How Process Heals Divisions with Bruce Epperly (Part 1)

Ilia Delio is joined by process theologian Bruce Epperly for an honest conversation looking at the divisiveness at work in our communities and politics. Bruce gives an introduction to process theology (or process relational theology) and together they unpack how the basic conceptual shifts promoted by process theology can help to heal our communities and guide our interactions with people who challenge us to a better future. 

ABOUT BRUCE EPPERLY

“Healing can occur in any circumstance, because God is the source of abundance and new life in all things. Even when no physical cure is possible, we can experience a peace that enables us to face life’s most difficult challenges with a sense of hope and equanimity.”

Bruce Epperly, Ph.D., has served as a congregational pastor and university chaplain, university and seminary professor and administrator, and is a prolific author and lectionary commentator. With over forty years joining pulpit and classroom, Bruce recently retired from congregational ministry after serving eight years as Senior Pastor of South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Centerville, MA. He has relocated from Cape Cod to the Washington D.C. suburbs to be closer to his family. He continues to teach as Adjunct Faculty at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia Interviews process theologian Bruce Epperly. They begin their conversation with an introduction to process theology. What is it? Where does it come from? And how important is it to a deeply divided world?

Ilia: We are with Dr. Bruce Epperly today, we're delighted to have you, Bruce, on our Hunger for Wholeness podcast. You bring a wealth of knowledge and experience from the world of process theology, spirituality, mysticism, and Franciscan spirituality, so I am very interested to talk with you about these various areas. Many of our listeners are not familiar with process theology, so maybe you can begin by just telling us your vocation, your path as a process theologian, some of the books, some of your key books in this area, and introduce our listeners to this wonderful area of process thought.

Bruce: Well, I would be delighted and in many ways, process theology, both the Whiteheadian and the Teilhardian, Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have been part of my life since I was a sophomore or junior in college. I chanced upon a course on process theology when I was a junior in college and I was looking for a worldview. I had been raised as an evangelical conservative Christian, and that no longer worked for me. I still wanted to be a Christian, and process theology gave me a framework. A framework for faith, a framework for thinking about God that allowed me to be a 20th—in those days, 20th century Christian. It was 1972, perhaps—20th century Christian and to make faith come alive for me.

The term process, or as some people call it, process relational theology and others open and relational theology. For me, the key elements are the fact that the world is lively and changing. The term process means that all things flow as Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, that life has changed, life is growth, life is creative. The relational aspect is that everything is interdependent. Wherever we are, we are shaping and being shaped by the world around us. There's no such thing as an isolated individual. And so, the process and relational thought is key, but it also has a theological component. And whether it be Teilhardian or Whiteheadian, it's the notion that God is part of the process as a companion; that God is part of the process urging us forward; that God is part of the process as the lure of the future. Teilhard says the God of tomorrow is what we need. And the tomorrow is actually each moment of experience being called forward to its particular goal, towards a particular orientation. The relational aspect of it is that God is related to us.

I don't want to go into the intricacies of the marriage of Greek and Hebraic thought, but process theology doesn't focus on the isolated individual, but on the relational individual, and that also includes God. God is truly related to the world. The fountain that Bonaventure talks about, the fountain flows into the world, and I believe the world flows back into the fountain, that God shapes the world and that the world shapes God. The future is open. That's a big deal for both Teilhard and Whitehead. The future's not predetermined that—we are part of the creation of the future. There's a word that I say when I've been a pastor of congregations, the children of our churches, "God loves you. We love you, you matter, and you can do great things." I think when we think the world has already decided, we let go of our agency. And both Teilhard and Whitehead believe that we help move forward the moral arc, the spiritual arc, and the evolutionary arc of history.

Ilia: Process theology, process thinking is actually much more consonant it seems with scripture than the type of theology that has emerged with Greek metaphysics. Abraham Heschel's insight that God is the most moved mover, that God is affected by God's relationship with us, which is something not many preachers preach about or that we even hear about. Sometimes we hear God is in control or God knows all things and God never changes anything. What kind of God is that? A God who's basically inert in a living world.

Bruce: Less real than us.

Ilia: Less real than us.

Bruce: Less alive than us.

Ilia: Less alive. Exactly. How can a God who is the wholeness of life itself be less alive than that which God lent the life itself. So, sometimes there just are some illogical aspects of Western Christianity that have been forged by Greek metaphysics that as you point out, just really don't make much sense. And I think Whitehead and Hartshorn and the great process philosophers of the 20th Century, really were trying to revive a framework for a living God, a God Who is truly alive in relationship and who grows with us. And I think the other thing you pointed out, which people need to hear more and more is that our actions, our lives affect God's life. You know, that they're not just participating in God as if we're under this umbrella of divine love; we actually affect how that love grows or doesn't or diminishes. God is affected one way or the other by our choices, so it's a co-agential world. It's a co-creating world; we are creating it together. And I think that's much more conducive to actually what the New Testament is about, that God is at work in this life of Jesus, and there is something taking place there that is godly and human, godly and nature. You can't separate these things, but we have, and I think that separation has been very, very unhelpful for our world. So in your reflections on things, where do you see the role of process thinking in a world that's so divided now, so conflicted, we're so polarized, and I know you're very keenly engaged in the whole political sphere and coming to some kind of justice in a world that is deeply divided. So, how do you think about these things from the process perspective?

Bruce: And it's something that I struggle with. Like, almost every American struggle with, so that I not add to the polarization and yet have strong opinions that I try to advocate for? I think that the challenge in an odd way is to have a process evangel, have a process gospel. It's my feeling, and of course Thomas Oord has kind of been a leader in this, that conservative Christianity, and I hesitate even to use the word evangelical anymore. I was raised in evangelical Christian, so I know what that means. It means having a personal relationship with Jesus. It means walking and being in relationship, and it means having an open heart and care for others. I think there are, as a growing number of people that are finding conservative American Christianity unsatisfactory, and they're leaving the church. They're leaving churches because they can't imagine Christianity being focused on individualism and isolationism and us versus them and demonizing our opponents.

I think we have a marvelous opportunity in the Center for Christogenesis as part of this, of presenting a whole world. For me personally, being influenced by the process thought as well as what I'd call process mysticism, is that there's something of God in those people with whom I'm contending. There's something of God within them. One of my mentors, at least spiritually, and I was graced to have a chance to meet him a couple times, was Howard Thurman, the great African American mystic, lived for about 1899 to 1981. I had a chance to study briefly with him a couple times. He was a good friend of my campus pastor, who was a contemporary of his, and he talks about the mystic, seeing that God is everywhere. And that means in the one I challenge—that you don't take your foot off the accelerator into quest for justice. You may make it difficult for those who are perpetuating injustice, but you see the holiness in them, and that at least protects our own hearts.

I love the words of a song by The Who that relate, I think, to what happens when you don't do this, "Here comes the new boss, just like the old boss." In other words, all of us have the temptation of being authoritarian, of quieting our foes. And if we see the holiness in the other, we have a chance of revolutions that actually are revolutionary. We have a chance of social change that hears the voices and the fears and the anxieties of, let's say, the Christian Nationalist Movement, just to make it real. The Christian Nationalist Movement is fed on a diet of fear. It's fed on a diet that they're taking our world away from us, whether they're people of color or whether they're LGBTQ plus people. Imagine all the hot air about drag queens! Isn't even mentioned in gospel. And I think that if we can assure folks that God is at work in the world and have a process notion that we can listen without being afraid, we ourselves don't need to be afraid. Our agency is grounded in hospitality and not incivility and separation.

Ilia: No, absolutely. Bruce, I think though that fear is sort of driven by and supported by that theology. A God who is judgmental, a God who creates male and female as if these two literally are the only two sexes that could ever, possibly biologically be made. That God will judge us on the last day, and that if we don't do well, we will go to hell. And therefore, the fire of hell sort of reign over that kind of low level awareness that I could suffer for eternal life, eternal damnation, if you want to use that language. So we're sinful and this question of original sin that we can get over it because we're so weakened by it, we're de-prayed, we're fallen, and all of these things. So this kind of very binary thinking that lands itself inside of a politicization of binary thinking, that what we need is a savior figure who's going to make wrong, who's going to save us, who's going to purify us; it's a savior complex type thing. The whole thing is just an unhealthy distortion of bad theology to begin with.

Bruce: Well, yeah.

Ilia: And this, I do think, coming back to scripture, who is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jesus, the God of Hassad, the Hosea, the God of compassion, the God of mercy, the God who goes to the nth degree to call us back? You know, I have led you out to the desert and I'm speaking to you, why don't you hear me? A God who gets frustrated with us, but this is a God of unconditional love, no conditions whatsoever. And we put so many conditions on God, we impose these conditions as if God is actually this harsh judge and this very narrow thinker. This is all deep, deep fear of our own. And here I'd have to agree with Freud—it's sort about projection of our deep, deep inner fears projected onto a God idol that makes us feel good if we project those fears out of us because we can't reconcile them within us. And the whole thing I think of scripture is, come home to yourself, because that's where God is.

Robert: It's an election year in America. And if you're outside of the States, you'll either hear about our divisive campaigns or experience local divisions of your own. Next, Ilia asks Bruce, what he thinks is most important for difficult conversations, even when they feel impossible. Support for a Hunger for Wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Consider getting involved at fetzer.org.

Ilia: I also really like your point that God dwells in our opponents—those who don't think like us. Those who may be violent in their positions, and we know now as we're going into a year of elections that politics are heating up. People have very strong opinions on these things. How do we maintain conversations of justice, conversations that are equitable and charitable that we can hear one another? Because I think our fears drown out our ability to listen to one another.

Bruce: And I think we're only responsible for our own listening. Oftentimes it makes us feel rather impotent to say we're only responsible for our own listening. However, we need, without any sense of condescension, to hold our viewpoints, to share our viewpoints, and to listen to the other even when we critique. I mean, I think the same issues that work in the dynamics of pluralism. I don't think we should reach out and share our faith without the willingness to listen. And I also have a notion, the old saying that some of our grandparents may have said a stopped clock is right twice a day. And so, I looked for what some of the folks that I oppose, what the deep issue behind them is. We all want some level of security. We all want some sense that it's going to be okay, and the future's going to be okay for us, and to respond to that part of them.

It's not easy. It's not easy. I mean, I have prayer disciplines that I use just to keep me from going on the wrong track. It's easy for us to hate, it's easier for us to roll our eyebrows whenever certain people come on TV. We should, and these particular groups and people, we should oppose with every fiber of our being in terms of public policy, and yet we should perhaps still see the divine in them—because you can't be a little omnipresent. If God is present everywhere, that means God's present in the people I don't like. I mean, I think this is what I discovered from studying the Franciscans, especially St. Francis, that he had great fear of people with leprosy. He was generous to them, but generous from as far away as he could be.

You know, he'd send the check in, he'd send the check in, but heaven forbid that I'd be one. But he had an experience of encountering a person with leprosy and heard the voice of God in a way, urging him to reach out and he hugs this person. And then he's known, I'm told, as being the patron saint of lepers or persons with leprosy. Or Francis again during a time of the crusades crossing the boundary and visiting a Sultan. He had his own evangelistic purposes as the stories go. However, he listened, as well as spoke.

Ilia: First of all, Isaiah says, you see as humans see, not as God sees, so the first thing is not God. We're not God, we have no idea. You know, what it means to speak of God's love. God's love is, when we say it's unconditional, that means every single person, no matter what their political, what their language, what their color, who they are, that person is uniquely loved by God from all eternity. God grieves, God's all up into that person. And it's hard, right? But you're saying it's hard to, how is it possible that God could love this person? That's one of our questions sometimes. And that's the thing; that should call us back to a stance of humility. And I think that's what we're saying in terms of Francis. He didn't go out to just judge people; he received from them first. So the first thing for Francis is receptivity, not proclamation. It's, you receive the person, you receive that flesh in that moment as you encounter that person because it's the God here, in God's own godly way coming to us. And God comes in the strangest way sometimes. That's the funny thing about it.

And then the other thing I was thinking about as you were talking is Raimon Panikkar says, we see through our narrow windows. We look at that little window and we say, that's the whole world. And then he's saying, but if you turn your head a little bit, you'll see another pane of glass, and if you look through that window, you're going to get a whole different view. And so, our windows are not wide enough sometimes. And we mistake our little window for the entire view of things. Where this is how people are, and all these big pronouncements about major issues. The other thing I was thinking about is Leonard Swidler’s way of talking about dialogue. And Swidler said, in an article written back in the seventies, he said, it's for me—and Panikkar  actually says the same thing, "I have to leave my comfort zone and cross the threshold dia-logos. I crossed my threshold and I enter into the world of the other."

It doesn't mean I have to agree with the other, or I just have to listen. I listen to the other and try to see what that world is of the other, and then I come back to my own world. I cross back into my world and then I can discern; what did I hear? What did I experience as we tried to some kind of understanding between very different positions on things? That for Panikkar is the basis of inter-religious dialogue. And sometimes we find we have much more in common than we ever thought we would. So these are—I think, one thing, process theology does, it process from thought—it says relationality is our deepest reality. And therefore, relationship must be the starting point for any kind of conversation or any kind of working through these polarized issues at times. In fact, I think if we took process reality or process thinking at its best, we wouldn't have polarization. We would have ongoing dialogues.

Bruce: Yeah. And it wouldn't mean agreement. I think one of my teachers, Bernard Lumer, used the term size or stature, and when he said that he meant that it's the ability to hold contrasting viewpoints intention with one another without losing your center. It's the ability to affirm the need for social programs and also pay the bills. It's the ability to hold into contrast, a woman's right to choose, which I strongly affirm. And the experiences that fetuses have. I mean, I don't think we should sacrifice either the woman or the fetus in this conversation as a process theologian, I'm clear that women have value and have experience, but in a world of value of pan experientialism, within oak trees, within cells, within the cells growing in a woman's body, there is experience that needs to be reverenced. Although, there also is the contrasting values that we have to struggle with to do as little harm. I don't know if... I think that probably Hippocrates was overly generous when he said, first do no harm.

There are times when harm does occur by virtue of what we have to do. People might lose jobs if you're boycotting a business or a country in a time of war. And that's painful. But it's also appreciating the greater good that might be achieved. And I think hold the contrast, looking for the divine even as you challenge, there are certain viewpoints that I can't find any redemptive good in. And certain politicians, I can't find any redemptive good in their policies if they have them at all. And at the same time, I have to be willing to say that the God, at least I'm speaking as a Whiteheadian process person now. But I think there's a sense of this also Teilhard with the within. If God is constantly presenting us with possibilities, God is also presenting that other person with possibilities.

Ilia: You're pointing to, I think, a type of wisdom, a knowing, an intuitive knowing, that there's a time to talk, there's a time for silence. There's a time for letting the question remain a question, for the ambiguous to remain ambiguous. And I think sometimes it becomes, you know, I was thinking about this, because relationality is our deepest reality, we have the hardest time actually living in relationality is our deepest reality because we always want to reduce everything to one side or the other. Are you with me or are you against me? Are you this, are you that? And sometimes it's neither of this nor that. And I think we have the most difficult time living in the, in-between, and yet it's the in between space where life is actually happening. And so, we have to sometimes make what following Karen Barad’s idea, we have to make agential cut. We have to just make a decision. In that moment I can't resolve this one way or the other, and then that's okay. That itself is the decision.

So the unresolvedness then Miroslav Volf, in his book, Exclusion and Embrace, he lived through that Serb-Croat War and wondered how could, as a Christian, how could he live this Christian call to love people who had slaughtered his friends and murdered his relatives, friends, and things like this? You know, how do you embrace the enemy as a brother, as a friend? And so, he came to this notion of what he called the phenomenology of embrace, that open arms signal that I cannot remain isolated in myself, that there's a need for the other. And therefore, in a sense, the open arms as a sign of otherness that I cannot remain in this self-isolated existence. And then he speaks about embracing the other precisely in the midst of an unresolved question. I mean, how can the enemy ever understand or the one who has been violated, who has lost lives, I mean, precious relatives, and perhaps been deeply wounded? How do you embrace that enemy in this way? And it's precisely in the unresolved ability to recognize the past is over, and the only thing we have is the future together, and so we have to make a choice. Will we go together? Will we somehow not try to reconcile our differences, but find together what binds us for the future?

Robert: This concludes the first part of Ilia's conversation with Bruce Epperly. Listen next week when Ilia and Bruce discuss what it means to see the divine in the other. Until then, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.