PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

08 Sep PAT BAILEY’S SPIRITUALITY WITH RELIGION

Editor’s note: In his doctoral dissertation, Pastor Pat Bailey of Telluride’s Christ Presbyterian Church is claiming the need for a re-visioning of the Christian church’s theology and its understanding of mission, the need for a more natural, integrative theology and for an earth-focused, contextual approach to mission. To that end, he is reviewing the theology of three contemporary theologians whose thought is very integrative of Nature and Spirit from three very different approaches. Pastor Pat is currently reviewing the thought of David Ray Griffin, based on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. This blog is part of a weekly series.

Pastor Pat Bailey

Griffin speaks of God’s nature as being dipolar: God has both a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The primordial nature is that aspect of God that is unchanging. Griffin likens it to a person’s character, “the set of characteristics that remains virtually the same day after day.”  The consequent nature, on the other hand, represents the aspect of God as changing as it exists in reciprocal relationship with the world. A dipolar view of God allows the classical attributes while also transcending them. God’s primordial nature is timeless, unchanging, absolute, impassible.  God’s consequent nature is temporal, contingent, relative, dependent, changeable, and passable.

Griffin holds together these two aspects of God and considers both as necessary for “a religiously adequate idea of God.”

“We must think of God as both necessary and contingent, both absolute and relative, both unchanging and changing, both independent and dependent, both non temporal and temporal.” 

The Christian concept of the Holy Spirit and all those other biblical allusions to the agency of God’s self-revealing and of the experiencing of God in the natural world are, then, descriptions of the consequent nature or concrete states of God.

Griffin is seeking to provide a metaphysical description of God that is modern rather than premodern. Can you imagine God as having two natures that are polar opposites of one another?  Is it disconcerting or comforting to think of the possibility that God changes in response to our and Nature’s causality and evolution?