ABSTRACT
Whitehead’s own program had been quite different from both. For him religious issues were part of a broad cosmological reconstruction (Whitehead 1929). This required the extension of the hypothetical or speculative method from the sciences to a comprehensive theory that includes metaphysical elements. His method was to propose hypotheses, draw forth their implications, and then test them. His most general hypothesis is that events or experiences are more fundamental than enduring substances and objects. This requires testing in all the natural sciences as well as sociohistorical and humanistic elds. Religious experience and beliefs are among these. Employment of the speculative method does not depend on any xed foundation, and it does not build to certain conclusions. Everything is open to correction in the light of new evidence. This is true of the sciences, and certainly also of the cosmology. But this tentativeness does not lead to skepticism. There is a vast body of knowledge that, for most practical purposes, is well established and reliable. Change in science and in cosmology usually consists in incorporating into a larger context that can explain new data as well as what was previously known. A process cosmology does not require abandonment of all that has been learned by those who have understood the world to be composed of matter in motion. Whitehead’s cosmology depicts a world in which everything is so interrelated that academic approaches that divide up the data already distort them. Philosophy should not be separated from other elds, and religious thinking cannot be separated from other forms. Philosophy of religion is integrated into process philosophy as a whole, as in the three-volume work of Frederick Ferré (Ferré 1996; 1998; 2001). Insofar as the faculty at Chicago used a term for what they shared it was ‘neonaturalism.’ In addition to the radical empiricists, the rationalistic metaphysicians, and the speculative cosmologists, there were other neo-naturalists who drew on multiple naturalist traditions. Bernard Meland represents this stance. He continued the historical emphasis of the earlier Chicago school, enriching it with cultural and aesthetic motifs. Bernard Loomer moved across all these boundaries, but is best located here. The Chicago school broke up in the 1950s and 1960s with key faculty going to Harvard, Union, Princeton, Emory, and the Graduate Theological Union. The heirs of neo-naturalism have continued to express their commonality and differences in the Highland Institute and the Journal of American Philosophy and Theology. They are now more likely to call themselves naturalists, pragmatists, radical empiricists, or historicists than neo-naturalists. During the 1950s, Loomer spoke of ‘process theology,’ and this term rapidly came into general use. All branches of the Chicago school thought in processual terms, but ‘process theology’ has tended to name the work of those who followed Whitehead and Hartshorne most closely. This tradition has been promoted by the Center for Process Studies, which I founded in 1973 with David Grif n at the Claremont School of Theology, and by its journal, Process Studies, established and long edited by Lewis Ford. At Chicago, instead of a department of ‘systematic theology’ there was a department of ‘constructive theology.’ The idea was that recent intellectual changes in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were so drastic that students needed to rethink religious beliefs for themselves. The results were generally at the periphery of church theology. This kind of process thinking continues to this day. However, as the conceptualities of Whitehead and Hartshorne were more fully appropriated, their fruitfulness for broader use in mainstream theology was recognized. In the 1960s, a Chicago graduate, Schubert Ogden, synthesized a Hartshornian understanding of God with a Bultmannian understanding of human existence and Christology (Ogden 1961; 1963). Daniel Day Williams wrote The Spirit and the Forms of Love, which remains the best Whiteheadian systematic theology (Williams 1968). Since then process categories have been applied to many traditional theological topics. William Beardslee developed the connection between process thought and biblical studies. Chalice Press is publishing a commentary series on the Beardslee model (Beardslee 1994) written from this perspective. There is extensive process writing also on preaching, Christian education, and pastoral counseling. Whitehead in uenced William Temple and Lionel Thornton in England and, in the United States, Norman Pittenger, who adopted the ‘process’ label (Pittenger 1968). The context for these thinkers was Anglicanism rather than American naturalism. After Vatican II, Catholic followers of Teilhard recognized af nities with Whitehead. The rst book to bear the title ‘Process Theology’ was edited by Ewert Cousins, a leading Catholic theologian, and consisted of essays by Whiteheadians and Teilhardians (Cousins 1971). Although the openness of Catholics to process theology has decreased, close relations between Teilhardians and Whiteheadians continue. For a while there was a strong Whiteheadian in uence at Yale. The movement of process thinking was further broadened by Grif n’s labeling his SUNY Series ‘Constructive Postmodernism,’ which includes several volumes by Grif n himself (Grif n 2001). The term ‘postmodern’ had been used sporadically by process thinkers since the 1960s. The later French movement that gave ‘postmodernism’ wide currency reinforced many Whiteheadian criticisms of modernity, but it concluded on a ‘deconstructive’ note. Whiteheadians joined with other constructive critics of modernity in emphasizing reconstruction.
