Take Home Points for the General Reader
- God is the universal Spirit of love at work in the universe. This Spirit can be encountered as a living Thou in whose presence we dance, sing, and pray.
- The cosmos unfolds as an everlasting adventure shaped by this Spirit’s love. Our universe is one movement in an infinite symphony of worlds.
- The Spirit and the world dwell within one another. All things are in God and God is in all things—yet each also exceeds the other.
- The Spirit is not only a concept but a presence. It can be thought about intellectually and also felt directly—in friendship, in the beauty of nature, and in the power of music.
- The Spirit is all-loving but not all-controlling. Spontaneous self-creativity runs all the way down into the depths of reality, and with that freedom comes the tragic possibility of evil.
- Divine power is the power of love. It persuades, invites, and empowers—but it does not dominate.
- The Spirit of love and the world co-create the future together. Every moment is a shared act of becoming.
- The Spirit lures the universe as a whole, and each creature within it, toward flourishing. The world is drawn—moment by moment—toward richer forms of life and relationship.
- The Spirit is affected by the world; it knows the world through empathy. The joys and sorrows of every creature are felt within the divine life.
- The Spirit journeys with us into an open future. The road ahead is not fixed, but it is never walked alone.
Summary of Some Key Ideas & Springboards for Reflection
In his recent book, A Systematic Theology of Love: God and Creation (Volume One), Thomas Jay Oord develops a view of God rooted in love. Initially I planned to write a short review of this magnificent and thoroughly researched work. But as I read, I found myself so engrossed in its many ideas that the project gradually changed.
What you find below, therefore, is not simply a review. It is a summary of many of the book’s key ideas—some of them quite technical—along with my own responses, offered mostly from a Whiteheadian perspective. My hope is that these reflections might serve as springboards for your own thinking.
In that sense, this essay may function less as a review of the book than as a companion to reading it. Or, to be more specific, a Whiteheadian companion to reading Oord's book, tinged with a bit of wisdom from St. Augustine, of whom Oord is quite critical, but with whose thought on Beauty and Time I am more sympathetic for reasons that will be clear below.
Thomas Oord’s work invites this kind of engagement and dialogue. He does not ask for passive agreement; he encourages readers to think with him, question him, and extend the conversation. If this reflection helps catalyze that kind of response, it will have served its purpose. Please forgive me if I don't include pagination on the quotations; but trust that they are either from Oord's book or, when quoting Whitehead, Whitehead's Process and Reality.
What you find below, therefore, is not simply a review. It is a summary of many of the book’s key ideas—some of them quite technical—along with my own responses, offered mostly from a Whiteheadian perspective. My hope is that these reflections might serve as springboards for your own thinking.
In that sense, this essay may function less as a review of the book than as a companion to reading it. Or, to be more specific, a Whiteheadian companion to reading Oord's book, tinged with a bit of wisdom from St. Augustine, of whom Oord is quite critical, but with whose thought on Beauty and Time I am more sympathetic for reasons that will be clear below.
Thomas Oord’s work invites this kind of engagement and dialogue. He does not ask for passive agreement; he encourages readers to think with him, question him, and extend the conversation. If this reflection helps catalyze that kind of response, it will have served its purpose. Please forgive me if I don't include pagination on the quotations; but trust that they are either from Oord's book or, when quoting Whitehead, Whitehead's Process and Reality.
Yearning for Love
A Systematic Theology of Love is a book for our time and, in truth, for all times. People yearn for a vision such as the one Oord offers, both within and beyond the Christian community. The book is written primarily for Christians—Oord is a Christian theologian—but its ideas reach further. They can speak to people of other faiths, to spiritual independents, and to those who are skeptical of “religion” yet still find themselves believing in love, or wanting to believe in love as a cosmic force.
For many people around the world—and not only Christians—the phrase “God is love,” which comes from the New Testament, is a signpost for such belief. The phrase functions as an invitation to imagine that the very heart of the universe, appearances to the contrary, is somehow about love: not hatred, not division, not purity, not rigidity, but love. People may not be able to define love with philosophical precision, nor do they necessarily wish to. Yet the word carries powerful connotations: nurturance, flourishing, tenderness, empathy, compassion, kindness, generosity, and care. They hope that these qualities are what the universe is ultimately about. If the word “God” names the deepest reality of the universe, their hope is that God is love.
Such hope, even as fragile, is an antidote to despair and a catalyst for compassionate action in the world. It persists even when the surface of the world seems to contradict it—when suffering is intense, when cruelty appears to prevail, and when the evidence of history seems ambiguous. When disease, earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes—none caused by human beings—can nonetheless devastate life. And when the universe itself can appear violent, marked by collisions and explosions, mirrored on our small planet in predator–prey relations in which, as Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “life is robbery.”
Even so, many people sense—or hope—that beneath or beyond these appearances there is a deeper current, a deeper Spirit. Oord’s A Systematic Theology of Love speaks to this hope and argues for it. He calls the power of this Spirit amipotent rather than omnipotent, by which he means that the universal power of love is indeed powerful, but not all-powerful. There are many things that happen in the universe that even the divine Spirit—God—cannot prevent. Redeem? Yes. Prevent? No.
Oord’s account will resonate especially with those who think of this Spirit in personal terms: as a being, an inclusive Consciousness with aims, purposes, and agency. Not a being with a localized body somewhere in space but a presence equally present to every here and now, but also more than every here and now. Like wind, for example, or like breath - but with a soul of its own.
For those more inclined toward transpersonal understandings of God—God as Being Itself, or as the energy of love, or as a cosmic lure—Oord’s language may feel less immediately familiar. To be sure, his idea of amipotence can support such interpretations.
Yet Oord ultimately wants to say more. Spirit, for him, is not only a what but a who. A Who who can be addressed in prayer. A Who who has feelings, aims, and purposes. Influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, Oord's book is an invitation to imagine that the every entity in the universe has a mental side as well as a physical side (he calls it material-mental monism) such the idea of utterly dead matter is an illusion. All actual entities of whatever sort have interiority of some kind. They receive inffluences in a physical way from others, and they respond with mentality of subjectivity of their own. This means that if love is indeed at the heart of the universe, it makes sense to think of this love as expressed in a cosmic Life, with interiority of its own, in whose life the universe unfolds.
For Oord, this cosmic Life is God. He uses many other phrases in the book as synonyms: the divine Lover for example, and the divine Musician (see below). He tells us that God is like gravity, that God is like a mind, that God is like wind or breath, that God is living, that God is a person, that God is not localized but also that God has a material side (what Whitehead calls 'physical' feelings of the world.) But one of his favorite terms is "the universal spirit of Love." With this phrase, he straddles a divide between the personal and the transpersonal, making space, in my view, for both.
For many people around the world—and not only Christians—the phrase “God is love,” which comes from the New Testament, is a signpost for such belief. The phrase functions as an invitation to imagine that the very heart of the universe, appearances to the contrary, is somehow about love: not hatred, not division, not purity, not rigidity, but love. People may not be able to define love with philosophical precision, nor do they necessarily wish to. Yet the word carries powerful connotations: nurturance, flourishing, tenderness, empathy, compassion, kindness, generosity, and care. They hope that these qualities are what the universe is ultimately about. If the word “God” names the deepest reality of the universe, their hope is that God is love.
Such hope, even as fragile, is an antidote to despair and a catalyst for compassionate action in the world. It persists even when the surface of the world seems to contradict it—when suffering is intense, when cruelty appears to prevail, and when the evidence of history seems ambiguous. When disease, earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes—none caused by human beings—can nonetheless devastate life. And when the universe itself can appear violent, marked by collisions and explosions, mirrored on our small planet in predator–prey relations in which, as Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “life is robbery.”
Even so, many people sense—or hope—that beneath or beyond these appearances there is a deeper current, a deeper Spirit. Oord’s A Systematic Theology of Love speaks to this hope and argues for it. He calls the power of this Spirit amipotent rather than omnipotent, by which he means that the universal power of love is indeed powerful, but not all-powerful. There are many things that happen in the universe that even the divine Spirit—God—cannot prevent. Redeem? Yes. Prevent? No.
Oord’s account will resonate especially with those who think of this Spirit in personal terms: as a being, an inclusive Consciousness with aims, purposes, and agency. Not a being with a localized body somewhere in space but a presence equally present to every here and now, but also more than every here and now. Like wind, for example, or like breath - but with a soul of its own.
For those more inclined toward transpersonal understandings of God—God as Being Itself, or as the energy of love, or as a cosmic lure—Oord’s language may feel less immediately familiar. To be sure, his idea of amipotence can support such interpretations.
Yet Oord ultimately wants to say more. Spirit, for him, is not only a what but a who. A Who who can be addressed in prayer. A Who who has feelings, aims, and purposes. Influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, Oord's book is an invitation to imagine that the every entity in the universe has a mental side as well as a physical side (he calls it material-mental monism) such the idea of utterly dead matter is an illusion. All actual entities of whatever sort have interiority of some kind. They receive inffluences in a physical way from others, and they respond with mentality of subjectivity of their own. This means that if love is indeed at the heart of the universe, it makes sense to think of this love as expressed in a cosmic Life, with interiority of its own, in whose life the universe unfolds.
For Oord, this cosmic Life is God. He uses many other phrases in the book as synonyms: the divine Lover for example, and the divine Musician (see below). He tells us that God is like gravity, that God is like a mind, that God is like wind or breath, that God is living, that God is a person, that God is not localized but also that God has a material side (what Whitehead calls 'physical' feelings of the world.) But one of his favorite terms is "the universal spirit of Love." With this phrase, he straddles a divide between the personal and the transpersonal, making space, in my view, for both.
An Infinite Chain of Universes created by Love
His book consists of fifteen chapters divided into three sections: The Primacy of Love, The Universal Spirit of Love, and Creation and Providence. Each chapter begins with an easily grasped bulleted overview—usually ten or so “big ideas” that frame the chapter—and ends with a succinct conclusion summarizing its central claims. This structure makes the book unusually accessible, guiding readers step by step through Oord’s larger argument.
Because he is addressing Christian readers, many chapters engage the Bible and the historical Christian tradition in depth. Oord discusses well-known figures such as St. Augustine along with a wide range of contemporary Christian theologians. At the same time, as an open and relational theologian deeply influenced by process thought, he treats process theology as a natural home for a systematic theology of love. And as a Protestant Christian, he argues that his understanding of divine love is, in many important respects, consonant with the biblical witness.
Some portions of the book will be of special interest to professional theologians but may feel somewhat obscure to general readers. This is especially true of Oord’s extended critique of the traditional doctrine that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and his detailed argument for an alternative view—namely that God everlastingly creates out of creation in love (creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore). But there there is something very interesting: namely the idea that reality may not have an absolute beginning in sime, but may instead unfold as an everlasting chain of universes.
At the center of Oord’s proposal is the idea that reality may consist of an everlasting chain or succession of universes. Our universe is not the first and will not be the last; it belongs to a wider cosmic history in which universes emerge from prior forms of existence and may give rise to others. Oord also allows for the possibility of simultaneous universes existing alongside our own.
In every universe—however many there may be—the Spirit of Love is the source of ongoing creation. Yet the Spirit always creates moment by moment out of pre-existing actualities, and the universe that evolves through this activity is co-created by those actualities themselves. For Oord, as for other process theologians, there was never a “first moment” when nothing existed except God. Reality has no absolute beginning.
As for the manner of this creative activity, Oord—like many process theologians—speaks of God’s action as a form of luring or, in his preferred language, “wooing.” Yet he also characterizes it as a kind of efficient causation, though not a sufficient cause. In this respect he differs from most process thinkers, who tend to interpret divine action primarily through Aristotle’s notion of final causation: God offers possibilities that are felt as aims or goals rather than exerting physically felt “pushes.” Oord’s account allows for efficient causation as well. We need not pursue that metaphysical difference here. What matters for his view is that God’s creativity—everlasting and not created by the world—nonetheless requires the materiality of the world for its efficacy. The Spirit of Love works with what already exists, inviting each moment of reality toward richer forms of existence. In this way every universe in the everlasting succession is both inherited and newly created: a cooperative venture between the Spirit of Love and the evolving cosmos.
Because he is addressing Christian readers, many chapters engage the Bible and the historical Christian tradition in depth. Oord discusses well-known figures such as St. Augustine along with a wide range of contemporary Christian theologians. At the same time, as an open and relational theologian deeply influenced by process thought, he treats process theology as a natural home for a systematic theology of love. And as a Protestant Christian, he argues that his understanding of divine love is, in many important respects, consonant with the biblical witness.
Some portions of the book will be of special interest to professional theologians but may feel somewhat obscure to general readers. This is especially true of Oord’s extended critique of the traditional doctrine that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and his detailed argument for an alternative view—namely that God everlastingly creates out of creation in love (creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore). But there there is something very interesting: namely the idea that reality may not have an absolute beginning in sime, but may instead unfold as an everlasting chain of universes.
At the center of Oord’s proposal is the idea that reality may consist of an everlasting chain or succession of universes. Our universe is not the first and will not be the last; it belongs to a wider cosmic history in which universes emerge from prior forms of existence and may give rise to others. Oord also allows for the possibility of simultaneous universes existing alongside our own.
In every universe—however many there may be—the Spirit of Love is the source of ongoing creation. Yet the Spirit always creates moment by moment out of pre-existing actualities, and the universe that evolves through this activity is co-created by those actualities themselves. For Oord, as for other process theologians, there was never a “first moment” when nothing existed except God. Reality has no absolute beginning.
As for the manner of this creative activity, Oord—like many process theologians—speaks of God’s action as a form of luring or, in his preferred language, “wooing.” Yet he also characterizes it as a kind of efficient causation, though not a sufficient cause. In this respect he differs from most process thinkers, who tend to interpret divine action primarily through Aristotle’s notion of final causation: God offers possibilities that are felt as aims or goals rather than exerting physically felt “pushes.” Oord’s account allows for efficient causation as well. We need not pursue that metaphysical difference here. What matters for his view is that God’s creativity—everlasting and not created by the world—nonetheless requires the materiality of the world for its efficacy. The Spirit of Love works with what already exists, inviting each moment of reality toward richer forms of existence. In this way every universe in the everlasting succession is both inherited and newly created: a cooperative venture between the Spirit of Love and the evolving cosmos.
Hesed: The Steadfast Love of the Lord
Oord links this notion of everlasting love with the biblical theme of God’s steadfast love--hesed—and thus names God the Ever Creator. Or, as the phrase implies, the Forever and Ever Creator.
In the biblical traditions, steadfast love is closely associated with the idea of covenant. God makes a covenant with creation that is both unconditional and conditional: unconditional in that divine love is given no matter what, and conditional in that the covenantal activity of God requires a response from creatures in order to be fully realized.
Related to this is the biblical notion of olam, or foreverness. As Oord explains, the idea of creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore includes the claim that the Spirit of Love creates in this way always and forever—within whatever universe exists and in relation to whatever moment is unfolding. This is not an eternal or timeless love standing outside the world. It is everlasting love, continuously active within the ongoing life of the universe. In this sense it is infinitely temporal.
This infinite temporality is not a mere sequence observed from afar by creatures or even by God. Rather it is the interiority of the universal Spirit of love or, as Whitehead would put it, the "real internal constitution of God" characterized by "subjective immediacy" of God's own. Oord speaks of the Spirit of Love as essential hesed, meaning that this reaching out in love for the well-being of the world belongs to the very nature of God. Divine love is not something God occasionally chooses; it is what God always is and always does. In biblical terms, it is what is meant by the steadfast love of the Lord enduring forever.
In the biblical traditions, steadfast love is closely associated with the idea of covenant. God makes a covenant with creation that is both unconditional and conditional: unconditional in that divine love is given no matter what, and conditional in that the covenantal activity of God requires a response from creatures in order to be fully realized.
Related to this is the biblical notion of olam, or foreverness. As Oord explains, the idea of creatio ex creatione sempiternalis en amore includes the claim that the Spirit of Love creates in this way always and forever—within whatever universe exists and in relation to whatever moment is unfolding. This is not an eternal or timeless love standing outside the world. It is everlasting love, continuously active within the ongoing life of the universe. In this sense it is infinitely temporal.
This infinite temporality is not a mere sequence observed from afar by creatures or even by God. Rather it is the interiority of the universal Spirit of love or, as Whitehead would put it, the "real internal constitution of God" characterized by "subjective immediacy" of God's own. Oord speaks of the Spirit of Love as essential hesed, meaning that this reaching out in love for the well-being of the world belongs to the very nature of God. Divine love is not something God occasionally chooses; it is what God always is and always does. In biblical terms, it is what is meant by the steadfast love of the Lord enduring forever.
“The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever,” therefore, tells us the truth about who God essentially is and how God always acts. Essential hesed for creation characterizes the One who everlastingly creates."
In this respect, Oord distinguishes his view from what he interprets as the Augustinian emphasis on God’s love for God. This is one reason he is critical of Augustine’s understanding of love. Augustine roots love in a desire for what is ultimately valuable and then proposes that the only thing truly worthy of ultimate love is God. Thus, for Augustine, what matters most is that we love God for God’s sake, just as God loves Godself for God’s sake.
Oord believes that genuine love is not structured in this way. True love, he suggests, is directed toward others and toward the flourishing of the world, not toward oneself alone. The biblical idea of hesed points to this outward movement in the divine life. It names the side of God that reaches beyond itself in care for others—an orientation toward the well-being of creatures.
Panentheism and Theoenpanism
In developing his image of God, of Spirit, he combines two important ideas: panentheism (all creatures are in God) and theoenpanism (God is in all creatures). He coins the latter phrase.
Panentheism is the view that everything that happens in the world, and all creatures within it, are in a unified divine Consciousness who is always here-and-now. This is connected with his view of an evolutionary universe, a universe in process. Creatures are not “in” God as static entities existing from the beginning of time. Rather, they are “in” God as they come into being and, more specifically, in their moment-by-moment existence. As Oord writes, “All creatures flow into the divine life.” Or again: “Moment by moment we all enter God’s life.”
Theoenpanism is the complementary claim that this divine life is also in all creatures. They are, in a real sense, windows through which divine light shines. Quoting John Wesley, Oord writes: “We are to see the Creator in the glass of every creature.” When we encounter beauty, truth, and goodness—in other people and in the more-than-human world—it is as if we are looking through stained glass: divine light shines through them, yet the light is more than the glass.
Neither view implies numerical identity between God and the world. God is not identical with the plurality of creatures, and creatures are not reducible to God. Rather, God and the world are mutually immanent (present within one another) and mutually transcendent (more than one another).
A metaphor may help, though it remains only metaphor. Imagine a womb and an embryo. The embryo—like the universe in process—exists within the womb, yet its agency is not reducible to the environment that sustains it. Nor is the womb reducible to the embryo. They are “inside” one another in distinct ways. Moreover, the mother feels and is affected by the embryo’s movements as they occur. The life within her is experientially real. In an analogous way, the divine life is not indifferent to what unfolds in the world. God feels the movements of creation as they happen.
This vision resonates with Alfred North Whitehead, who writes in Process and Reality:
Panentheism is the view that everything that happens in the world, and all creatures within it, are in a unified divine Consciousness who is always here-and-now. This is connected with his view of an evolutionary universe, a universe in process. Creatures are not “in” God as static entities existing from the beginning of time. Rather, they are “in” God as they come into being and, more specifically, in their moment-by-moment existence. As Oord writes, “All creatures flow into the divine life.” Or again: “Moment by moment we all enter God’s life.”
Theoenpanism is the complementary claim that this divine life is also in all creatures. They are, in a real sense, windows through which divine light shines. Quoting John Wesley, Oord writes: “We are to see the Creator in the glass of every creature.” When we encounter beauty, truth, and goodness—in other people and in the more-than-human world—it is as if we are looking through stained glass: divine light shines through them, yet the light is more than the glass.
Neither view implies numerical identity between God and the world. God is not identical with the plurality of creatures, and creatures are not reducible to God. Rather, God and the world are mutually immanent (present within one another) and mutually transcendent (more than one another).
A metaphor may help, though it remains only metaphor. Imagine a womb and an embryo. The embryo—like the universe in process—exists within the womb, yet its agency is not reducible to the environment that sustains it. Nor is the womb reducible to the embryo. They are “inside” one another in distinct ways. Moreover, the mother feels and is affected by the embryo’s movements as they occur. The life within her is experientially real. In an analogous way, the divine life is not indifferent to what unfolds in the world. God feels the movements of creation as they happen.
This vision resonates with Alfred North Whitehead, who writes in Process and Reality:
“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 transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.”
Oord's affirmation of panentheism (everything in God) and theoenpanism (God in everything) points to the mutual immanence of God and the World. These are not simply abstractions for Oord. Sometimes we have an experiential taste of the immanence of God in the world and, for that matter, our immanence in God. An experience of Something More than individual privacy: our skin-encased egos cut off from the world, and other people by the boundaries of our skin.
Finding God in Music, Nature, and Friendships
Oord's method in A Systematic Theology of Love (Vol. I) is both rational and empirical. It is rational in that he seeks to develop a consistent set of ideas that cohere with one another and make sense of the objective world studied, for example, by modern science. He argues for example, that the notion of an infinite chain of universes is itself consistent, perhaps more consistent, with leading developments in physics. And he argues that evolutionary thinking, both biological and galactic, provides a helpful context for thinking about divine activity in the universe.
And yet is empirical in at least two senses. He wants to appeal to experiences that are publicly available to each and all, and he appeals to his own personal experience in humility and honesty. Thus he gives readers a sense of how the universal Spirit of love might be experienced at a personal level by describing some of his own personal experiences that point to, in his words, a Something More. These are, to my mind, among the most moving parts of the book, because they are honest and descriptive. He makes no pretense that they apply to everybody, or that they prove God's existence. But also does not pretend that they are irrelevant to his project. They give a taste of the Spirit.
Reflecting on music, he writes:
And yet is empirical in at least two senses. He wants to appeal to experiences that are publicly available to each and all, and he appeals to his own personal experience in humility and honesty. Thus he gives readers a sense of how the universal Spirit of love might be experienced at a personal level by describing some of his own personal experiences that point to, in his words, a Something More. These are, to my mind, among the most moving parts of the book, because they are honest and descriptive. He makes no pretense that they apply to everybody, or that they prove God's existence. But also does not pretend that they are irrelevant to his project. They give a taste of the Spirit.
Reflecting on music, he writes:
“One of my most profound spiritual experiences came at a U2 conference. Although I’d been listening to the band since my teens, I didn’t see them live until my forties. When hearing live music that carried me through life’s ups and downs, I experienced a Transcendent response. I went to a U2 concert and ended up worshiping Someone without an instrument. Music can point to a Musician alongside musicians.”
And of his work as a nature photographer:
And of his work as a nature photographer:
“As a nature photographer, I’ve had plenty of ‘God moments.’ When composing a scene I sometimes experience a Jolt. I felt close to the Creator while photographing a moose and her calf, a grouse and chicks, and two gopher snakes copulating. I consider these creatures companions, and I greet them ‘Hello, friend.’ The animal friendship, as I see it, is prompted by the Friend of all creation. A photographic experience can be revelatory.”
And marriage
Speaking of friends, My wife is my closest confidante and life partner. While our marriage has its ebbs and flows and while neither of us is perfect, I feel Another in our relationship too. My wife isn’t God, but I sometimes sense God profoundly when in her presence. Our enduring partnership provides one reason I speculate that the steadfast love of a divine Friend endures forever.
Such moments of revelation are not irrelevant to Oord's project. They complement, rather than compete with, abductive reasoning—an inference to the best explanation.
Experience and abduction go together.
Creaturely Freedom and the Reality of Evil
Of course there is more to life than the kinds of experience so beautifully described above. There is also the experience of evil and tragedy. It should come as no surprise that these are important to Oord. Much of his scholarly and personal life has been devoted to reducing suffering in the the world and showing how a God of Love is not responsible for, and cannot prevent such suffering, even as that God is at work in human life and the more than human world to reduce unnecessary suffering and promote flourishing. He takes evil seriously - not simply as the absence of good but but the presence of pain, harm, and violence.
What is evil for Oord, He defines it along the lines of one of his teachers, David Ray Griffin. Evil consists of “occurrences that, all things considered, make the world worse than it might otherwise have been.”
Drawing upon Whitehead's ideas in Adventures of Ideas, I offer a further suggestion of what kinds of occurences make the world worse than it might otherwise have been. I suggest that they consist of at least two kinds of events: situations of intense suffering for which no instrumental good can compensate; and situations of missed potential—events that cut off certain promising possibilities and actualize diminished or destructive ones instead.
Illustrative of the first would be the prolonged agony of a child dying from an aggressive cancer, the terror experienced by civilians in a war zone, or the trauma endured by victims of abuse. These are not mere inconveniences within an otherwise beneficial narrative. They are wounds that cannot simply be justified by appeal to a greater outcome. They leave scars in lives and communities.
Illustrative of the second would be the situation of an alcoholic father whose addiction gradually erodes trust within his family. His children grow up walking on eggshells, their emotional security compromised; opportunities for stability, confidence, and healthy attachment are narrowed. The father himself may carry unrealized capacities for tenderness, creativity, and responsible love that never fully emerge. In such a case, something genuinely promising is truncated. Possibilities for flourishing are foreclosed, and diminished patterns of relationship take their place.
Both forms of evil—intense suffering and foreclosed potential—make the world worse than it might otherwise have been. They diminish richness of experience, narrow the field of becoming, and introduce discord into the ongoing creative advance of the universe. Both of these forms of evil - debilitating suffering and missed potential - can be suffered by humans, as the examples attest, but also by other sentient beings.
Let me add, as Oord does, that these two forms of evil come in two forms: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil arises when creatures—especially human beings—intentionally or negligently harm others. It includes cruelty, violence, betrayal, injustice, and oppression. Moral evil is rooted in creaturely decision; it reflects the distortion or misuse of freedom.
Natural evil, by contrast, does not arise from deliberate agency but from the self-creative spontaneities of the natural world: disease, earthquakes, tornadoes, genetic disorders, ecological collapse. These forms of suffering emerge from the lawful and self-creative structures that make life possible in the first place. They are tragic not because they are chosen by the more than human world, but because they occur within a world of real becoming.
Given all of this, the question emerges: Why is there any evil at all? Why do we live in a world (and perhaps even a universe) where there is so much intense suffering and missed potential, of the moral and natural kinds? If there really is a universal Spirit of love, why didn't this Spirit 'create' a world in which such evil is non-existent, and why doesn't the Spirit prevent it?
For Oord, as for Whitehead, part of the answer is ontological. Oord’s “material-mental monism,” grounded in Whitehead’s metaphysics, holds that every actuality has both a physical pole and a mental pole. The physical pole consists in the reception of influences from the past. The mental pole consists in the grasp of possibilities for responding. Each actuality inherits its past and then responds to it in its own way.
Because of this dual structure, the world is not a system of passive effects but of self-creative events. The response of each actuality is not fully predictable—not even by God.
Spontaneity, in varying degrees, lies at the heart of reality: in quantum events, in biological processes, in animal life, and in human decision. The world therefore transcends God (to quote Whitehead, but not Oord) in its creaturely self-creativity. What happens cannot be reduced to divine action alone. This same ontological spontaneity that makes love and beauty possible also makes tragedy possible.
On Oord’s view, explained clearly in many books, including A Systematic Theology of Love, neither moral nor natural evil is willed by God, nor preventable by unilateral force. They arise from a universe composed of genuinely responsive, self-determining actualities at every level: submicoscopic, cellular, organic, and galactic, The risk inherent in such a world—the possibility of destructive decisions and tragic outcomes—is inseparable from the creativity, itself loved by God, that makes love, novelty, and beauty possible. The very structure that allows a child to laugh freely, a musician to improvise, or a person to choose compassion rather than cruelty is the structure that also allows for failure and suffering. The risk of freedom in human life, and of spontaneous agency in the more than human world. is the price of creativity.
This account preserves divine goodness more coherently than classical omnipotence. If God possessed unilateral control over every event, then the existence of uncompensated suffering would implicate God directly in its occurrence. By contrast, in Oord’s framework, God is not the hidden author of tragedy but its most faithful companion—working within the limits of a genuinely self-creative world to heal, redeem, and lure toward greater well-being.
Divine love is revealed not only in God’s persistent effort to bring good out of harm, but also—just as importantly—in God’s empathetic sharing of suffering as it occurs. At least so I suggest. God is the Deep Listening, the divine Companion, in Whitehead's words, "a fellow sufferer who understands." The point is that the universal Spirit of love does not stand above tragedy. The wounds of the world are taken into the divine life itself, gathered into what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God—the ever-growing, living whole in which nothing is lost and every sorrow is felt.
But truth be told, there is more to life - much more - than suffering, and the joys matter, too. All flows into God. The sufferings of each person are experienced by God—and the joys as well—so that nothing is lost.
What is evil for Oord, He defines it along the lines of one of his teachers, David Ray Griffin. Evil consists of “occurrences that, all things considered, make the world worse than it might otherwise have been.”
Drawing upon Whitehead's ideas in Adventures of Ideas, I offer a further suggestion of what kinds of occurences make the world worse than it might otherwise have been. I suggest that they consist of at least two kinds of events: situations of intense suffering for which no instrumental good can compensate; and situations of missed potential—events that cut off certain promising possibilities and actualize diminished or destructive ones instead.
Illustrative of the first would be the prolonged agony of a child dying from an aggressive cancer, the terror experienced by civilians in a war zone, or the trauma endured by victims of abuse. These are not mere inconveniences within an otherwise beneficial narrative. They are wounds that cannot simply be justified by appeal to a greater outcome. They leave scars in lives and communities.
Illustrative of the second would be the situation of an alcoholic father whose addiction gradually erodes trust within his family. His children grow up walking on eggshells, their emotional security compromised; opportunities for stability, confidence, and healthy attachment are narrowed. The father himself may carry unrealized capacities for tenderness, creativity, and responsible love that never fully emerge. In such a case, something genuinely promising is truncated. Possibilities for flourishing are foreclosed, and diminished patterns of relationship take their place.
Both forms of evil—intense suffering and foreclosed potential—make the world worse than it might otherwise have been. They diminish richness of experience, narrow the field of becoming, and introduce discord into the ongoing creative advance of the universe. Both of these forms of evil - debilitating suffering and missed potential - can be suffered by humans, as the examples attest, but also by other sentient beings.
Let me add, as Oord does, that these two forms of evil come in two forms: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil arises when creatures—especially human beings—intentionally or negligently harm others. It includes cruelty, violence, betrayal, injustice, and oppression. Moral evil is rooted in creaturely decision; it reflects the distortion or misuse of freedom.
Natural evil, by contrast, does not arise from deliberate agency but from the self-creative spontaneities of the natural world: disease, earthquakes, tornadoes, genetic disorders, ecological collapse. These forms of suffering emerge from the lawful and self-creative structures that make life possible in the first place. They are tragic not because they are chosen by the more than human world, but because they occur within a world of real becoming.
Given all of this, the question emerges: Why is there any evil at all? Why do we live in a world (and perhaps even a universe) where there is so much intense suffering and missed potential, of the moral and natural kinds? If there really is a universal Spirit of love, why didn't this Spirit 'create' a world in which such evil is non-existent, and why doesn't the Spirit prevent it?
For Oord, as for Whitehead, part of the answer is ontological. Oord’s “material-mental monism,” grounded in Whitehead’s metaphysics, holds that every actuality has both a physical pole and a mental pole. The physical pole consists in the reception of influences from the past. The mental pole consists in the grasp of possibilities for responding. Each actuality inherits its past and then responds to it in its own way.
Because of this dual structure, the world is not a system of passive effects but of self-creative events. The response of each actuality is not fully predictable—not even by God.
Spontaneity, in varying degrees, lies at the heart of reality: in quantum events, in biological processes, in animal life, and in human decision. The world therefore transcends God (to quote Whitehead, but not Oord) in its creaturely self-creativity. What happens cannot be reduced to divine action alone. This same ontological spontaneity that makes love and beauty possible also makes tragedy possible.
On Oord’s view, explained clearly in many books, including A Systematic Theology of Love, neither moral nor natural evil is willed by God, nor preventable by unilateral force. They arise from a universe composed of genuinely responsive, self-determining actualities at every level: submicoscopic, cellular, organic, and galactic, The risk inherent in such a world—the possibility of destructive decisions and tragic outcomes—is inseparable from the creativity, itself loved by God, that makes love, novelty, and beauty possible. The very structure that allows a child to laugh freely, a musician to improvise, or a person to choose compassion rather than cruelty is the structure that also allows for failure and suffering. The risk of freedom in human life, and of spontaneous agency in the more than human world. is the price of creativity.
This account preserves divine goodness more coherently than classical omnipotence. If God possessed unilateral control over every event, then the existence of uncompensated suffering would implicate God directly in its occurrence. By contrast, in Oord’s framework, God is not the hidden author of tragedy but its most faithful companion—working within the limits of a genuinely self-creative world to heal, redeem, and lure toward greater well-being.
Divine love is revealed not only in God’s persistent effort to bring good out of harm, but also—just as importantly—in God’s empathetic sharing of suffering as it occurs. At least so I suggest. God is the Deep Listening, the divine Companion, in Whitehead's words, "a fellow sufferer who understands." The point is that the universal Spirit of love does not stand above tragedy. The wounds of the world are taken into the divine life itself, gathered into what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God—the ever-growing, living whole in which nothing is lost and every sorrow is felt.
But truth be told, there is more to life - much more - than suffering, and the joys matter, too. All flows into God. The sufferings of each person are experienced by God—and the joys as well—so that nothing is lost.
Co-Creativity: God Can't Do it Alone
For Oord, as I understand him, divine transcendence is not a static attribute but an activity. To be quite specific, the mental pole of the Spirit of love is not a property glued onto something fixed, but rather an activity on the part of the Spirit itself. God continually influences the world through non-coercive lures toward well-being and continually receives the world into the divine life in empathic response. This, too, corresponds to Whitehead's ideas of God supplying "initial aims" in each moment of experience: fresh possibilities for responding to whatever circumstances are faced.
However here there may be a difference with Whitehead. I am not sure. Whitehead speaks of individual creatures as responding to these aims, positively or negatively, out of a "self-creativity" which is not generated by God. Whitehead writes:
However here there may be a difference with Whitehead. I am not sure. Whitehead speaks of individual creatures as responding to these aims, positively or negatively, out of a "self-creativity" which is not generated by God. Whitehead writes:
That an actual entity by functioning in respect to itself plays diverse rôles in self-formation without losing its self-identity. It is self-creative; and in its process of creation transforms its diversity of rôles into one coherent rôle. Thus ‘becoming’ is the transformation of incoherence into coherence, and in each particular instance ceases with this attainment. [This] self-functioning is the real internal constitution of an actual entity. It is the ‘immediacy’ of the actual entity. An actual entity is called the ‘subject’ of its own immediacy.
At the heart of this self-creativity within the "real internal constitution" of an actual entity - its own subjective immediacy - is an act of decision, which Whitehead suggests is the very meaning of actuality. He writes:
The ontological principle asserts the relativity of decision; whereby every decision expresses the relation of the actual thing, for which a decision is made, to an actual thing by which that decision is made. But ‘decision’ cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it.
Thus Whitehead feels free to say that God is "not" the creator of the universe, but rather its poet, Whitehead writes:
Thus Whitehead feels free to say that God is "not" the creator of the universe, but rather its poet, Whitehead writes:
He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Oord, by contrast, says that God provides agency to all in creation, even as God cannot annihilate or override the agency once created."
Oord, by contrast, says that God provides agency to all in creation, even as God cannot annihilate or override the agency once created."
God provides agency to all creatures, and God can’t withdraw, override, or fail to provide it.
And again:
God’s giving isn’t confined to humans and other complex creatures, however. The second additional idea says deity provides agency to all in creation, even the smallest entities. These gifts—even if in some cases nearly trivial—are necessary expressions of the Spirit’s love. Whether quarks, quinoa, quail, queers, or quasars, the Spirit loves all and provides agency to each, depending on their constitution and complexity. God-given agency is essential to the moment-by-moment becoming of everything that exists, because everything is, as Alfred North Whitehead puts it, “a process: it is a becomingness.”28 In God, all creation lives and moves and has its being (Acts 17:28).
I am confused about what it means to say that God "provides" agency.
At a certain point Oord acknowledges and affirms something like self-creativity. This is especially evident in a section of the book titled: God Co-Creates and Cannot Annihilate
At a certain point Oord acknowledges and affirms something like self-creativity. This is especially evident in a section of the book titled: God Co-Creates and Cannot Annihilate
God and creatures engage in creatio continua: continual creating. From the smallest to the largest, the Spirit creatively empowers all, and, together, God and creation bring about something new, moment by moment. This concursus—acting together—involves multiple causal actors, factors, and forces but always the creaturely and divine together. This is libertarian co-operative, rather than compatibilist, concurrence. And God preserves existence moment by moment as One who necessarily creates, relates, and loves.
To put it another way, the Spirit’s creating wasn’t a one-time event in the distant past. Of course, what’s creatively possible now differs drastically from what was possible then when the Spirit hovered over the chaotic deep. But just as Genesis portrays God calling upon creatures to “bring forth” others, creatures bring forth today as co-creators.
For my part, I am left with the question: As an actual entity comes into existence, responding to what is given to it from its past actual world through an act of decision, who creates the decision? Whitehead would not appeal to God in response to this question. He would say that the decision emerges de novo. Decision expresses something which, for Whitehead, is not of divine origin: an ultimate reality he calls Creativity. It is not clear to me how Oord would respond. What is clear is that he wants to say that God as Spirit provides agency but cannot annihilate it. Perhaps one reason that God cannot annihilate it is because it transcends even God.
Oord and Augustine: God as Beauty
Oord is often sharply critical of St. Augustine, and several of his criticisms shape the theological direction of A Systematic Theology of Love. Oord argues that Augustine misunderstands the nature of love by identifying it with desire. In Augustine’s account, love is the movement of the soul toward what it perceives as valuable, culminating in the claim that God alone is ultimately worthy of love. Oord worries that this framework risks turning love into a form of self-interest: loving what is most valuable rather than caring for the flourishing of others.
Oord also criticizes Augustine for portraying God as primarily self-loving and all-powerful. In his view, this conception reinforces a theology in which God’s primary concern is divine self-regard and divine sovereignty rather than relational care for creatures. Closely related, Oord believes Augustine wrongly privileges the eternal over the temporal, suggesting that what lies outside time is superior to what unfolds within time. Finally, Oord objects to Augustine’s treatment of time as largely a subjective phenomenon of the human mind rather than a fully real dimension of the created world.
Yet Augustine’s thought contains elements that could actually enrich Oord’s project, and in ways that resonate strongly with a process-relational outlook. Augustine recognizes that God can function as an object of desire in human life, drawing people toward what they most deeply seek. He also identifies beauty as a primary characteristic of the divine, describing God as “ever ancient, ever new,” a formulation that aligns surprisingly well with a process understanding of a universe continually lured toward richer forms of harmony.
Augustine likewise takes seriously the human longing for permanence. Far from being a mistake, the desire for something enduring can be understood as a natural feature of human experience in a changing world. And Augustine’s famous line—“our hearts are restless until they rest in you”—can be interpreted not as a rejection of the world but as an acknowledgment of a deeper human yearning for peace, a harmony that gathers together the fragments of life.
Seen in this light, Augustine offers resources that can deepen a theology of love. His reflections on beauty, desire, permanence, and peace point toward themes that are surprisingly compatible with a Whiteheadian spirit: a universe drawn toward beauty, animated by longing, and seeking a peace that does not erase becoming but gives it meaning.
Oord also criticizes Augustine for portraying God as primarily self-loving and all-powerful. In his view, this conception reinforces a theology in which God’s primary concern is divine self-regard and divine sovereignty rather than relational care for creatures. Closely related, Oord believes Augustine wrongly privileges the eternal over the temporal, suggesting that what lies outside time is superior to what unfolds within time. Finally, Oord objects to Augustine’s treatment of time as largely a subjective phenomenon of the human mind rather than a fully real dimension of the created world.
Yet Augustine’s thought contains elements that could actually enrich Oord’s project, and in ways that resonate strongly with a process-relational outlook. Augustine recognizes that God can function as an object of desire in human life, drawing people toward what they most deeply seek. He also identifies beauty as a primary characteristic of the divine, describing God as “ever ancient, ever new,” a formulation that aligns surprisingly well with a process understanding of a universe continually lured toward richer forms of harmony.
Augustine likewise takes seriously the human longing for permanence. Far from being a mistake, the desire for something enduring can be understood as a natural feature of human experience in a changing world. And Augustine’s famous line—“our hearts are restless until they rest in you”—can be interpreted not as a rejection of the world but as an acknowledgment of a deeper human yearning for peace, a harmony that gathers together the fragments of life.
Seen in this light, Augustine offers resources that can deepen a theology of love. His reflections on beauty, desire, permanence, and peace point toward themes that are surprisingly compatible with a Whiteheadian spirit: a universe drawn toward beauty, animated by longing, and seeking a peace that does not erase becoming but gives it meaning.
God, Time, and Non-Temporal Creativity
As an open and relational theologian who believes that what we call “the future” is not yet determined—not even for God—Oord is naturally interested in the nature of time. The word time can mean many things: clock time, existential time, evolutionary time, bodily time, and more. But in most cases it refers to something like passage or transition: the coming into being of events that did not exist before they came into being and the passing away of the subjective immediacy of those events once they have occurred.
At the heart of actual time are the dynamics of before and after, already and not-yet, as If the events in question are subjective experiences, we “know” the already by remembering it and we “know” the not yet by anticipating it—much as Augustine describes in the Confessions. Our sense of time arises from this interplay of memory and anticipation.
Oord finds Augustine’s notion of time overly subjective, tied too closely to human consciousness. Yet it seems to me that Augustine’s account can be understood more broadly. What Augustine describes need not be limited to human experience alone. Rather, it can apply to any subjective event—any occurrence that, as Whitehead might put it, includes both a physical and a mental dimension and is lived from the inside.
An event experienced in this way would naturally involve a before and an after, an already and a not-yet. It would include the reception of what has been and an anticipation, however minimal, of what may come. In this sense, Augustine’s account of time may describe not merely human temporality but the inner structure of experience wherever experience occurs.
Oord takes up the question of time in relation to God and, more specifically, the question of whether God can or does create in a non-temporal way. His answer is no. At one point he remarks that “timeless creating is oxymoronic.” For this reason he regards Augustine’s claim that God “timelessly creates” the world as incoherent. In Oord’s view, creation must involve temporal activity: if God creates, God creates in time. I would like to challenge this assumption.
It is interesting to note that the philosophical tradition that most deeply shapes Oord’s theology—process philosophy—contains an idea that might appear, at first glance, to resemble the kind of timeless creating Oord rejects, though it appears in relation to finite creatures themselves. In Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, every moment of reality is an actual occasion of experience, otherwise called a concrescing subject. Such a subject consists of physical feelings of the past, conceptual feelings of potentialities, a subjective aim toward satisfaction, and—most importantly—an act of decision or self-creativity by which it creates itself in response to what is given from the past.
Concrescence names the activity by which an occasion gathers influences from the past and integrates them into a new act of experience. Whitehead says that this subjective process is one of two meanings of the word process, the other being transition—the movement from one completed occasion to the next.
Whitehead then speaks of phases of concrescence within this creative activity, but insists that these phases are logical rather than temporal. They do not unfold as a sequence of moments within time and cannot be divided into a temporal “before” and “after.” Rather, the activity of concrescing happens all at once. In this sense, each occasion’s self-creation is creative yet non-temporal.
The universe, for Whitehead, is a vast unfolding of such momentary acts of self-creation. What we call time refers not to the internal process of concrescence itself but to the transition from one completed occasion to the next. The occasions themselves do not move from one location to another in time; they do not “move” at all. Yet their non-temporal creativity gives rise to time understood as passage or succession. Time does not pre-exist such activities. Rather, it emerges as their outcome. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the succession of completed occasions generates the temporal order we experience.
Now, then, to God. Whitehead’s understanding of God includes two distinct forms of creativity. One is non-temporal: the divine activity of ordering eternal objects—pure potentialities—so that a coherent universe can arise rather than a chaotic panoply of disconnected occasions of experience. The other is temporal: God’s ongoing provision of possibilities to each new occasion of experience, what Whitehead calls the initial aim and what Oord sometimes describes in more pastoral language as God’s wooing of the world toward greater well-being.
Oord does not find the idea of a non-temporal act of creativity helpful or existentially meaningful, and thus tends to set it aside. Augustine, however, did find such an idea meaningful. For Augustine, the notion that God’s creative act stands beyond temporal succession helped express the depth and constancy of divine creativity.
It should also be added that this non-temporal ordering of eternal objects can itself be understood as an act of love or grace. As Donna Bowman argues in The Divine Decision, the divine ordering of possibilities is not merely a metaphysical function but a gracious act—an expression of care that makes a meaningful and harmonious universe possible in the first place. From this perspective, the primordial creativity of God can itself be understood as a form of love.
My purpose in making these points is to suggest that Oord’s easy dismissal of Augustine on the question of time may overlook another way in which an open and relational theology of divine love might be enriched: through a more generous reading of Augustine and, importantly, through a greater openness to the possibility that God includes a timeless dimension.
This, in fact, was Whitehead’s own view. He held that the primordial nature of God is a non-temporal activity—the ordering of possibilities—which is completed by God’s consequent nature, the divine reception and feeling of the world. In Whitehead’s account, God is not fully actual—or perhaps not actual at all—without these “physical feelings” of the world. The divine life thus includes both dimensions: a non-temporal ordering of possibilities and a temporal participation in the unfolding life of the universe.
Recognizing this non-temporal side of God can evoke, for many people, a sense of wonder. Such wonder is itself a way of knowing God. It can deepen the experience of divine mystery in ways that may be diminished if God is understood as merely and only “in process.” A more expansive vision—one that includes both the temporal and the non-temporal—may therefore enrich rather than weaken a theology of divine love.
At the heart of actual time are the dynamics of before and after, already and not-yet, as If the events in question are subjective experiences, we “know” the already by remembering it and we “know” the not yet by anticipating it—much as Augustine describes in the Confessions. Our sense of time arises from this interplay of memory and anticipation.
Oord finds Augustine’s notion of time overly subjective, tied too closely to human consciousness. Yet it seems to me that Augustine’s account can be understood more broadly. What Augustine describes need not be limited to human experience alone. Rather, it can apply to any subjective event—any occurrence that, as Whitehead might put it, includes both a physical and a mental dimension and is lived from the inside.
An event experienced in this way would naturally involve a before and an after, an already and a not-yet. It would include the reception of what has been and an anticipation, however minimal, of what may come. In this sense, Augustine’s account of time may describe not merely human temporality but the inner structure of experience wherever experience occurs.
Oord takes up the question of time in relation to God and, more specifically, the question of whether God can or does create in a non-temporal way. His answer is no. At one point he remarks that “timeless creating is oxymoronic.” For this reason he regards Augustine’s claim that God “timelessly creates” the world as incoherent. In Oord’s view, creation must involve temporal activity: if God creates, God creates in time. I would like to challenge this assumption.
It is interesting to note that the philosophical tradition that most deeply shapes Oord’s theology—process philosophy—contains an idea that might appear, at first glance, to resemble the kind of timeless creating Oord rejects, though it appears in relation to finite creatures themselves. In Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, every moment of reality is an actual occasion of experience, otherwise called a concrescing subject. Such a subject consists of physical feelings of the past, conceptual feelings of potentialities, a subjective aim toward satisfaction, and—most importantly—an act of decision or self-creativity by which it creates itself in response to what is given from the past.
Concrescence names the activity by which an occasion gathers influences from the past and integrates them into a new act of experience. Whitehead says that this subjective process is one of two meanings of the word process, the other being transition—the movement from one completed occasion to the next.
Whitehead then speaks of phases of concrescence within this creative activity, but insists that these phases are logical rather than temporal. They do not unfold as a sequence of moments within time and cannot be divided into a temporal “before” and “after.” Rather, the activity of concrescing happens all at once. In this sense, each occasion’s self-creation is creative yet non-temporal.
The universe, for Whitehead, is a vast unfolding of such momentary acts of self-creation. What we call time refers not to the internal process of concrescence itself but to the transition from one completed occasion to the next. The occasions themselves do not move from one location to another in time; they do not “move” at all. Yet their non-temporal creativity gives rise to time understood as passage or succession. Time does not pre-exist such activities. Rather, it emerges as their outcome. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the succession of completed occasions generates the temporal order we experience.
Now, then, to God. Whitehead’s understanding of God includes two distinct forms of creativity. One is non-temporal: the divine activity of ordering eternal objects—pure potentialities—so that a coherent universe can arise rather than a chaotic panoply of disconnected occasions of experience. The other is temporal: God’s ongoing provision of possibilities to each new occasion of experience, what Whitehead calls the initial aim and what Oord sometimes describes in more pastoral language as God’s wooing of the world toward greater well-being.
Oord does not find the idea of a non-temporal act of creativity helpful or existentially meaningful, and thus tends to set it aside. Augustine, however, did find such an idea meaningful. For Augustine, the notion that God’s creative act stands beyond temporal succession helped express the depth and constancy of divine creativity.
It should also be added that this non-temporal ordering of eternal objects can itself be understood as an act of love or grace. As Donna Bowman argues in The Divine Decision, the divine ordering of possibilities is not merely a metaphysical function but a gracious act—an expression of care that makes a meaningful and harmonious universe possible in the first place. From this perspective, the primordial creativity of God can itself be understood as a form of love.
My purpose in making these points is to suggest that Oord’s easy dismissal of Augustine on the question of time may overlook another way in which an open and relational theology of divine love might be enriched: through a more generous reading of Augustine and, importantly, through a greater openness to the possibility that God includes a timeless dimension.
This, in fact, was Whitehead’s own view. He held that the primordial nature of God is a non-temporal activity—the ordering of possibilities—which is completed by God’s consequent nature, the divine reception and feeling of the world. In Whitehead’s account, God is not fully actual—or perhaps not actual at all—without these “physical feelings” of the world. The divine life thus includes both dimensions: a non-temporal ordering of possibilities and a temporal participation in the unfolding life of the universe.
Recognizing this non-temporal side of God can evoke, for many people, a sense of wonder. Such wonder is itself a way of knowing God. It can deepen the experience of divine mystery in ways that may be diminished if God is understood as merely and only “in process.” A more expansive vision—one that includes both the temporal and the non-temporal—may therefore enrich rather than weaken a theology of divine love.
Onto-Theology, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Essences
In discussing whether God is Being Itself or “a being among beings,” Thomas Jay Oord addresses the problem of onto-theology, a term originally introduced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. As I understand it, the problem of onto-theology is not simply that philosophers think of God as “a” being. Rather, it arises when God is deliberately turned into an object of philosophical conceptuality—an abstraction that can be grasped, defined, and mastered by the human intellect. For Heidegger, this tendency is characteristic of much of Western metaphysics, which he regarded as an expression of the will to power in intellectual form. When this occurs, the living Spirit—the God in whose presence we can dance and pray—is lost. Or, to borrow the language of Friedrich Nietzsche, the living God is “killed.” What remains is a conceptual idol fashioned by metaphysical thought.
Oord takes this challenge seriously, although he is not inclined to blame it on metaphysics as such. Instead, he believes that the universal Spirit of love can be obscured when God is conceived in static categories—as an enframeable “thing” that can be owned, possessed, or fully grasped by thought. His proposal is that if we envision God in more dynamic terms—as essentially becoming rather than essentially being—the living Spirit can still be discussed, as he attempts to do in his book A Systematic Theology of Love: God and Creation, without becoming conceptually ownable or subject to intellectual mastery. For this reason Oord repeatedly acknowledges the provisional character of his claims. He often says that he is not entirely certain about what he is saying—or even about God’s very existence—but is instead offering his best effort to describe and argue for what he calls a God of uncontrollable love.
Within this framework, Oord sharply criticizes both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for emphasizing divine timelessness. In his view, a timeless God cannot genuinely love or enter into reciprocal relationship with the world. He also rejects Aquinas’s claim that the very essence of God is identical with God’s existence. As an alternative, Oord proposes what he calls “gino-theology,” drawing on the Greek word ginomai, meaning “to become.” If we think of the very existence of God as an event—indeed, an everlasting event—we can better avoid reducing the living Spirit to a mere object within the onto-theological imagination.
A similar argument appears in his critique of the classical doctrine of divine simplicity, which claims that God’s essence and existence are identical. Influenced by Charles Hartshorne, Oord instead proposes that the essence of God—the attributes that properly belong to God, such as love and wisdom—remains constant, while the existence of God is dynamically changing from moment to moment. In this view, God continually responds in love to what happens in the world while simultaneously offering fresh possibilities for response.
Two questions emerge for the reader. The first is philosophical. Might it not be the case that if essence is defined as what God is, and if God’s existence—like that of any other actuality—is the way God becomes, then in this sense God’s essence and God’s existence are indeed identical? In Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead suggests something very close to this. He writes:
Oord takes this challenge seriously, although he is not inclined to blame it on metaphysics as such. Instead, he believes that the universal Spirit of love can be obscured when God is conceived in static categories—as an enframeable “thing” that can be owned, possessed, or fully grasped by thought. His proposal is that if we envision God in more dynamic terms—as essentially becoming rather than essentially being—the living Spirit can still be discussed, as he attempts to do in his book A Systematic Theology of Love: God and Creation, without becoming conceptually ownable or subject to intellectual mastery. For this reason Oord repeatedly acknowledges the provisional character of his claims. He often says that he is not entirely certain about what he is saying—or even about God’s very existence—but is instead offering his best effort to describe and argue for what he calls a God of uncontrollable love.
Within this framework, Oord sharply criticizes both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for emphasizing divine timelessness. In his view, a timeless God cannot genuinely love or enter into reciprocal relationship with the world. He also rejects Aquinas’s claim that the very essence of God is identical with God’s existence. As an alternative, Oord proposes what he calls “gino-theology,” drawing on the Greek word ginomai, meaning “to become.” If we think of the very existence of God as an event—indeed, an everlasting event—we can better avoid reducing the living Spirit to a mere object within the onto-theological imagination.
A similar argument appears in his critique of the classical doctrine of divine simplicity, which claims that God’s essence and existence are identical. Influenced by Charles Hartshorne, Oord instead proposes that the essence of God—the attributes that properly belong to God, such as love and wisdom—remains constant, while the existence of God is dynamically changing from moment to moment. In this view, God continually responds in love to what happens in the world while simultaneously offering fresh possibilities for response.
Two questions emerge for the reader. The first is philosophical. Might it not be the case that if essence is defined as what God is, and if God’s existence—like that of any other actuality—is the way God becomes, then in this sense God’s essence and God’s existence are indeed identical? In Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead suggests something very close to this. He writes:
“That how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is, so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the ‘principle of process.’”
If by existence we mean process in this sense—the ongoing becoming of an actuality—then we have at least one way of affirming the classical phrase that “God’s essence is to exist.” How God becomes constitutes what God is.
What troubles Thomas Jay Oord about this formulation, however, is that it can easily slide back into the classical idea that divine “whatness” and divine “isness” are timeless and simple--simple in the traditional metaphysical sense of containing no internal multiplicity. Such a conception risks portraying God as lacking the richness of relational life: no changing feelings, no evolving aims, no diverse responses to the unfolding situations of the world. For Oord, any adequate understanding of divine love must allow for genuine responsiveness and relational dynamism, qualities that seem difficult to reconcile with the classical doctrine of simplicity.
Here, perhaps, the notion of modal essences might help. An essence need not be understood as a fixed property or attribute—terms that easily suggest stasis and lend themselves to the kind of onto-theological grasping that concerns philosophers such as Martin Heidegger. Instead, an essence might be understood as a mode: a characteristic way of unfolding or becoming.
On this view, essence is not a static content but a pattern of activity, a way something exists through time. The essence of a reality would be the characteristic manner in which it becomes what it is. In the case of God, this might mean that divine essence is not a list of attributes—love, wisdom, goodness—but a living mode of becoming that expresses itself through these qualities. Love, wisdom, and responsiveness would then be ways in which this divine mode unfolds rather than fixed properties possessed in advance.
Indeed, one might say that the divine essence is itself a mode that includes many modes: a dynamic pattern of loving responsiveness, continually expressed in relation to the unfolding world. Such an understanding preserves the insight that how God becomes constitutes what God is, while avoiding the temptation to reduce the living Spirit to a static conceptual object. This leaves room for a sense of mystery.
God and Mystery: Seven Ideas from Whitehead
In his discussion of divine mystery, Thomas Jay Oord distinguishes three different ways that theologians appeal to the idea of mystery: defensive mystery, utter mystery, and humble mystery. He argues that the first two are unhelpful, while the third is constructive. In this context he also distinguishes between absolute apophaticism and what he calls relative apophaticism, affirming the latter while rejecting the former.
Defensive mystery occurs when believers invoke mystery to protect strongly held beliefs from criticism or revision. In such cases, mystery functions as a shield rather than as an honest acknowledgment of the limits of human understanding. Oord describes defensive mystery as an appeal made when people of faith “refuse to reformulate strongly-held beliefs that oppose good evidence, experiences, moral sensibilities, or strong arguments.” Instead of reconsidering their views in light of new insights, they invoke mystery to avoid the hard work of theological revision. Mystery becomes a conversation-stopper rather than a stimulus to deeper reflection.
A second unhelpful approach is what Oord calls utter mystery, corresponding to absolute apophaticism. Apophatic theology traditionally emphasizes the limits of human language in speaking about God, reminding us that the divine reality surpasses our concepts. In its extreme form, however, apophaticism claims that nothing positive can be said about God at all. If taken this far, the result is a kind of theological silence: no human thought, word, or experience can convey genuine truth about the divine. Oord believes that this stance ultimately undermines theology itself.
Against these two approaches, Oord proposes what he calls humble mystery. Humble mystery acknowledges that God ultimately exceeds human comprehension, yet it does not conclude that meaningful speech about God is impossible. Instead, it affirms that our language, concepts, and experiences can offer partial but genuine insight into the divine reality. Here Oord endorses relative apophaticism—the recognition that every statement about God is limited, metaphorical, and open to revision, while still capable of pointing truthfully, however imperfectly, toward the divine.
It may also be helpful to add that, in this humble tradition, appeals to mystery sometimes concern not only what can or cannot be claimed about God, but also how God may be experienced. Mystery can refer to a dimension of experience that is felt before it is formulated as a belief. Oord himself offers an example when he recounts attending a U2 concert: “I experienced a Transcendent response. I went to a U2 concert and ended up worshiping Someone without an instrument. Music can point to a Musician alongside musicians.”
Experiencing “Someone without an instrument" suggests an encounter with a presence that exceeds conceptual description. It is an experience of something—or someone—unbounded yet felt and pre-linguistic. In such pre-linguistic moments there is a kind of knowing. It is not propositional knowing, not even primarily theological knowing, and certainly not perfect knowing. It is closer to what might be called intuitive knowing: a felt awareness of a presence that can later be spoken about, but that first enters human life as lived experience rather than as a doctrine.
In this sense, mystery does not only mark the limits of language about God. It can also point to the depth of experiences in which people sense the sacred before they attempt to explain it. Such experiences do not settle theological questions, but they may help explain why the language of God continues to arise in human life.
Here I would like to add seven ideas from Whitehead's philosophy that can enrich an open and relational perspective such as that developed by Oord, and likewise enrich his own understanding of how Someone without an instrument" might be known and felt.
Whitehead’s philosophy offers several ideas that help explain how people can experience something real even when they cannot fully explain it. These ideas illuminate the kind of intuitive or apophatic knowing discussed above—experiences in which people sense a presence or depth that is felt before it is formulated in words.
First, Whitehead speaks of non-verbal prehensions. He suggests that we are constantly prehending—that is, feeling or taking account of—the realities around us. These prehensions include emotional tones such as wonder, attraction, fear, love, or a sense of mystery. In this way we often know something through feeling before we know it through language.
Second, Whitehead suggests that we can prehend God in wordless ways. This may occur through experiences of ideals such as truth, goodness, and beauty, or through the quiet sense of a calling toward better possibilities in each moment. In such experiences, the divine may be felt before it is described.
Third, Whitehead’s understanding of propositions helps illuminate how ideas can be communicated without language. For him, propositions are “lures for feeling.” They do not need to be expressed in sentences. Music, gestures, rituals, architecture, and art can communicate meaning and insight even when no words are spoken.
Fourth, Whitehead emphasizes the importance of unconscious experience. Much of human experience occurs beneath the level of conscious thought. We may know things about other people, the natural world, or even God in ways that are not yet fully conscious or articulated.
Fifth, Whitehead highlights the depth of each moment of experience. Every moment carries within it the influence of the entire past of the universe. This means that each human experience has depths that can never be fully grasped or exhausted.
Sixth, Whitehead speaks of Peace as the experience of a “Harmony of Harmonies.” Peace is not primarily a concept but a felt sense of belonging within a larger whole, a quiet participation in the deeper order of the universe.
Finally, Whitehead suggests that human beings can develop a deep trust in the efficacy of beauty—whether moral beauty, natural beauty, artistic beauty, or even tragic beauty. This trust is often experienced directly rather than reasoned out.
Taken together, these ideas suggest that mystery is not simply a limit to knowledge. It can also point to forms of knowing that arise through feeling, intuition, and lived experience, even when they cannot be fully expressed in words.
Defensive mystery occurs when believers invoke mystery to protect strongly held beliefs from criticism or revision. In such cases, mystery functions as a shield rather than as an honest acknowledgment of the limits of human understanding. Oord describes defensive mystery as an appeal made when people of faith “refuse to reformulate strongly-held beliefs that oppose good evidence, experiences, moral sensibilities, or strong arguments.” Instead of reconsidering their views in light of new insights, they invoke mystery to avoid the hard work of theological revision. Mystery becomes a conversation-stopper rather than a stimulus to deeper reflection.
A second unhelpful approach is what Oord calls utter mystery, corresponding to absolute apophaticism. Apophatic theology traditionally emphasizes the limits of human language in speaking about God, reminding us that the divine reality surpasses our concepts. In its extreme form, however, apophaticism claims that nothing positive can be said about God at all. If taken this far, the result is a kind of theological silence: no human thought, word, or experience can convey genuine truth about the divine. Oord believes that this stance ultimately undermines theology itself.
Against these two approaches, Oord proposes what he calls humble mystery. Humble mystery acknowledges that God ultimately exceeds human comprehension, yet it does not conclude that meaningful speech about God is impossible. Instead, it affirms that our language, concepts, and experiences can offer partial but genuine insight into the divine reality. Here Oord endorses relative apophaticism—the recognition that every statement about God is limited, metaphorical, and open to revision, while still capable of pointing truthfully, however imperfectly, toward the divine.
It may also be helpful to add that, in this humble tradition, appeals to mystery sometimes concern not only what can or cannot be claimed about God, but also how God may be experienced. Mystery can refer to a dimension of experience that is felt before it is formulated as a belief. Oord himself offers an example when he recounts attending a U2 concert: “I experienced a Transcendent response. I went to a U2 concert and ended up worshiping Someone without an instrument. Music can point to a Musician alongside musicians.”
Experiencing “Someone without an instrument" suggests an encounter with a presence that exceeds conceptual description. It is an experience of something—or someone—unbounded yet felt and pre-linguistic. In such pre-linguistic moments there is a kind of knowing. It is not propositional knowing, not even primarily theological knowing, and certainly not perfect knowing. It is closer to what might be called intuitive knowing: a felt awareness of a presence that can later be spoken about, but that first enters human life as lived experience rather than as a doctrine.
In this sense, mystery does not only mark the limits of language about God. It can also point to the depth of experiences in which people sense the sacred before they attempt to explain it. Such experiences do not settle theological questions, but they may help explain why the language of God continues to arise in human life.
Here I would like to add seven ideas from Whitehead's philosophy that can enrich an open and relational perspective such as that developed by Oord, and likewise enrich his own understanding of how Someone without an instrument" might be known and felt.
Whitehead’s philosophy offers several ideas that help explain how people can experience something real even when they cannot fully explain it. These ideas illuminate the kind of intuitive or apophatic knowing discussed above—experiences in which people sense a presence or depth that is felt before it is formulated in words.
First, Whitehead speaks of non-verbal prehensions. He suggests that we are constantly prehending—that is, feeling or taking account of—the realities around us. These prehensions include emotional tones such as wonder, attraction, fear, love, or a sense of mystery. In this way we often know something through feeling before we know it through language.
Second, Whitehead suggests that we can prehend God in wordless ways. This may occur through experiences of ideals such as truth, goodness, and beauty, or through the quiet sense of a calling toward better possibilities in each moment. In such experiences, the divine may be felt before it is described.
Third, Whitehead’s understanding of propositions helps illuminate how ideas can be communicated without language. For him, propositions are “lures for feeling.” They do not need to be expressed in sentences. Music, gestures, rituals, architecture, and art can communicate meaning and insight even when no words are spoken.
Fourth, Whitehead emphasizes the importance of unconscious experience. Much of human experience occurs beneath the level of conscious thought. We may know things about other people, the natural world, or even God in ways that are not yet fully conscious or articulated.
Fifth, Whitehead highlights the depth of each moment of experience. Every moment carries within it the influence of the entire past of the universe. This means that each human experience has depths that can never be fully grasped or exhausted.
Sixth, Whitehead speaks of Peace as the experience of a “Harmony of Harmonies.” Peace is not primarily a concept but a felt sense of belonging within a larger whole, a quiet participation in the deeper order of the universe.
Finally, Whitehead suggests that human beings can develop a deep trust in the efficacy of beauty—whether moral beauty, natural beauty, artistic beauty, or even tragic beauty. This trust is often experienced directly rather than reasoned out.
Taken together, these ideas suggest that mystery is not simply a limit to knowledge. It can also point to forms of knowing that arise through feeling, intuition, and lived experience, even when they cannot be fully expressed in words.
Divine Empathy: Knowing through Feeling
Oord says that divine knowing comes, not through propositional knowledge about the world, not from obtaining information, but through feeling.
...this systematic theology of love says God’s knowing comes through feeling. The universal and relational Spirit of love knows what’s happening because all creatures and creation influence the Spirit. An omnipresent and relational God knows through immediate feeling rather than by watching from afar. We should think of God as a feeler, not a voyeur. Our experience also tells us that empathy is crucial for loving well. Compassion, caring, celebrating, and other forms of love require feeling with the beloved. And the more direct the feeling, the better. The universal Spirit feels directly by empathy when rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn (Rom. 12:15). As John Wesley puts it, God “is present in every part of the universe, [so] he can’t but know whatever is, or is done there.”The Spirit’s empathy plays a key role in judging the value of creaturely actions, and this evaluating involves obtaining information that comes by feeling.
In process theology, empathic feeling means “feeling the feelings” of others with the same emotion—the same subjective form—with which they felt their own experience. In Whitehead’s terms, a prehension does not merely register that something has happened to another being; it can reproduce, in some measure, the emotional tone with which that being experienced it.
For example, when we see a child laughing with delight, we may spontaneously feel a similar joy rising within us. When we witness someone in pain, we may feel a tightening in our own bodies or a sorrow that mirrors their suffering. We do not simply observe the feeling from the outside; we participate in it, however partially.
Process theologians suggest that something like this occurs in God’s relation to the world. God prehends every creature and feels the joys and sorrows of the world from within. The suffering of creatures is not merely known by God as a fact; it is felt by God empathically. In this way, divine knowledge of the world is also divine compassion.
How would God know what to do? How would God know what to lure creatures toward? If God did not, at first, but also at each moment, feel their feelings. Only in this way could God be, as Whitehead puts it, a "fellow sufferer who understands."
For example, when we see a child laughing with delight, we may spontaneously feel a similar joy rising within us. When we witness someone in pain, we may feel a tightening in our own bodies or a sorrow that mirrors their suffering. We do not simply observe the feeling from the outside; we participate in it, however partially.
Process theologians suggest that something like this occurs in God’s relation to the world. God prehends every creature and feels the joys and sorrows of the world from within. The suffering of creatures is not merely known by God as a fact; it is felt by God empathically. In this way, divine knowledge of the world is also divine compassion.
How would God know what to do? How would God know what to lure creatures toward? If God did not, at first, but also at each moment, feel their feelings. Only in this way could God be, as Whitehead puts it, a "fellow sufferer who understands."
Trust in an Uncertain Spirit
Oord adds that this direct knowing on the part of the Spirit is a feeling of what has happened to creatures, what is happening to creatures, and what can happen to creatures, and that what can happen is not-yet-existent, and thus not-yet-knowable, not even for God. This means that God is in process and, in a divine way, uncertain.
A theology that rejects divine timelessness offers a third, and better, model of God’s necessary love for creation. It assumes God moves through time as creatures do, and there is no knowable future. The living Spirit loves in the present and faces an open future comprised of real possibilities.vpossibilities. Not even God knows with absolutely certainty what will occur. The loving Spirit who faces an open future can’t be certain what free creatures will do. Consequently, deity can’t be sure which possibilities, if chosen by God or by creatures, will best promote flourishing. Some options certainly won’t be good, of course, and others are unlikely to promote well-being. Committing murder, incest, and genocide will not promote flourishing, so God doesn’t call creatures to choose them. But God can’t be certain which among the many good possibilities will best establish love, beauty, and justice, especially in the distant future. The Spirit can’t be certain, because time is real, creatures make free choices, and random events occur.
To trust in a God who is uncertain is to trust not in control but in companionship. This is, I believe, part of what most deeply motivates Thomas Oord. It is to trust in God as a companion to the world, to life itself.
In classical theologies, trust in God often means confidence that God already knows and determines the future. The world unfolds according to a divine plan that is fully known in advance. In process theology, the picture is different. The future is genuinely open. Even God does not know it as a settled fact, because it does not yet exist to be known. God knows all possibilities and all past realities perfectly, but the final shape of the future depends in part on the responses of creatures.
Trust, in Oord's context, means trusting that God is always working creatively with whatever happens, offering possibilities for healing, beauty, and goodness in each new moment. It is trust in divine faithfulness rather than divine control.
Such trust resembles the confidence one might place in a wise and loving companion on a difficult journey. The companion does not know every twist in the road ahead, but is fully present, attentive, and responsive. Whatever occurs, that companion will continue to offer guidance, encouragement, and new possibilities.
To trust an uncertain God, then, is to trust a God who is perfectly loving but not perfectly controlling—a God who participates in the adventure of the universe with us. The divine life includes risk, creativity, and responsiveness. The future is not guaranteed in advance, but it is never abandoned.
In this way, trust becomes less like relying on a fixed blueprint and more like joining a partnership in an unfolding story. The confidence lies in this: whatever the world brings, God will be there within it, feeling its joys and sorrows and continually luring creation toward deeper beauty and peace.
Participating in God: Are we part of God's Manyness?
One of the enduring insights of classical theology is the idea that human beings can participate in God. This idea is often associated with thinkers who speak of God not primarily as a being—one entity among others—but as Being Itself, the depth or ground of all existence. When God is understood in this way, the relationship between God and creatures can be described not only in terms of obedience, worship, or moral imitation, but also in terms of participation.
To participate in God is to share, in some measure, in the divine life itself. It suggests that creatures do not merely receive influences from God or respond to divine guidance; they also live within the divine life and contribute to it. Their experiences, decisions, and acts of love become part of the very life of God. They participate in God.
In process philosophy there are hints of something like this. Whitehead speaks of the world as becoming part of God’s own “manyness.” This idea is related to his famous principle that in every act of becoming “the many become one and are increased by one.” Whitehead sometimes suggests that God is an everlasting concrescence in which, moment by moment, the many of the universe become one in the divine life.
Yet there is also a tension here. Despite his affirmation of panentheism—the idea that everything is in God—Oord also emphasizes that God is numerically distinct from creation. God and the world are intimately related, but they are not identical. This emphasis suggests that the “real internal constitution” of God may not literally include the world itself. In that case God might not be a many becoming one, but rather a one who experiences a many.
It is not entirely clear whether Oord intends such a strong sense of participation. His emphasis on God as a personal Spirit who acts in love toward creatures sometimes sounds more relational than participatory. God and creatures cooperate, influence one another, and co-create the future together. But do creatures also participate in the very being of God?
If God is understood primarily as a personal agent, distinct from the world, participation may seem difficult to articulate. If God is understood more deeply as the living ground of existence—the Spirit in whom all things live and move and have their being—then participation becomes easier to imagine.
The question remains open: Does a theology of love ultimately point toward a participatory vision of divine life, in which creatures are not only loved by God and guided by God but also share, in some measure, in the life of God itself?
To participate in God is to share, in some measure, in the divine life itself. It suggests that creatures do not merely receive influences from God or respond to divine guidance; they also live within the divine life and contribute to it. Their experiences, decisions, and acts of love become part of the very life of God. They participate in God.
In process philosophy there are hints of something like this. Whitehead speaks of the world as becoming part of God’s own “manyness.” This idea is related to his famous principle that in every act of becoming “the many become one and are increased by one.” Whitehead sometimes suggests that God is an everlasting concrescence in which, moment by moment, the many of the universe become one in the divine life.
Yet there is also a tension here. Despite his affirmation of panentheism—the idea that everything is in God—Oord also emphasizes that God is numerically distinct from creation. God and the world are intimately related, but they are not identical. This emphasis suggests that the “real internal constitution” of God may not literally include the world itself. In that case God might not be a many becoming one, but rather a one who experiences a many.
It is not entirely clear whether Oord intends such a strong sense of participation. His emphasis on God as a personal Spirit who acts in love toward creatures sometimes sounds more relational than participatory. God and creatures cooperate, influence one another, and co-create the future together. But do creatures also participate in the very being of God?
If God is understood primarily as a personal agent, distinct from the world, participation may seem difficult to articulate. If God is understood more deeply as the living ground of existence—the Spirit in whom all things live and move and have their being—then participation becomes easier to imagine.
The question remains open: Does a theology of love ultimately point toward a participatory vision of divine life, in which creatures are not only loved by God and guided by God but also share, in some measure, in the life of God itself?
Love
It may seem odd to some readers to end this discussion of Oord’s book with an introduction to his understanding of love. After all, the entire project is a systematic theology of love. One might expect the theme of love to have been treated at the very beginning of this long essay, rather than at the end.
Yet there is a certain appropriateness to closing here. Oord’s understanding of love gathers together many of the threads that run throughout the book: his view of God, his account of creation, his response to the problem of evil, and his interpretation of divine action in the world. Love functions as the integrating center of the whole vision.
For Oord, love is not merely one attribute of God among others. It is the very character of the divine life and the guiding principle of God’s relation to the world. God does not sometimes act lovingly and sometimes act in other ways. Rather, every divine action expresses love.
This claim becomes clearer once we recognize how Oord defines love. Love, in his view, is not simply an emotion or an internal disposition. It is an active pattern of relating: a way of seeking the well-being of others while also promoting the flourishing of the whole.
God’s love, therefore, is not abstract benevolence but an ongoing effort to bring about the richest possible forms of life and relationship within the evolving universe.
Seen in this light, the theology developed throughout the book can be understood as an extended reflection on what it means for the ultimate reality of the universe to be love.
Yet there is a certain appropriateness to closing here. Oord’s understanding of love gathers together many of the threads that run throughout the book: his view of God, his account of creation, his response to the problem of evil, and his interpretation of divine action in the world. Love functions as the integrating center of the whole vision.
For Oord, love is not merely one attribute of God among others. It is the very character of the divine life and the guiding principle of God’s relation to the world. God does not sometimes act lovingly and sometimes act in other ways. Rather, every divine action expresses love.
This claim becomes clearer once we recognize how Oord defines love. Love, in his view, is not simply an emotion or an internal disposition. It is an active pattern of relating: a way of seeking the well-being of others while also promoting the flourishing of the whole.
God’s love, therefore, is not abstract benevolence but an ongoing effort to bring about the richest possible forms of life and relationship within the evolving universe.
Seen in this light, the theology developed throughout the book can be understood as an extended reflection on what it means for the ultimate reality of the universe to be love.
Looking Forward to Volume II
As you read Thomas Oord’s Systematic Theology of Love, how you respond will depend in part on who you are and what your situation in life is. Oord does not present his ideas as a final answer to which everyone must naturally assent. Rather, he offers them as a way of thinking about God and about life that makes sense to him—one that he believes fits with the Bible, the Christian tradition, reason, and experience.
He hopes that this way of thinking can help people respond sensitively to suffering, take delight in the joys of life, and participate in the ongoing effort to create a better world—with no one, and I mean no one, left behind: straight or gay, believer or skeptic, wounded or flourishing, insider or outsider. Love, as he understands it, is inherently inclusive. It seeks the well-being of each and all.
And we are fortunate enough—indeed graced enough—to live and move and have our being in the presence and companionship of a universal Spirit of love: a presence within us yet greater than us, intimate yet unbounded, present to all without being confined to any single place. This Spirit feels the life of the world from within and seeks the well-being—indeed the flourishing—of each and all.
We can speak of and to this Spirit as the Lord of Steadfast Love, but also—if it seems better to us—as the Cosmic Energy by which, at every moment, the universe and we ourselves are beckoned forward. It is a presence that continually offers possibilities for life, promising to be in covenant with us, no matter what, forever and ever.
But of course we, like God, live moment by moment. We may hold the “forever and ever” perspective in our minds, but our actual lives unfold one moment at a time—this moment, and then the next, and then the next. Understandably, we want to better understand how we might experience and know this Spirit in the flow of our daily lives. And we also want to be honest to the fact that we always far short of the Spirit in whose live we flow. It is good enought to talk about a God of love, but we also need to be honest about un-love and anti-love. After all, there is more to reality than who God and and what God does. There is also who we are and what we do, and how we might better understand how to flow with the Spirit. That, in large measure, is the task of Volume II.
He hopes that this way of thinking can help people respond sensitively to suffering, take delight in the joys of life, and participate in the ongoing effort to create a better world—with no one, and I mean no one, left behind: straight or gay, believer or skeptic, wounded or flourishing, insider or outsider. Love, as he understands it, is inherently inclusive. It seeks the well-being of each and all.
And we are fortunate enough—indeed graced enough—to live and move and have our being in the presence and companionship of a universal Spirit of love: a presence within us yet greater than us, intimate yet unbounded, present to all without being confined to any single place. This Spirit feels the life of the world from within and seeks the well-being—indeed the flourishing—of each and all.
We can speak of and to this Spirit as the Lord of Steadfast Love, but also—if it seems better to us—as the Cosmic Energy by which, at every moment, the universe and we ourselves are beckoned forward. It is a presence that continually offers possibilities for life, promising to be in covenant with us, no matter what, forever and ever.
But of course we, like God, live moment by moment. We may hold the “forever and ever” perspective in our minds, but our actual lives unfold one moment at a time—this moment, and then the next, and then the next. Understandably, we want to better understand how we might experience and know this Spirit in the flow of our daily lives. And we also want to be honest to the fact that we always far short of the Spirit in whose live we flow. It is good enought to talk about a God of love, but we also need to be honest about un-love and anti-love. After all, there is more to reality than who God and and what God does. There is also who we are and what we do, and how we might better understand how to flow with the Spirit. That, in large measure, is the task of Volume II.
The next volume of this systematic theology of love begins with questions of epistemology and how we might know God. I address questions about divine revelation in general and the particular revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. I address both the widespread propensity to sin and individual sins. The second volume also explores salvation and sanctification in light of love. At the heart of all these endeavors is my conviction that an adequate systematic theology prioritizes love above all and integrates love in every doctrine.