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The Spacious Soul
Bernard Loomer (1912-1985)
“By size, I mean the stature of your soul, the range and depth of your love, your capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality; the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature.”
—Bernard Loomer, “S-I-Z-E Is the Measure,” in Religious Experience and Process Theology (1976)
The Spaciousness of a Spacious Soul
- The range and depth of our love, our capacity for relationships
- The volume of life we can take into your being
- The intensity and variety of outlooks we can entertain while maintaining our integrity and individuality
- The power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions
- The magnanimity of concern that seeks to provide conditions in which others can increase in stature
These characteristics of a wide soul include, but also move beyond, strictly ethical considerations. Loomer speaks of the volume of life you can take into your being, the intensity and variety of outlooks you can entertain, and the power to sustain complex and enriching tensions. The wide soul is not simply morally good. It is spacious, receptive, resilient, and capable of living creatively amid complexity.
The value of process philosophy and theology, then, is not simply that they offer an engaging and mind-stretching ideas about the nature of the universe and our place within it. Their value also lies in their capacity to help us become sizeable souls: that is, persons whose minds are deep and wide.
Whether process philosophy and theology actually do this depends not only on the content of their ideas but also on the conditions of our lives, individually and socially; on how relevant those ideas are to such conditions, and on how we interpret and embody them. This relevance depends also on the broader world in which we are enmeshed: the social conditions and historical circumstances, and how free we are, or are not, to respond to those conditions in life-nourishing ways.
Does Process Philosophy help deepen our souls? The answer is: Sometimes, and maybe, depending on the circumstances of our lives. But one process philosopher, Bernard Loomer, points us in the right direction?
- Jay McDaniel
Eight Great Ideas from Bernard Loomer
- The world is God.
- Ambiguity is an essential part of life: embrace it.
- Seek to become a spacious soul who can love deeply and embrace enriching tensions.
- Know that true power is not simply the power to influence others but the power to absorb influences from others.
- Know that there is often more truth in stories than in clean-cut, orderly abstractions.
- Know that relational power is superior to coercive (unilateral) power.
- Know that relationships are everything.
- Know that we live and die in mystery.
Empirical Process Theology
I take each of the ideas above from Bernard Loomer (1912-1985) - one of the leading figures in what is sometimes called "empirical process-relational theology." Two others are Bernard Meland (1899-1993) and Henry Nelson Weiman (1884-1975). The empirical tradition continues today with help from many others, including Bob Mesle, Jerome Stone, and others who are drawn to process understandings of an organic and evolving universe pulsating with life, but skeptical of the idea of a partially transcendent God, especially if conceived in personal terms. *
Empirical process theology is different from speculative process theology (John Cobb) and rationalistic process philosophy" (Charles Hartshorne). In contrast to speculative process theology, empirical process theology does not speculate about God as an external power but instead sees God in (and as) the world itself. And in contrast to rationalist process theology, it does not focus on logically consistent 'principles' that allegedly illuminate reality but seeks instead to be faithful to lived experience itself. It avoids a yearning for the perfect system of clean-cut, orderly abstractions, seeing the yearning itself as pathological.
I am best placed in the speculative tradition, because I see God as a power different from the world. Whitehead's idea that the universe includes a Soul in whose heart all things unfold makes sense to me. Truth be told, I think it is empirical not speculative. I think many people, including me, experience this Soul in direct ways, including prayer when we reach out into the cosmos and sense that someone is listening. The idea that there is a Companion to the universe is, for me, a matter of experience not speculation.
But I also appreciate the critique of the Companion idea offered by empirical process theologians such as Loomer, and I think that there is truth in the idea that God is the world even as God is more than the world. I am a panentheist: I think the world is in God even as God is more than the world, and that part of God is indeed the world itself. So, for my, a qualified "yes" to the first idea: God is the world. And a hearty "yes" to the other seven.
All eight ideas are, for me, a healthy corrective to a kind of process theology that is overly preoccupied with "clean cut, orderly abstractions." The eight ideas are always in my mind as lures for feeling and reflection, and I am grateful to Bernard Loomer for giving me them. I sense that, in the process movement, the empirical tradition can speak to many in ways that the speculative and rationalistic traditions cannot. I offer this page as a way of introducing others to the wisdom of Bernard Loomer.
Jay McDaniel, 11/12/21
* For a good discussion of the empirical tradition and these three thinkers, see William Dean's Empirical Theology: A Revisable Tradition in Religion Online and Religion and Radical Empiricism (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 1987) by Nancy Frankenberry. And for more on Loomer see The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context (ed. William Dean and Larry Axel, Mercer University Press.)
Empirical process theology is different from speculative process theology (John Cobb) and rationalistic process philosophy" (Charles Hartshorne). In contrast to speculative process theology, empirical process theology does not speculate about God as an external power but instead sees God in (and as) the world itself. And in contrast to rationalist process theology, it does not focus on logically consistent 'principles' that allegedly illuminate reality but seeks instead to be faithful to lived experience itself. It avoids a yearning for the perfect system of clean-cut, orderly abstractions, seeing the yearning itself as pathological.
I am best placed in the speculative tradition, because I see God as a power different from the world. Whitehead's idea that the universe includes a Soul in whose heart all things unfold makes sense to me. Truth be told, I think it is empirical not speculative. I think many people, including me, experience this Soul in direct ways, including prayer when we reach out into the cosmos and sense that someone is listening. The idea that there is a Companion to the universe is, for me, a matter of experience not speculation.
But I also appreciate the critique of the Companion idea offered by empirical process theologians such as Loomer, and I think that there is truth in the idea that God is the world even as God is more than the world. I am a panentheist: I think the world is in God even as God is more than the world, and that part of God is indeed the world itself. So, for my, a qualified "yes" to the first idea: God is the world. And a hearty "yes" to the other seven.
All eight ideas are, for me, a healthy corrective to a kind of process theology that is overly preoccupied with "clean cut, orderly abstractions." The eight ideas are always in my mind as lures for feeling and reflection, and I am grateful to Bernard Loomer for giving me them. I sense that, in the process movement, the empirical tradition can speak to many in ways that the speculative and rationalistic traditions cannot. I offer this page as a way of introducing others to the wisdom of Bernard Loomer.
Jay McDaniel, 11/12/21
* For a good discussion of the empirical tradition and these three thinkers, see William Dean's Empirical Theology: A Revisable Tradition in Religion Online and Religion and Radical Empiricism (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 1987) by Nancy Frankenberry. And for more on Loomer see The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context (ed. William Dean and Larry Axel, Mercer University Press.)
The World is God
"God is to be identified with the totality of the world, with whatever unity the totality possesses...More concretely, God is expressed as the organic restlessness of the whole body of creation, as this drive is unequally exemplified in the several parts of this societal web."
- Bernard Loomer, The Size of God
“The world is God because it is the source and preserver of meaning; because the creative advance of the world in its adventure is the supreme cause to be served; because even in our desecration of our space and time within it, the world is holy ground; and because it contains and yet enshrouds the ultimate mystery inherent within existence itself. . . . The world in all the dimensions of its being is the basis for all our wonder, awe, and inquiry.” Loomer decried theological certainty and delighted in the wonder of existence: “Final answers are not to be trusted. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery."
- Bernard Loomer, The Size of God