Gnuse submits that process theology provides a more appropriate method for interpreting the biblical text, the Old Testament in particular, than that offered by dualistic classical based systematic theology. Classical theology, rooted in Greek philosophy, has been embarrassingly unable to adequately represent what the Bible says about God and the interaction of God with humanity. The philosophical idea of the perfection of God: his omnipotence, omniscience, and omni benevolence, must of necessity ignore, even distort, biblical depictions of God changing his mind, showing emotion, and having limited power.

Also, process theology is better able to give theological clarity to the opposing pictures of theological history and critical history, and in expressing the theological implications of the history of the biblical traditions. All of these scriptural characteristics reveal a process of development that classical theology is unable to cope with adequately.

Expressing the scriptural development theologically, Gnuse proposes to "articulate a wide range of specific themes from the Hebrew Scriptures in Whiteheadean terms" (p. 8). These themes are: God’s suffering, creation, covenant, prophecy, law and justice; and in addition, a new exposition of Heilgeschicte conditioned by process thought, followed by a discussion of the intellectual advance of Hebrew scripture, and a chapter of the development of scripture and canon.  Whitehead was dissatisfied with the analytical method, and sought to interpret the universe "holistically." Reality was relational and alive, and events were to be understood as experiences, energy events, or psychological concepts, even "extensions of the self." 

These so-called events are in process, so do not exist; rather they happen. Whitehead termed these events, "actual entities." They have a mental pole which is from God, and a physical pole which is in the world process, and is the result of what is chosen in freedom. 

Actual entities with their future dynamics are united in the temporal flow by "prehensions." Prehension can be positive or negative. Every actual entity "becomes" by drawing itself out of positive prehensions of former actual entities. Negative prehensions are rejected and forgotten.

 This process is termed "concrescence," the future acting as a creative lure for good. Thus, it is the future that is the cause of the present more than the present is determined by the past; and God is the future. The process of drawing new actual entities out of the old is termed "the primordial body of God," and because the process retains a memory of the past actual entities, this is called the "consequent body of God." 

Everything in the process is interrelating, interpenetrating, and social, and may be understood as a process of persuasion, rather than determination. God is immanent in the entire process, and evolved human beings, because of their higher consciousness, including free will, are co-creators in the future dynamics.

Applying Whitehead’s philosophy to the theme of suffering, Gnuse affirms that a God who is immanent in the entire interacting world process would feel the suffering of the actual entities, the higher forms of which are characterized by more developed forms of consciousness. Affirming a God of process who suffers, more closely aligns with the witness of the Hebrew text than does the remote God of classical theology. Thus, suffering, along with God as "lure" to the future, is a creative tool for religious advance. 

The most significant symbol of the creative and redemptive suffering in this process is seen in the suffering of Jesus. Interpreting the theme of Creation, Gnuse unites the Hebrew creation stories with other creation stories of the time, demonstrating the evolution of the Hebrew stories in Genesis as a process of prehending positive elements from her neighbor’s stories, and rejecting others. 

This brings religious advance due to the lure of God or divine persuasion. In fact, the continual creativity of God can be considered, by the eye of faith, as "the entire evolutionary process" (p. 101). Like the evolutionary story, the Hebrew story displays process and advance through the lure of God immanent in the process. This immanence is the way we must understand the image of God in humanity, and the manner by which we must perceive humans as co-creators. Everything (actual entities) interpenetrates everything else (other actual entities), including God. 

After refreshing the reader on the covenant theme in various Old Testament theologies, Gnuse points out that the primary relationship between covenant theology and process thought is the idea of dynamic and evolving relationships in communities. The language of covenant, especially the conditionality of the covenant, is dear to the hearts of process thinkers because they understand the world as a "social process." All things in the world are united and related, and can be spoken of as social relationships, particularly where it concerns those with highly evolved consciousness.

The covenant is both conditional, because it involves human response to divine persuasion (which sometimes brings rejection and pain to both God and Israel, joy with repentance and change of purpose), and unconditional, because God is the positive lure to the future. The covenant relationship demonstrates what process thinkers affirm: God is enmeshed in the human and historical process.

Gnuse’s exposition on "Prophecy" develops a process view that explains prophecy, not as unusual or supernatural occurrence breaking into the world from outside; rather the intimate experience the prophet has with the deity is an indication that God’s presence is thoroughly enmeshed in the universe. Furthermore, the traditional tendency to contrast Israelite prophecy with their contemporaries in the ancient Near East has now been modified to see continuity of religious experience. 

Mystical experience is found in especially sensitive religiosi, so the experience of the prophet is not an indication of special revelation, but a manifestation of an immanent presence of the divine available to all human beings. 

The prophetic experience is the search for transcendence from within. If the locus of divine experience is already in the world, then all encounters with the divine originate from human consciousness. Also, prophecy is not prediction, but indication of divine intent, thus all prophecy is conditional. 

Jesus relates to prophecy as the culmination of an evolutionary trajectory, the lure at work, persuading and maximizing the divine good through a process of advancing dynamic values, the culmination of prophetic anticipation which is universalized. 

Turning to the questions of the intellectual advance evidenced in the Hebrew scriptures, the evolution of the picture of Yahweh in the Old Testament, and the formation of scripture and canon, Gnuse attempts to demonstrate, by process categories, and by reference to the previously developed themes, how religious advance took place by the creative lure to the future. The advance of Hebrew scriptures is intertwined with a type of "social inspiration," as is the formation of scripture and canon. The inspired individual challenges the community and its interpretation of tradition, advances the creative process; and eventually, the community editing, filtering, and shaping the text, gives rise to the Bible. Thus, we should include the entire community in the idea of inspiration. 

This process also allows for the evolution of communities from other communities which are a single living organism characterized by diversity. It is the inspired community that supports the individual genius, and is responsible for promulgating the text, not the larger passive community.

Critique

Process Thought, Old Testament Literature and Themes.

There are numerous criticisms of process theology, so I shall not engage it in depth here. Generally, criticism revolves around the loss of a personal God, diminishing of a transcendent and a changeless divine attribute, and the minimalization of the Incarnation of God in Jesus.

Acceptance of Gnuse’s creative approach to the Old Testament depends on admitting to two critical propositions: the disjunction between the modern historical understanding of Israel’s history and that portrayed in the Bible, and the validity of the critical picture of the growth of Israel’ tradition (tradition-historical criticism). Admittance to the first focuses our attention on the second, and urges us to accommodate it within some historical-theological framework of interpretation.

Traditio-historical criticism has already demonstrated the historical growth and reinterpretation of Israel’s traditions according to specific religious needs of the time, and canon criticism has established the theological and sociological developmental factors involved there. Gnuse seeks to encompass and give solution to these problems within a process model of interpretation.

Gnuse’s application of the process model to Old Testament themes serves two important functions theologically: because God is immanent in the historical process as lure to the future, process thought provides the philosophical explanation for how external events of history and God’s action in the world are related; second, the process model, by broadening the concept of history for theological application, enables the theologian to accommodate themes which were peripheral in older approaches anchored in God’s acts and/or organized under a dominant central theme such as covenant.

But while Gnuse’s principal purpose is to interpret Old Testament themes by process categories and avoid the questions of classical theology, it has a wider goal. Prefacing his work with the universal evolutionary thought of Whitehead, referencing Israel’s developing religious thought to that of the ancient Near East, extending it to the development of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, and making claims about eventual integration with other world religions, Gnuse has integrated the religious advance of Israel with the entire universal creative process.  As Joseph Sitler has written somewhere, the history of nature has become the nature of history.

Applied to the development of the biblical literature, the process model works uncannily well. Models are generally evaluated on whether they can accommodate and explain the data, and make predictions about the future. The process model certainly accommodates the themes that Gnuse selects. The themes and literature he does not choose to comment on are those which are less compatible with his process method, but may still be integrated because they are the result of the social and religious history of Israel, thus part of her whole intellectual advance. 

It would be interesting to see how the themes which are the concern of the Chronicler could be accommodated to express religious advance. Prediction of the future is trickier, and Gnuse does not risk that, except to give it an optimistic character, because God is the future, luring creatively.

Of course, models are never completely satisfactory in accommodating all of the data. There always seem to be problems with absorbing some data. This is true in biological evolution as well. There are jumps to novelty that elude explanation within the boundaries of the model. Thus, we need not be overly critical if some of the biblical data does not fit as well as we would like in this process model. In other words it needs modification.

In general, I find nothing unduly objectionable to Gnuse’s portrayal of this literary development by the biblical authors compilers and editors. Nor do I find fault in applying some kind of evolutionary model to interpret it.

 What I find disconcerting is the refusal to dialogue with classical theology when drawing theological conclusions from biblical themes. Of course, it is difficult to criticize Gnuse for not considering the implications of something he has rejected. But, if Gnuse is rejecting classical systematic categories, why does he make reference to a "transcendence power" luring the evolutionary process toward greater complexity and order (p105)? 

Elsewhere, Gnuse wants the distinction between transcendence and immanence to be blurred, as we would expect from a process thinker who sees things holistically. Transcendence seems to be related to human consciousness and free will in future possibilities of divine luring. When he says, there is a "transcendent aspect of God that lies outside of the universe," always hidden (p.106), this must be because God is always in the future.

 This accommodates the theist’s penchant for transcendence, but it also contradicts Gnuse’s departure from classical systematic categories. If Gnuse attempts to accommodate some form of transcendence, why not other systematic categories, thus engaging in dialogue with classical systematic theology? 

But then, this would modify his holistic universe. In process thought, God is simply immanent, and Gnuse need not explore beyond. Perhaps Gnuse feels there is some vestige of dualism still in the universe.

Gnuse claims his approach is panentheistic, but the process God, except for the future reference, seems entirely within the natural process. Panentheism would seem to demand that in some sense the creation is in God. And by some means God is able, as divine energy (the Holy Spirit?), to interpenetrate the creation and become immanent in it.

One could argue by top down causation, that mental events may supervene on brain states making changes in them, and in this way God could act in the universe. But this would change Gnuse’s view of immanence. If one wishes to consult a discussion of a wide variety of approaches to God’s actions within a panentheistic perspective, one may consult Philip Clayton’s book, God and Contemporary Science.

However we speak of transcendence and immanence within a panentheistic model, it seems we must affirm that God’s existence is not contingent on process or any specific view of time; it is not contingent, but necessary. This implies that God will continue to exist beyond the universal process

Returning to the question of the growth of Old Testament literature conforming to the evolutionary paradigm of process thought, we have already pointed out that those themes expressed in historical form are obviously more adaptable to the process paradigm. And the idea that the immanent God is socially involved in relating and luring human beings to create progressive societies, allows an interpretation of other genres which are not so overtly historical. 

Thus, the legal literature may be more successfully subsumed under a process model because it exhibits ethical growth; and Wisdom can be understood, not merely as a response to God’s acts in history, but along with the intellectual activity of Israel in the arena of history. The accommodation of Wisdom in this enlarged historical perspective is commendable.

While the Covenant Code and the Deuteronimic Code more clearly show ethical development, the Holiness Code and other parts of the Priestly Code do not so clearly show it. While they certainly relate to the growth and identity of the community, their evolution is not so transparent. They do not seem to lead to something so noble as universal social justice. Just how the processual lure of God would be understood here would be more difficult than explaining the ethical progression from the Covenant Code to the Deuteronimic Code.

The Book of Psalms proves difficult to accommodate with any developmental or process model, because the individual psalms are not arranged according to any progressive thematic pattern. Gnuse calls attention to the book’s largely cultic setting in life, noting that it manifests interaction with God, and surmising that future applications of the process model will expound it appropriately. 

Yet the Psalms may be the single most important theological book in the Old Testament, and it would seem that process theology would have to arrange the individual psalms thematically and chronologically as progressive historical expressions, or interpret them all dialectically, both praise and complaint, as evidence that God relates to his people; feels their pain and their joy, as the lure draws their responses of faith into the future, ultimately to their adaptation to Christ’s suffering and triumph.

Heilsgeschichte

I found the chapter on Heilsgeschichte the most intriguing of all the chapters. Gnuse prepared us for it all along the way. It seems most natural that a method based on evolutionary history would contain a discussion of Heilsgechichte. There is some affinity between the older Heilsgeschichte and this new version, excluding versions of more fundamentalist interpreters who insist on the inerrancy of biblical history.

Heilsgeschichte of the 19th century, reacting to the impact of rationalism on biblical thought and religious ideas, retreated from the external acts of biblical history as revelation, and concentrated on the history of consciousness. The Hegelian undergirding is unmistakable. Biblical history became purely symbolic with this attention to consciousness, and to the history of piety. 

Other Heilsgechichte theologians thought of events in biblical history as symbolic of faith episodes in history that, although irretrievable by critical means, nevertheless were symbolized in stories. These stories are schematized to make up the history of salvation. Viewed from the outside we see the history of tradition; from the inside we see the history of faith, but we don’t know just what historical event to pin this to. 

The problem with this Heilsgeschichte is that it became docetic.  With the characteristic of actual entities being more like a drop of experience than an event, an extension of self, something that happens rather than exists, not existing in themselves, but in relationships with other actual entities, and above all, the advanced stage of consciousness in the actual entities which determines their level of cooperation in the creative process, we have a similar tendency, despite the dipolar nature of actual entities, to concentrate on consciousness. This tends to reduce the so called external features of events to the "symbolic."

Of course, the old idea of material and immaterial substances has been abandoned for the relational view of reality at the subatomic level advanced by quantum physics, and this abolishes the "solid" view of matter. Also, quantum physics suggests that reality takes on features dependent upon the observer. But the scientific view restricts significant human experience of the world to an intellectual grasp of what occurs at the quantum level. 

So, while we are looking at the development of the history of tradition as evidence that Israel was creatively involved in a process, or that God was luring the people as an actual entity to new actual entities in the future, we are basically focusing on the process of Israel’s consciousness cooperating with the lure to the future. This is God acting, and it is consciousness, or the forward drawn trajectories, that link the process of the Old Testament to Jesus as a special actual entity. 

This description relativizes and subordinates the person of Jesus (and the response of faith to this person) to the way process thought depicts the characteristics of an "actual entity," and the intellectual advance of process. Extended further to the development of scripture, canon, and western culture, manifestations of the same advance may be observed. 

Again, we cannot fault Gnuse for this portrayal, because this depiction follows from the process model. Interestingly enough, Gnuse is also willing to include Rabbinic Judaism, as an equally valid witnesses to the process. At least this avoids the anti-Semitism of the earlier Heilsgeschichte which took great pains to divorce Judaism from history, and to point to Christians as the real inheritors of the covenant promises.

Gnuse suggests that other major religions are to eventually be included in this process of religious advance as well. Again, one would expect such a prediction from a process thinker. It is a truly ecumenical move, and while that may be applauded, in my opinion, Gnuse’s inclusion of the evolution of culture, western society, in particular, as the result of the lure of God, has moved his thought into a full blown "theory of progress."

Some Additional Observations

Gnuse argues that the traditional reformation position of salvation by the grace of Christ alone violates the holistic approach of process thought. Faith and works are parts of an integrated whole. If every interpenetrating actual entity is a co-creator in the process with the interpenetrating process God, humans included, then the creative "lure" to the future cannot exclude human contributions. Faith, or grace, and works, are unified. What God does and what humanity does both count.

If the basic problem of environmental responsibility lies in comprehending humanity and world holistically, rather than analytically or dualistically, God, immanent in all existing actual entities, forges a respectable bond between God, humanity, and the world. The fact that God is enfleshed in the process is also a suggestive idea, even though the person of God and the incarnation of divinity in the person of Jesus will have to be informed more by classically informed systematic theology than Gnuse seems willing to explore in order to express the fundamental confession of the Christian faith.