How God Holds Power Without Coercion with Sheri Kling

Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. Today, I'm delighted to welcome back teacher and writer Dr. Sherry Kling to discuss her recently edited volume, Renewing Faith. We explore how emerging theological movements, like process and open and relational theology, are shaping everyday faith and integrating more deeply with today's scientific worldview. Later, Sherry offers a compassionate reflection on suffering and divine power. We're delighted today to welcome back Dr. Sherry Kling, who wears many hats. She is a theologian, minister and director of process and faith, and today's conversation will center around a newly edited and published book, Renewing Faith, which is, as I understand it, a collection of essays by numerous voices that explore how process and open and relational theology can truly awaken a sense of God, a sense of worship, and a sense of community. Exactly. And certainly, we do not need to look too far to know that in our age that's marked by huge disillusionment and fragmentation, this work in particular offers us something quite rare. And I would call it, and Sherry, I hope you would agree, a faith expansive enough to meet our uncertainty, yet intimate enough to speak to our longing for wholeness. So with that, Sherry, we welcome you back. Thank you, Robert. So glad to be back. Your little ending phrase there perfectly captures, I think, exactly what we're aiming for in this book. Fantastic. So why don't we help our readers understand, first of all, and maybe this goes to that ending phrase, that ending sentence. What exactly led you to organize this book around the theme, Renewing Faith? Well, the book actually came out of a conference, an online conference that Process and Faith, which is a program of the Center for Process Studies, held in January of 2025, that had multiple people coming together. And we had a really great attendance at that event. And we had different presentations and panels talking about kind of the core topics of Christian faith. Like Bruce Epperly was, he and I were kind of the keynote speakers, and we talked about the overall concept of renewing faith. What about our faith can be renewed by these Process and Relational and Open and Relational approaches? So what about that kind of faith is renewing of us? And how can we, as people interested in this kind of approach to theology and philosophy and faith, what can we do to renew the Christian faith overall? So that conference had panels looking at the core Christian topics of God, Jesus, Spirit, and then preaching or message, worship, and community. And so we had usually three to four people in each of those topics in conversation about the topic. And then, right from the beginning, I knew that I wanted to plan to create a book after the conference. And what ended up happening is many of the people who were part of the conference contributed an essay, but we reached out to others beyond the conference. So we have, I think, about 45 contributors in this volume. There's a total of a few more essays than that because there was a handful of us that wrote more than one. So maybe it's around 50 or 52 total essays. And they're organized by those same core themes, faith, God, Jesus, et cetera. And the people who contributed, some are theologians like Thomas J. Ord and Rebecca Parker and Bruce Eperly. Some are ministers, some are chaplains and spiritual directors, and then lay people with different backgrounds, but who all are embracing and have found these process and relational and open and relational approaches to be renewing for them. And so the essays are robust, they're rich, informative, and also very personal. They're very reflective and moving in many cases. The stories that are told and the journeys that all of our contributors, they don't all give a lot of detail about their own personal journey, but they all kind of touch on what moved them in this kind of approach to Christian faith and why it made a huge difference in their own lives and brought their own faith back in a renewed way for them. Now this might be a tall order, Sherry, but in light of the terms that we're throwing out here, process theology and open and relational theology, for listeners who might be unfamiliar with those categories, how might you describe it in everyday language and what makes process theology and open and relational theology different from traditional Christian theology? Yeah, that is a tall order, but I will do my best. So the category open and relational is kind of an umbrella category that includes process theology. And process theology emerged out of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who was a mathematician and philosopher born in Britain, but then brought to Harvard in the 1920s, and that was where he spent the rest of his career. He was known at that time in the 1920s as like the philosopher talking about philosophy of science. And so he was writing at a time, you know, after Darwin, after Einstein, after the discovery of quantum mechanics. And he really felt so strongly that our view of ultimate reality, which in philosophy, the term for that is metaphysics, which is not doesn't the word metaphysics, it's used in different ways that are misleading in the sense of a philosophical idea. It's not about like woo woo things that are not physical. It's about kind of the level above the physical world that looks at the structure of all of reality and how it works. And so Whitehead felt really strongly that what we say in an abstract way about the way things are in ultimate reality or in the world we live in should reflect our own experience. It shouldn't be an abstract level that doesn't relate at all to our everyday experience as human beings, as we observe what's emerging in the sciences. And so that was very important to him. And so he felt like to begin, you begin with experience, then you can like kind of rise above experience and reflect on it. So as a category, and I'm certainly a more influenced by or more knowledgeable about process theology as a category, what's called open and relational theology. That's a term coined by Thomas Ord. And those two terms really refer, I'll start there, refer to the idea that the future is open and that the world and God are all relational or are interrelated, interconnected and always in relationship. So I would say that these theologies are, first of all, they do reflect our actual experience of the world. And so they're very friendly to science. You don't have to check your scientific mind at the door in order to embrace or consider, at least, some of the ideas that are within these systems. And I guess I would say my little brief 30 second elevator speech about process theology is that it looks at the world as always in the process of becoming very evolutionary and that God is not just transcendent to the world, but actually imminent within the world. In fact, that God and the world are mutually imminent within each other. And it's what's called a panentheistic viewpoint, meaning that all of the world is contained within God and related to God. God holds all of the world within God's self, but also is beyond the world. God in the world aren't identical in terms in the same way that a pantheistic approach would take panentheism, that EN that's added to that word, means that all is in God. God holds all within God's self, but God is also beyond the actualized world. But God is always involved with the world that in those moments that, you know, process theology says that everything is always becoming, always evolving, and that reality is based in events, not substances. So things are coming into being and perishing all the time. Coming into being, coming into being, forming out of the past world, creating something new and giving that newly created actual experience to the next moment for its creation. And that God is related to the world. God takes up everything the world does and then returns to the world new possibilities for actualization that are God's vision for what the world can be. There are many different ways, different process theologians and open and relational theologians look at a lot of these questions differently. It's not like there's one answer to every question, but, you know, a process theology would stress Jesus's humanity and that Jesus's divinity is more a sense of Jesus's willingness to listen for God's possibilities in every moment and to actualize as closely to those possibilities as is possible for a human. And so I always say that I think people experienced Jesus as divine because he was so fully transparent to God and showed God's light in his own life so clearly. But also process theology and open and relational theology talk about God's powers persuasive that God lures us toward these better possibilities and that novelty is possible in every moment that we aren't just imprisoned by the past. See this is to me, see my focus as a theologian is really on psychospiritual wholeness and transformation. So, you know, your theme of hunger for wholeness is right up my alley because that's what I'm interested in. And so I talk about the state of the world that we're in right now is being so fragmented. We're at every level, societally, interpersonally and intra-personally, meaning within ourselves. We're split. We're so split and divided. And I see resources like process theology as being very integrating because they show us a whole world that is in relationship with us and facilitates our own wholeness itself. And to me, that's very hopeful. So when I encountered my own journey first took me through an involvement in Jungian psychology and seeing that as crucial to my own spiritual unfolding and spiritual journey and my own wholeness. And then I discovered process theology, which matched very well to me to what I already was experiencing. It set my own journey within a larger sort of cosmic context and theological context that made sense to me. I didn't have to compartmentalize who I was as a thinking person and what I had experienced of God and the sacred from Christian theology. And I think that's a lot of the dissatisfaction we see today is because people have inherited traditions that are based in world views that go back to medieval times, medieval categories, medieval ways of looking at the world, and they no longer fit us. It's like a set of clothes that don't fit us anymore. And now we're looking at a whole new world with the sciences saying all kinds of interesting things about the world. And even in ecological sciences, the way everything is interconnected, you can't isolate things as separate little, I mean, everything is unique, but you can't isolate anything out from its environment. It just can't be done. You have to talk about everything within its context. So that's how we all are in relationship with everything else. So anyway, I saw that theology is lining up better with my own experience with my own religious experiences, mystical experiences, scientific knowledge, it all made better sense to me than what kind of a classical theological approach typically teaches. It's an uphill challenge to bring the medieval cosmologies of our religious traditions into the 21st century. In that light, how can we, as practitioners and teachers, sustain and emphasize this slow, vital work amid suffering and crisis? Next, I ask Sherry how these renewed insights might help heal the alienation wrought by theologies of a distant, detached God. A brief word of gratitude and an invitation. The Center for Christogenesis is in the midst of our winter fundraiser as we celebrate ten years of exploring faith, science, and the promise of a new future. If this podcast has sparked insight or studied your spirit, please consider supporting our next decade of work. Your gift fuels new episodes, conversations, learning resources, and community. At a time when organizations vital to our shared future are losing support, your contribution affirms that our mission matters, now, more than ever. Donate today at Christogenesis.org/donate. Thank you for journeying with us. You're hitting on something very important to Sherry that I just want to tease out a little bit more, especially in an age in which people who feel they've lost their faith because they no longer believe in certain doctrines, particularly certain doctrines of God. As you said, a whole new world view leads to a whole new view of God as well. One of the striking themes in this book, I think, is a shift from God as omnipotent to a God whose power is persuasive, as you've mentioned. How is this shift from an omnipotent God to a God of persuasion so significant for people wrestling with suffering and this idea of theodicy that we talk about in theological circles? How can this God of persuasion help them confront those issues without theologizing them out of existence and perhaps renew their faith in the process? Yeah. Well, I want to give, I think, a really clear example first, which comes from a book by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock called Proverbs of Ashes, and they are two women theologians, both writing from a process orientation generally, and that book particularly is about atonement and Christ's atoning work. And they look at the more traditional ideas where Jesus is seen as being sent to suffer this crucifixion in order to pay a debt or to achieve forgiveness for sin, and they talk about the inherent abusiveness of that idea. If God is father and God sends God's son to be killed, that's a pretty abusive parent. And so in this book, they each approach theology through a very personal lens of their own experiences. And so Rebecca Parker in that book talks about her own really horrific experience of abuse at the hands of a neighbor, I won't go into details, but it was a very horrific situation when she was very, very young. And there's one particular event that she's describing, and she says that while this abuse was happening, she had a sense of God's presence in the corner of the room, like at the ceiling in the corner of the room, desperately trying to get the attention of her abuser, like she just felt this presence of God, then she said, I knew if that man had turned and saw what I saw, he could never have done what he did, because he would have been moved to act differently. And so she felt the presence of God, trying desperately to bring that abusive man to a different possibility, and God failed. God was not successful in that luring, because the man didn't look, the man wasn't open to being changed from his path. I mean, that was my interpretation of the story of that part. And so when we have omnipotent images of God, it leaves us with questions like, well, if God is all powerful, then how does God allow this suffering to continue? And it's even worse when people think that God makes the suffering happen. So I think if we look at a open and relational process, relational perspective and see God first as love and first as relational, and if God is whatever this whole, we can call it an experiment of embodied life is about, I personally think that it's about decision-making and value creation. It's like, to me, God is like this great field of possibility that's always coming to, like each living thing is like an arising perspective from the field of a unique perspective on the whole. And that unique perspective of the person or the animal, whatever it is to its capacity, our purpose is to make decisions and to create value, to create something, to actualize some real thing in the world, so that God can experience that for God's self. And so that we can learn and grow as a result of having made those decisions. And so we have free will within this world. We have the capacity to decide whether or not we're just going to repeat the past or do something new in the future. And what is the evaluation we go through as a momentary event within the events that make us up? That momentary event is a decision point in every event. What are we going to do? What are we going to create? What are we going to co-create with God in this world? If our vision of God is God as this omnipotent being, like a big cop in the sky, and when we say things that are so, I would say, such bad theology, you know, when someone dies and we say, "Oh, God wants another angel," I mean, really, you know, that just, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make it any better. I prefer the view that, you know, if we believe God was in Jesus, then God came in solidarity with this suffering planet to walk on this planet and experience everything that we experienced including the most horrific kind of suffering in death at the hands of evil, and hold on to the faith and the knowledge that that isn't the whole story, that there's more going on here than we can even imagine, and that God doesn't necessarily cause everything to happen. And even if we don't know, like, there are theologians who differ, you know, Tom Orrd in his book, God Can't, will say that God's nature as love actually means that God cannot coercively control the world. That is not an option in God's self because God's nature is love and that is the core of it. I hope Tom would think that I summarized his work well in that little explanation. Other theologians might say, and I read a book by a theologian I love named Thomas Hosinski, he was a Catholic process theologian who passed away a couple of years ago, he talks about there being a sort of a divine canosis that God gives up that in order for there to be an embodied world of real things, in real relationship with God, that God gives up that kind of coercive power. Now so we might be, you know, splitting hairs to say, is there a way in which God still has that power, or is it true that God just doesn't have that power at all? I sort of come down a little bit more on the canosis side, but saying that if God were to try to reclaim the power that maybe God has at some level that there could be no world. The world itself could not exist if God took back all of that possibility of coercive power, that the world itself as an embodied world could no longer exist. I won't get into all of why I say that exactly that way, but so I believe that there maybe there is a way that God is giving up a certain amount of power in order for there to be a real world that is in real relationship with God's self so that God can experience what embodiment brings and the decision making that entails and the value that creates. So in all that then I see our role as humans especially. You know when I'm with Pierre-Téhard de Chardin on this, seeing humans as having a very unique capacity and role, then our purpose is noble and dignified because we are contributing to God's own life. It's not just that we're learning and our souls are developing, which I believe they are. You know, I love near-death experiencer stories, like I'm kind of addicted to the YouTube channels that interview people who have had near-death experiences and in fact recently attended and spoke at the International Association of Near-Death Studies Conference where I got to meet one of my longtime life heroes, Raymond, Dr. Raymond Moody, who wrote the seminal book Life After Life in published in 1975. And a lot of their stories, you know, talk about this sense in which so many of them say that we exist before this life as a soul, that we kind of plan out the major plot points of our life, what we're going to be learning and how we're going to go through that and what knowing that there's going to be suffering that comes with that and we kind of come into this world knowing that but yet having free will within those major plot points to make decisions and do particular things differently, there's always that free will. So you know, I'm not here to argue for or against what that all means theologically because I'm still sort of working, thinking through all that and working all of that out. But we can say not only are we here to learn, not only are we living this life and developing, but that we are also contributing to God's actual life and therefore our work, our lives are hugely valuable and noble and dignified and real and meaningful. And when we can see our lives within that kind of a context, wow, does that raise everything up to a whole new level. Next time I ask Sherry what a relational process theology means for the practice of prayer. As always, I'm Robert Necastro, thanks for listening.