Tallman: New theologies reconcile modern qualms with belief in God

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In contemporary culture, you do not have to choose between atheism and problematic conventional theology. In the past sixty years many new theologies have developed: existential, evolutionary, process, charismatic, feminist, womanist, gay, Black, Indigenous, ecological and quantum theologies offer many options. There are theologies of sexuality and the body. You can find a theology that fits your world view.

One of the most promising new theologies is being developed by Thomas Jay Oord. In Open and Relational Theology, he notes that a survey by two Oxford University social scientists found that 96 per cent of Americans believe in four different versions of God: authoritative (God controls everything) (32 per cent); benevolent (God is loving) (24 per cent); distant (God is not involved in human life so almost anything goes) (24 per cent); and critical (God is not involved except to punish people in the afterlife) (16 per cent).

Roughly three-quarters of these believers thus subscribe to conventional theology in which God is overcontrolling, not influenced by humans, and never changes.

Open and relational theology on the other hand believes God knows everything past and present, but not the future. God and creatures experientially move into the future open to whatever happens. If God knew the future in advance, things would have to unfold the way God knew them and there would be no freedom and consequently no love. Everything would be preordained.

In the view of Oord and others, God is not only open, God gives and receives in relation to creation, therefore God is relational. God cannot singlehandedly stop free creatures such as humans from doing evil. It is never the case that God could stop evil but chooses not to. In this approach, God neither permits nor allows suffering because God is powerless to stop evil, if that is what we choose. God’s love is not a controlling love. Rather than overpowering, God empowers. God is what Oord calls “amipotent” not “omnipotent.” God does act, but God is not all-powerful, and God only acts out of love.

To prevent evil and suffering, God has to collaborate with human beings. God and humans co-create the future together. From inside our heart and conscience, God lures, inspires, and cajoles us, but God does not control us. We are free to cooperate with God or not. God does not condemn anyone to hell, we create our own heaven or hell on Earth by the free choices we make. What we do therefore matters; it even affects God!

Therefore, our lives count because things are not preordained. Since God is relational, like anyone in a relationship, God can change. God’s essence never changes, but God’s experience changes all the time. Our prayers therefore matter. They affect how God experiences the world, they affect the world, and they affect us.

In this theology, God is more powerful than anything, but God’s power is the power of persuasion: God is constantly working within us trying to persuade us to do the right thing. God suffers with us if we make the wrong choices, but then tries to draw good out of whatever happens.

Open and relational theology solves many problems of conventional theology: God’s seeming indifference, a lack of intervention by God, or God bringing horrible things on us to “teach us a lesson,” having to resort to convoluted explanations or “mystery” to explain how an omnipotent, omniscient and supposedly all-loving God can allow rape, crime and war.

This theology gives reasonable and relatively simple answers that, besides fitting with our own intuitions and life experience about the way things work, also fits with scripture where God clearly is relational and often changes his mind based on what humans do.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director, marriage preparation specialist and religious educator of adults. His latest book is God’s Ecstatic Love. brucetallman.com btallman@rogers.com