Nine Limitations of Process Relational Theology

​As Often Presented, but with Important Exceptions

• Underdeveloped psychology: It offers a sophisticated cosmology but lacks a sufficiently developed psychology.
• Neglected contemplation: It gives too little attention to Christianity’s mystical and contemplative traditions.
• The missing divine feminine: It gives insufficient attention to the divine feminine as an important dimension of spiritual life and ultimate reality.
• The absence of attention to the Self as Witness to experience. It rejects the possibility of a timeless Self or substrate beneath the changing stream of experience: the Witness.
• Becoming without Being: It illuminates the reality of becoming while neglecting the reality and spiritual significance of Being, understood as an Activity and not a static substance.
• Neglect of Mystery: It too easily turns God into an object of philosophical analysis rather than a mystery in which we participate.
• Neglect of Unitive Mysticism: It gives insufficient attention to mystical experiences in which the distinction between God and the self becomes fluid or falls away.
• Creativity beyond God: It fails to explore Creativity as an ultimate reality beyond God, perhaps analogous to the Godhead beyond particular images of God.
• An inadequate phenomenology of Everyday Life: It does not adequately connect its abstract metaphysical categories with the feelings, relationships, textures, and practical concerns of ordinary experience.

This page is not a review of a book but an appreciation of one of its chapters. I am in the process of reading—and thoroughly enjoying—Patrick J. Mahaffey’s Individuation and Beyond: World Views, God-Images, and Self-Realization. It is well written and filled with insights. By no means is it about process relational theology alone. It also explores Jungian psychology, contemplative yoga, integral thought, and an approach to psychological and spiritual development called the Diamond Approach. Still, it is partly about process-relational theology and what it can offer people—what it can offer us—if we open ourselves to its insights, even as we recognize that it may not speak to all our spiritual needs.

As a process relational thinker, I am especially grateful that Mahaffey’s chapter on process-relational theology includes two sections: “Aspects I Find Valuable and Inspiring” and “Aspects I Find Less Influential, Limited, or Problematic.” I find myself agreeing with what he finds valuable. But I am most interested in the second section, on the limitations of process relational theology as he has experienced it. I have often sensed limitations and problems within the very philosophical and theological tradition with which I identify, and Mahaffey helps me name them.

Below, I offer the publisher’s description of the book and share its table of contents. I then turn to Mahaffey’s points—both inspiring and problematic—and add four potential limitations of my own. It seems to me that the limitations he identifies apply not only to process theology but also, in varying degrees, to the wider movement of open and relational theology, of which process theology is one expression.
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I do this for two reasons: first, to make clear, with Mahaffey, that process theology is neither final nor complete; and second, in the hope that it can be further developed in ways that make it more adequate and inclusive. Mahaffey himself points to Sheri Kling’s A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation as an important example. Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, Kling helps develop a more robust psychology for process thought. Mahaffey’s criticisms need not be reasons for abandoning process relational theology; they can become invitations to extend and enrich it—and to learn from many other sources.

Individuation and Beyond: World Views, God-Images, and Self-Realization

Publishers Description

"Individuation and Beyond is a profound exploration of the psychospiritual journey toward wholeness and awakening. Drawing on over five decades of academic study, spiritual practice, and teaching at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Dr. Patrick J. Mahaffey interweaves insights from process relational theology, Jungian depth psychology, the Diamond Approach, contemplative yoga traditions, and integral philosophy. The book invites readers to engage deeply with their inner lives by examining the worldviews and God-images that shape meaning and identity. He proposes a form of integrative spirituality—a path that unites psychological wholeness with spiritual realization. More than a synthesis of great ideas, this work is a guide for the modern seeker—a mandala of perspectives designed to illuminate the divine within the human. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions and practices that encourage experiential engagement, making the book both intellectually rigorous and personally transformative.

Mahaffey is Professor Emeritus in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute and a practitioner of contemplative yoga. Published by iUniverse in 2026, the book is both theoretical and practical: each chapter concludes with questions and practices inviting readers to examine the worldviews and God-images that shape their identities and lives."

Table of Contents
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• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Faith and Worldviews
• Chapter 2: Process-Relational Theology
• Chapter 3: Jung’s Depth Psychology
• Chapter 4: The Diamond Approach
• Chapter 5: Contemplative Yoga
• Chapter 6: Integral Metatheory and Life Practice
• Chapter 7: Still Circling—My Version of Integrative Spirituality
• Appendix: My Contemplative Reading List
• Bibliography

What Mahaffey Finds Valuable and Inspiring
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• Holistic cosmology: Process thought presents an interconnected cosmos in which every being is constituted by its relationships with others and possesses value in and for itself. Human life belongs within this larger community of becoming rather than standing apart from it. The guiding ideals of this worldview include novelty, adventure, zest for life, beauty, truth, harmony, and peace.
• Panentheism: Process theology understands God as both immanent within the world and transcendent of it. The world exists within God, yet God is more than the world; God is also present within every creature as a lure toward its possibilities. This vision avoids both the separation of traditional supernatural theism and the identification of God with the world found in pantheism.
• Creative participation: Reality is a dynamic and unfinished process in which our choices genuinely matter. Human beings are not passive observers of a predetermined universe but participants in its continuing creation. In each situation, God offers possibilities for purpose, novelty, beauty, and fulfillment, while leaving creatures free to respond.
• God and suffering: God is all-loving but not all-powerful in the sense of possessing unilateral control over the world. God cannot simply prevent every instance of evil, violence, or suffering. Instead, God experiences the suffering of all creatures, accompanies them as a compassionate fellow sufferer, and works within every situation to redeem tragedy and transform suffering into possibilities for renewed life.
• Religious and ethical pluralism: Process-relational theology affirms that wisdom and spiritual transformation can be found in many religious traditions and practices. It offers a progressive alternative to forms of religion shaped by exclusivism, fundamentalism, patriarchy, nationalism, authoritarianism, opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, and indifference to social injustice, gun violence, animal suffering, and ecological destruction.
• Peace as a Harmony of Harmonies: Whitehead understands Peace not simply as tranquility or the absence of conflict, but as a “Harmony of Harmonies” in which the entire universe is unfolded within an encompassing wholeness. Peace includes the world’s differences, tensions, tragedies, and contrasting forms of beauty without erasing them. It offers a spacious vision in which the many can belong together while remaining genuinely many.
• Human life as becoming: Process thought emphasizes the processive or “becoming” character of human existence. We are not finished substances with permanently fixed identities but developing persons shaped by relationships, memories, choices, and emerging possibilities. This vision makes room for transformation, healing, growth, individuation, and self-realization throughout life.

What Mahaffey Finds Limited or Problematic
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• Underdeveloped psychology: Process thought offers a sophisticated cosmology and metaphysics but lacks a comparably developed understanding of the human psyche. It says much about experience, relationality, and becoming at a metaphysical level, but less about dreams, archetypes, unconscious conflicts, trauma, projection, shadow, and the psychological journey toward wholeness. Jungian depth psychology can help fill this gap, as Sheri Kling demonstrates by bringing Jung and process thought into a mutually enriching conversation.
• Neglected contemplation: Process-relational theology gives too little attention to the mystical and contemplative dimensions of Christianity. Although process thinkers often learn from Buddhist meditation and Hindu yoga, they do not always engage as deeply with contemplative practices arising from Christianity itself. Mahaffey therefore turns to Thomas Keating, Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer, and contemplative nondual Christianity as resources for cultivating direct spiritual awareness rather than relying primarily on philosophical ideas about God.
• The missing divine feminine: Process-relational theology gives insufficient attention to the divine feminine, despite its emphasis on relationality, receptivity, creativity, embodiment, and care. It rarely explores feminine God-images or traditions centered on Sophia, Shekinah, the Goddess, or the sacred feminine. Because the recovery of the divine feminine is central to Mahaffey’s worldview and spiritual practice, this absence represents a significant spiritual and theological limitation.
• The absence of an enduring Self: Process thought understands a person as a succession of interrelated moments of experience rather than as an enduring substance underlying change. In this respect, it has affinities with the Buddhist doctrine of anattā, or no-self. Mahaffey, however, believes that there is a timeless Self or deeper substrate beneath the changing processes of temporal life—an abiding dimension of identity that process thought does not adequately recognize.
• Becoming without Being: Process thought offers a profound account of becoming, creativity, change, and emergence, but it tends to deny or neglect the spiritual significance of Being. Mahaffey finds this account incomplete because some forms of mystical experience disclose a timeless depth or presence beneath the movement of ordinary experience. He therefore turns to the Jungian Self, Hindu understandings of the Self and ultimate reality, and the Diamond Approach’s concept of Essence or true nature as resources for holding Being and becoming together.

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Additional Limitations

• Neglect of Mystery: In its theological expressions, process thought too easily turns God into an object of philosophical analysis—a being whose nature, attributes, and relationship with the world can be explained through an elaborate metaphysical system. Such analysis can be illuminating, but it can also obscure the inexhaustible mystery of the divine. God may be not only someone or something about whom we think, but also a mystery within whom we live and in whom we participate—a depth that exceeds every concept, image, and theological formulation.
• Failing to Account for Unitive Mysticism: Process theology usually emphasizes relationship: God and the world, God and the individual, and the many beings influencing one another. This relational emphasis is valuable, but it can leave too little room for unitive mystical experiences in which the distinction between God and the experiencing self becomes fluid or falls away altogether. Such experiences need not deny difference or relationality, but they may disclose a dimension of spiritual life deeper than the distinction between self and other.
• Failing to Develop an Image of Creativity beyond God: Whitehead identifies Creativity, rather than God, as the ultimate reality of which God and all finite beings are expressions. Process theologians often treat Creativity primarily as a metaphysical principle and say relatively little about its religious or spiritual significance. Creativity might instead be imagined as an inexhaustible depth beyond God—perhaps analogous to the Godhead beyond all particular images and conceptions of God. This possibility could open process theology to apophatic, mystical, and transreligious understandings of ultimate reality.
• Failing to Offer a Robust Phenomenology of Everyday Life: Process theology offers a rich metaphysical account of events, relationships, feeling, and becoming, but it does not always describe ordinary human experience with equal richness. Its abstract categories can remain disconnected from the lived textures of cooking, working, grieving, parenting, gardening, making music, enduring illness, falling in love, and growing old. A more adequate phenomenology would show how process-relational ideas illuminate the feelings, bodily habits, interpersonal tensions, moral ambiguities, and practical concerns of everyday life.

Concluding Suggestion

If you are influenced by process relational theology, you may want to add limitations of your own. On the other hand, you may disagree with some of these criticisms or agree with them, but think of important exceptions. Process-relational theology is a diverse and evolving movement, and many thinkers are already developing it in directions that address the concerns identified above. The point is not to arrive at a final verdict but to encourage further reflection, conversation, and creative development. I am thankful to Patrick Mahaffey for the prompt.