TNT: Prayer and Process reaction

Tripp and Bo, Can't wait to hear some of the material from the Claremont/Emergent Village event - I managed to tune in to some of the John Cobb session on the video feed (stunning tattoos!), but the streaming got turned off just as things were getting REALLY interesting! Someone I think would interest you greatly in the whole dialogue between Process and other thought streams is the Eastern Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko, who has a compelling regular series of podcasts over at www.ancientfaith.com . Although he might come across as a little folksy at first, we're talking a major name here: Fr. Hopko was Dean of St Vladimir's Seminary in NY, which for anyone who knows anything about the Orthodox diaspora is one of the world's most important seminaries in that tradition - successor to people like Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, who are huge figures in EO theology. His podcasts can get a bit rambling at times, and on occasion he can sound overly conservative for some tastes (although he is just as critical of fundamentalism as of certain forms of liberalism), but he's the first person I've come across who is able to communicate the riches of that particular Christian tradition in a way that is very accessible to contemporary Westerners. And it's clear that although his delivery is extremely direct, he not only has a huge knowledge of Patristics but is also well versed in Heidegger, Teilhard, René Girard, Abraham Heschel ... I got onto this after reading a stimulating essay of David Ray Griffin's responding to some of Hopko's ideas which he put out in his Fordham Ph.D work back in the 1980s, which compared Eastern Orthodoxy and Process - seeing a lot of commonalities in the way of viewing the God-world relationship, but also some critical differences. Hopko talks about all this in one of his podcasts in a megaseries of 17 episodes entitled 'Darwin and Christianity': http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/darwin_and_christianity_-_part_13_god_and_creation It's really quite brilliant (the whole series is well worth listening to more generally, particularly as Hopko is strong on constructive engagement with natural science and has a lot of sympathy for people who reject Christianity because of the fundamentalist distortions of it and religious platitudes that they've encountered). Basically Hopko feels that Process is onto something important, and agrees with Whitehead about the deficiencies of 'classical theism', but he doesn't want to sacrifice the immanent Trinity as part of the deal - which I guess is probably also the position that Greg Boyd and the later Moltmann (to name just two examples) would take. Why I think Hopko's voice is important in this conversation is that it shows that being positively - if not uncritically - engaged with Process is perfectly compatible with having an orthodox (in both senses of the world) Christian theology IF you actually go back to Biblical and Early Church sources rather than trying to defend all the later scholastic and post-Reformation ways in which Christianity swallowed some pretty unhelpful metaphysics which it then dogmatized. That's not so different from what a wide variety of folks such as Boyd, Moltmann, Richard Rohr, John Haught ('God after Darwin'), Harvey Cox ('The Future of Faith') and Huston Smith ('The Soul of Christianity') are also saying about the God-world relationship, however much they may diverge about other issues. This one cuts across denominational boundaries, which is one of the most exciting aspects of the whole discussion. Looking forward to lots more from the EVTC - bring it on!! Peter B.

Wow, what an amazing TNT!! Tripp, thank you for what you shared on Job and biblical scholarship. Having grown up in Pentecostal circles and graduating from a Bible college, I never heard this perspective (I probably would have been kicked out just for entertaining these sort of thoughts). Listening to the two of you talk makes me feel like a complete novice, and I love it!

Excellent podcast, I've been listening over the last few months and really getting a lot out of them. I like bringing new ideas into the conversations I've been having with our more conservative friends. The problem I'm having is this: I want to share the podcasts with more of my friends (It would be good for them, you know ...share the brew). However, when I do, people realize that these wonderful and witty ideas I have been bringing into the conversation, aren't really mine.

Oooooooh. I think I'm starting to understand now. I like that one thing Tripp says, what was it, "God knows all the possibilities?" I think that's the main thing that confused me about process theology. "God doesn't know future? But He's beyond the limitations of time and space, right?" But if I'm hearing right--and please correct me if I'm wrong--it's not so much that God has no idea what's going to happen in the future the way we have no idea what's going to happen. Instead, God knows in advance what effect our present decisions, and allows us to make those decisions. Is that right, or am I just talking out of my ass again?

I'm really liking this conversation. The one thing that I'm worried about losing with the notion of omnipotence is the eschatological hope and even assurance that things will come out all right in the end--that, to quote Rob Bell in Love Wins, God will eventually get what God wants. Does ditching omnipotence open up the possibility that justice will not one day overcome injustice, that peace will not overcome violence, that love will not in fact win? If you've spoken to this already I apologize.