This question presents an ambiguity that reveals at least two questions, at one and the same time. The least interesting has to do with Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is dead,”1 a bold claim that summarily denies God any future—period! Far more interesting are the entwined questions of whether God is, in an important sense, temporal . . . and whether God is wholly, and without qualification, immutable.
For two thousand years or more the Holy Reality has been almost exclusively defined by all those icy Absolutes attributed to Her long ago by a stubborn masculine and patriarchal bias. When the “wheels of thought” run in deep ruts, it’s hard to get them going in a new direction.
In the divine cry of our time, Our Lady of Process, the new womanly God, who, through her boundless love, is as intimate with each one of us as mother with fetus, as Madonna and Child, calls out for a new name and a reattribution of all Her “yin” virtues.
After discussing how, in Oriental thought, the great Tao is often compared to water, Charles Hartshorne makes a revealing observation: that it is a typically Western idea to exalt “masculine mastery, power, stability, control, being, absoluteness, while depreciating the feminine: yielding, passive, fluid—that is, becoming and relativity.”2
What is it to say that someone is “relative”? In a process world, it is merely to say that he or she is “rich in relations.” God, then, as the great example, not the great exception, to metaphysical principles, is said to be surrelative: supremely relative and wondrously rich in relations, both giving and receiving influence to and from all actualities throughout the vast universe. This supports the perennial intuition that God is love—love in the most fundamental sense, that is, a sympathetic love that shares and feels the feelings of others: rejoicing in their joys and sorrowing with them in their sorrows. This is a rejection of the purely impassive God of medieval theology and Aristotle’s so-called “Unmoved Mover,” to whom the apocalyptic suffering of the Jewish Holocaust would cause not so much as a single blip on the Divine Sonar.
One of our great mystic poets suggests that, far from being unmoved by our suffering, God is the best- and the most-moved mover:
O! he gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.3
And stop for a moment and reflect on what has been called the two most moving words in the Gospels: Jesus wept.4
On the lighter divine side, there arise, for each of us, dazzling invitations to eventuate in the laughter of creative satisfaction:
From unfathomable depths of profundity
Come ever-new evocations of fecundity
Elevating each to jouissance of jocundity.
Rejoice and be glad!
Notes
1. The divine death sentence, “God is dead!” reverberates in two of Nietzsche’s books, The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the passages wherein both occur can be found in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, on pages 95 and 202.
2. Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery, 147.
3. William Blake, Songs of Innocence.
4. John 11:35.