “the world lives in God” and that every experience—from the flight of birds to the growth of trees, from the sentience of animals to the vibrations of atoms—is felt in the consequent nature of God. The divine life includes not only empathy for human suffering but also the enjoyment and sorrows of all creatures. The more-than-human world is not peripheral to God’s experience but essential to it. Whitehead thus invites the open and relational movement to reimagine theology as a truly planetary and even cosmic vision, where the divine life is enriched by the voices of rivers, forests, animals, and galaxies.
Open and relational thinkers increasingly emphasize that God’s love is not restricted to human beings. They stress that God relates to every creature, cherishes every life, and suffers with every loss. The movement has helped widen Christian theology beyond an anthropocentric focus. Yet the conversation often orbits around human moral and spiritual concerns, with non-human creatures framed primarily as extensions or examples of divine love for all.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead presses us to take more seriously the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world in the divine life. He insists that “the world lives in God” and that every experience—from the flight of birds to the growth of trees, from the sentience of animals to the vibrations of atoms—is felt in the consequent nature of God. The divine life includes not only empathy for human suffering but also the enjoyment and sorrows of all creatures. The more-than-human world is not peripheral to God’s experience but essential to it. Whitehead thus invites the open and relational movement to reimagine theology as a truly planetary and even cosmic vision, where the divine life is enriched by the voices of rivers, forests, animals, and galaxies.
The Role of Language in Religious Life The Open and Relational Approach
The Open and Relational Approach
Open and relational thinkers recognize the importance of language for shaping theology and community. They stress that words about God matter, not only because they communicate ideas but because they can heal or harm, liberate or oppress. Much of the movement’s energy has gone into reforming inherited language — rejecting coercive metaphors, authoritarian speech, and static categories in favor of images of God as loving, relational, and open. Language, in this view, is central for reimagining faith in ways that invite trust and foster compassion.
Whitehead’s Invitation
Whitehead goes further by treating language not only as a tool for communication but as a lure for feeling. For him, words are not inert labels but active forces that shape the possibilities of experience. Poetry, prayer, and metaphor are not secondary adornments but primary ways that life deepens its sensitivity and intensity. Language, in Whitehead’s vision, participates in the divine lure toward richer feeling and beauty. This suggests that the words we use — in worship, theology, and everyday life — are not just descriptions of God but invitations into God’s ongoing adventure of feeling and meaning.
Summary
Whiteheadian philosophy and open and relational theology share much: a rejection of coercive omnipotence, an emphasis on divine empathy, and a commitment to a loving God. Yet Whitehead offers friendly suggestions — reframing theodicy in terms of tragic beauty, lifting beauty as a category alongside love, encouraging openness to mystery, reminding us of the manyness within God, and recovering a sense of divine physicality. Together these insights can help open and relational theology expand beyond repair and reaction, toward a more expansive, aesthetic, and mystical vision of the sacred adventure of life.