God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology

The Torah of Israel is truly a collective work: not only does it engage the entire people across generations, but it also articulates the divine potentiality that invites continuing interpretation, exploration, and new tellings of its tales and new applications of its laws.

second possibility builds on the first, adding the plausible hope that consciousness and identity continue unimpaired. As God is process, and as God is the One who is supremely connected to everything, supremely related, and forgetting nothing, we remain eternally alive in God’s memory, in God’s thought—which, it turns out, is what we have been all

As the Hasidic master Rabbi Simcha Bunim told his students, “You cannot find peace anywhere if you do not find it in yourself.”

When confronted by such a moral outrage, theologians too often hide behind the term mystery. Or they assert that God’s definition of good and evil is different from our own. If a million babies murdered is not evil by God’s definition, then the term evil has no meaning. Such an atrocity is surely evil, regardless of the perpetrator.

the very values that have emerged from the Bible sensitize us to hear those tales and practices with heightened awareness. Scripture is always clothed in interpretation, made real through active engagement.

Our task in the world is to savor the bounty, to delight in it, steward it, and help each other to do the same. We are to make ourselves a blessing and commit to being grateful for the blessings.

In philosophical language, the former is the challenge of universal revelation (discernment of the Divine available to all through nature, intuition, and reason), which Judaism calls gilui ha-Shekhinah. Special revelation (made accessible through particular scriptures and tradition) is known in Judaism as matan Torah, giving of Torah, or as Torah m

we must rise to the responsibility of interpreting the text in such a way that God’s love, justice, compassion, and connection become more apparent, more inspiring, more clear. Revelation involves active engagement, not passive reading.

On the atomic, molecular, biochemical, cellular, biosystemic, bodily, and even conscious levels, we are not stable substances at all. We are constantly engaging in a give-and-take with the rest of creation, all simultaneously.