God as Co-Created: The Two-fold Ontic Status of God

Author(s): Edgar A. Towne

Source: American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 2/3 (May/September
2006), pp. 204-213
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27944379
Accessed: 07-06-2020 03:39 UTC

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 God as Co-Created: The Two-fold Ontic Status of
God

Edgar A. Towne / Christian Theological Seminary

Idevelop hereofthe
Meland's theology culturethesis
with somestated
referencein theTillich
to Paul titleand by reference to Bernard E.
Charles Hartshorne. A divine ontic status may seem too definitive a
specification to be compatible with Meland's "right to be vague," as
Gary Dorrien stated his principle,1 but I will show that Meland's
theology, however apophatic-like, allows God to have a specifiable
ontic status in nature and in the historically-realized interaction with
nature of human beings and their "fallible forms and symbols" of faith
and reason. This is not to fly off into reifying metaphysical speculation,
but to locate the ultimacies within the immediacies of living, as Meland
was wont to say.2 This article is part of an ongoing personal inquiry in
search of a plausible idea of God in the context of the current science
and religion conversation.

Benign Mutual Respect: Science and Religion Today

In considered
the contexttheologyof modern
to be science
"constructive" becausesince the 17th century, Meland
theology's
traditional claims become problematic in the light of our rapidly

1 Gary Dornen, "Metaphysics, Imagination and Creative Process: Bernard Meland and
Chicago School Theology," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 25, no. 3
(September, 2004): 199-224; citation 20S. Dornen rightly says Meland "wrote in a
murky, ruminating, elusive style" (199) and that "Meland knew that his work was
elusive and prone to musing" (211). In a telephone conversation with me on November
13, 1986, when we were discussing the fact that his thought would be discussed at a
meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Meland said, "I do think I have an
angle. I don't think it is esoteric, but it doesn't seem to be readily available."
2 Meland's Chicago predecessors made the same point as follows. "To reduce God to
the idea of God is like reducing bread to the idea of bread. But it is bread, not the idea
of bread, that is the staff of life" (George Burman Foster, "Concerning the Truth of
Religious Ideas," The Biblical World 41 [1913]: 65-67; citation 65). "Religion as
behavior and consequent experience is not to be identified with philosophy any more
than the growth of crops is to be identified with agronomy" (Shailer Mathews, "Social
Patterns and the Idea of God," The Journal of Religion 11, no. 2 [April, 1931]: 159-78;
citation 162). Meland embraced these ideas, but not Mathews's "mentalism."

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 Vol. 27, Nos. 2 & 3, May/September 2006 205

increasing empirical knowledge. In the current science and religion

conversation the validity of the empirical method is not in question,
though its techniques are rapidly being refined and expanded. Except
in cases where religious doctrine is allowed to call scientific method
into question, the exponents of religion can be said to be interpreting
their faith in light of this advancing scientific knowledge without fear of
it. Fides quaerens intellectum. In this sense faith may become more
vital as it becomes more plausible. This is not to say faith is proved
either rationally or empirically. Nor is it to say that science is allowed
to call doctrine into question. There is a benign mutual respect; science
may ignore religion and religion need not revise its doctrines in light of
science.
However, the exponents of religion do press those of science to
respect the data of their faith such that they are not reduced to a
physicalist explanation. This is the significance of terms such as "dual
aspect monism" (Polkinghorne) and "whole-part constraint"
(Peacocke), which suggest the view I am advocating here, though these
authors do not embrace it.3 The pressure is to acknowledge the
empirical reality of conscious agency ("top-down-causation"), mind,
imagination and their creations, including the idea of God and gods.
"Culture" is the general term we apply to these creations: civilizations,
sciences, arts, and religions. The exponents of religion are asking the
scientific community to respect the integrity of their "realities of faith"
(Meland) as themselves worthy subjects of empirical inquiry. Meland's
theology of culture is a sophisticated endorsement of this project
without any intent by theology to correct science or to enlist science in
its cause.4 Theology is constructive because the data, when not confined
only to one's own faith (or unfaith), will call some beliefs into question
while it welcomes others into the conversation. It becomes a theology

3 John Polkinghorne, 'The Metaphysics of Divine Action" in Quantum Mechanics:

Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk
Wegter-McNelly, John Polkinghorne, eds. (Vatican City State and Berkeley: Vatican
Observatory Publications and Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2001),
154-56. Arthur Peacocke, "God's Interaction with the World: The Implications of
Deterministic 'Chaos' and of the Interconnected and Interdependent Complexity" in
ibid., 285.
4 I think Meland's vision would be thought to concede too much to science by those
who seek a coll?gial model of the science-theology relation. See Alan Padgett, Science
and the Study of God: A Mutuality Model for Theology and Science (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 7, 19.

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 206 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

of culture because of this and because it embraces a radical empiricism

that admits data that physicalism and sensationism overlook because
they beg the question of the integrity and significance of the data.
With his empirical realism Meland's theological vision is
highly dialectical. It recognizes the limits of our knowing, the
ambiguity in our living, the dissonance in our believing, while, he says,
faith presupposes "the concreteness of God's working at the level of the
Creative Passage in each moment of historical time and a symbolical
(or cognitive) participation in the mythos. . . ."5 He does not fear
antinomy and the language of indirection. Under the influence of Alfred
North Whitehead and William James his empiricism is "radical" in the
sense that relations are real and their terms are given in and with them.
At the same time our cognitive situation is always relative to our
context: relativity without relativism. Therefore, there is a desirable
precision to be sought both in talk about what is concrete (embodied
experience) as well as in talk about what is abstract (symbolic forms).
This is the constructive task of theology.

Constructive Theological Inquiry Leads to a Theology of

Culture

Meland'ssays,
theology isdeeply
"we live more apophatic-like when
than we can think."6 We havehe characteristically
at our
disposal only fallible linguistic categories, and an imagination tied to
our elemental, creatural, embodiment in four-dimensional spacetime.
Our language and images are symbolic only; they do not define what is
ultimate or (if one employs the word) "God." We speak of God (when
and if we do) only with a "margin of intelligibility." In this sense God
is, as the negative theology would say, incomprehensible. Gary Dorrien
and Tyron Inbody have shown how the term, "God," is for Meland only
a "designative image" for the imagination, not for empirical science.7
God is enshrouded in mystery.

5 Bernard E. Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols: Discourses on Method in a

Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 157, and also 123, 145.
6 Bernard E. Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols, 28. For a treatment of the term
"apophatic" and the negative theology see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A
History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom
(600-1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 30-36.
7 Dornen, "Metaphysics, Imagination and Creative Process," 206. Tyron Inbody, The
Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland: Postliberal Empirical Realism, (Atlanta:

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 Vol. 27, Nos. 2 & 3, May/September 2006 207

Yet we are part of the mystery. We are in the shroud with God.
Meland considers our relativity, our participation in a "stream of
experience," to be the empirical datum of theology available to every
human being. Life and death, "the mystery of existing and not existing"
along with the "creatural" responses to them reported with fallible
forms and symbols, provide the data of theology.8 This stream of
experience is the source from which theology arises. From the stream
of experience an elemental and creatural response emerges that, from
the biological to the human level, Meland calls "faith."9 On the human
level it is a "depth of meaning" or "dimension of ultimacy within
history and within present immediacies" that eludes our conceptual
grasp; yet it is experienced as grace and judgment.10 Constructive
theology arises from three interrelated strands or "vortices of witness":
cultus, culture, and the individual. The term "vortices" conveys
Meland's sense of the powerful feeling tones and dynamics that attend
faith in its encounter with ultimacy, whether it is a struggle just to live
or to confront tragic suffering and death. As grace and judgment,
ultimacy and otherness are encountered in these vortices. This is his
naturalism. No mystery is dispelled. This is his apophaticism.

Theology of Culture: A Judicious Use of Intellect

Theology of culture
these vortices examines
with special, the attention
but not exclusive, formsto and
those symbols emergent from
prevalent in the wider vortex of culture. Human experience is shaped in
a particular historical and social context with its own structure of
experience; an individual's stream of experience in whatever cultic
context (if any) interacts inevitably with this cultural structure.

Scholars Press, 1995), 186-89; and Tyron Inbody, "The Contribution of Bernard
Meland to the Development of a Naturalistic Historicist Concept of God," American
Journal of Theology and Philosophy 20, no. 3 (September, 1999): 264-66.
Nevertheless, Meland's view is not a pansymbolism as the discussion to this point
shows.
8 Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols, 59-61. These pages contain a covert, yet
poignant, reference to the death of Meland's wife, Margaret. My wife, Marian, and I
heard this chapter read to a meeting of the Faculty Christian Fellowship at Defiance
College, Ohio, not long after her death.
9 Edgar A. Towne, "God and the Chicago School in the Thought of Bernard E.
Meland," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 10, no. 1 (January, 1989): 12.
10 Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols, 159, 30. Meland typically construes these as
"themes and motifs" with symbols from the Jewish and Christian legacies of faith.

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 208 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

Theology of culture attends this interaction and its derivative meaning

structures. Just as faith has evolved from the stream of experience so,
also, has reason. "Reason is the total organism [at whatever level of
emergence] acting in a specific way under certain conditions. . . .
Reason is the human organism when it is luminous with thought and
inquiry."11 Faith and reason share embodiment and cultural context.
Faith deals with "overtones and nuances"; its mode of discourse is that
of the mythos; it attends to the fullness and feeling tones of events.
Reason is concerned with clarity of understanding and precision of
expression; its mode of discourse is that of the logos. Their relation is
complementary. "Faith is thus always corrective of the precise
measure," Meland says, "although it need not nullify its sharpened
focus."12 Similarly, a "judicious use of intellect" need not "abdicate" in
the presence of the dimension of depth, otherness, ultimacy.13
I am making a judicious use of reason in Meland's sense when
I speak of the co-created actuality of God with reference to Hartshorne.
Hartshorne was no less a naturalist than Meland. His metaphysics is
controlled by the concrete, whether known in personal experience
(including its aesthetic qualities) or scientific data. He worked on
metaphysics as Meland did not. If Meland's thought is vague, elusive,
murky, I propose his thought is also idiosyncratic because his concern
was with the unique felt quality of what he called "the most immediate
empirical datum, the bare event of existing."14 Both men were
concerned with precision, but Meland's was of a "radical empirical"
type including the "appreciative consciousness." Meland's stress was
upon faith, Hartshorne's upon reason; but both agreed reason and faith
were rooted in concrete, elemental experiences.

The Co-Created Actuality of God

In "God"
a strenuous effort
or whether they will use not to atprescribe
that term to others what they will call
all, Meland employs
several phenomenological locutions when specifying the source and
datum of theology: "stream of experience," "mystery of existing and

11 Ibid., 128.
12 Bernard E. Meland, Faith and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953),

13 Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols, 47.

14 Ibid., 46.

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 Vol. 27, Nos. 2 & 3, May/September 2006 209

not existing," "ultimacy," "a good not our own," "the more,"
"otherness." Speaking of the new realism, he says, "ultimacy is seen to
inhere in a ground of otherness to which man [sic], in his subjectivity,
relates himself."15 This human response with its discursive forms and
symbolic images provides data to theology rich with feeling tones. In
the "sheer act of existing," there is a "common participation" in "depths
of awareness accompanying the bodily event of living and experiencing
that yield conditions of knowing what language may not convey, or,
perhaps, cannot convey."16 Still, the word "God" has appeared among
the fallible forms and symbols that accompany the human response to
existence. It names the ultimacy, the more, the mystery, the good not
our own, that is encountered in experience and discerned in an
appreciative awareness. God is created as God by creatures employing
language, in the sense that the mystery is named as "God" with this
symbol emerging from the three vortices of witness.17
We are in the realm of phenomenology now. The human
response to existence with its varied images and textured feelings has
fashioned a word, which by means of story, rite, and experience will
have attached to it unique and evocative qualities, and its own influence
in the lives of those who use it. It speaks in the mythic mode. In this
mode Godself and the believer participate together in the sheer act of
existing. God is present in grace or judgment, as Meland says. This
"reality of faith" is an image-phenomenon, an aesthetic object;18 it is an
aspect of the religious data theologians urge be given attention by
scientists. Of the creation of God in this image-phenomenon with its
feeling qualities I employ Philip Hefner's term to speak of God as "co

15 Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols, 21.

16 Ibid., 29.
17 My claim, I believe, is supported by Delores J. Rogers when she says, "God's work
in history and in different cultures is always conditioned by the human response. God
cannot work outside of culture" (Delores J. Rogers, "The Appreciative Consciousness:
A Tool for the Study of World Religions," in Thomas Ryba, George D. Bond, and
Hermann Tuli, eds., The Comity and Grace of Method: Essays in Honor of Edmund F.
Perry [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004], 26).
18 Edgar A. Towne, "Imaginative Construction in Theology: An Aesthetic Approach,"
American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 19, no. 1 (1998): 77-103; and Edgar A.
Towne, "The Future of Biblical Authority: Implications for Public Policy Issues," in
Charles R. Blaisdell, ed., Conservative Moderate Liberal: The Biblical Authority
Debate (St. Louis: CBP Press, 1990), 119-36.

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 210 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

created" as he employed it to speak of humankind.19 In a universe of

relatedness and interdependence, God as well as human beings is co
created. I am treating this phenomenological image-object as having
the ontic status of actuality. It is empirical in Meland's sense of
"radical"; it is there in appreciative awareness with its qualities given
with the relations out of which the symbol emerged.
However, this is not the full actuality of God. God also has the
ontic status of the universe up to and including the present?but not the
future?as that must be spoken of in terms of Einstein's special
relativity. Hartshorne terms this God's "strict identity," reasoning
analogically from human personal experience. The universe as we
know it is the contingent actuality of the divine necessary existence.
Ontologically and semantically, the word "God" names that reality
which cannot be conceived not to exist (Anselm) as and with some
contingent actuality (Hartshorne). God's existence is necessary
existence; if God is conceived able not to exist, God is not conceived.
Here we encounter the limit of the human measure, on which Meland
insists, when we realize, as Saul Kripke has shown, that the world we
know is also necessary.20 Hartshorne says the same: "Something exists"
is a statement that is categorically universal and necessary. Meland can
say this is faith speaking in the logical mode, mindful of its limits. I
conclude that to speak of God is in part to intend the universe. There is
no other plausible and specifiable actuality one could intend in one's
speaking except one's speaking of God itself. This is the two-fold ontic
status of God as actual. God is actual as the ephemeral image of God
entertained in the mind, which names God as "God"; God is actual as
the universe implicitly, if not explicitly, intended in any talk of God.
Of course, this is to be involved with paradox, which signals
the limits of the human structure. The universe both is and is not God.
The universe is contingent yet necessary as, speaking metaphorically, it
is God's body. Every metaphysics is relative and no metaphysics is

19 Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1993). "The human being is created by God to be a co-creator in the
creation that God has brought into being and for which God has purposes" (32). Hefner
treats God-talk as a "given," "rooted in the experience of the world" (77, 89).
20 Saul Kripke, "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic," Leonard Linsky, ed.,
Reference and Modality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 1979), 70. Edgar A.
Towne, "Semantics and Hartshorne's Dipolar Theism," Process Studies 28, nos. 3-4
(1999): 231-54, especially 247-48.

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 Vol. 27, Nos. 2 & 3, May/September 2006 211

final. In the logos mode all the empirical sciences, including the
social, psychological, and historical, investigate the divine strict
identity, the universe. They investigate, as Robert Scharlemann says,
"the otherness of God when God is not being God."22 In the mythos
mode, when and if persons speak of "God" with their fallible forms and
symbols as Hartshorne and Tillich do, the universe is known as God.
The sacral quality of the universe appears to the appreciative
consciousness as the "More," of which Meland speaks. I interpret this
to be the genetic identity of the universe as divine, its personal order,
the temporal sequence of the world's states, however long or short that
sequence is in terms of our empirical knowledge of the cosmos.23

Science and Theology of Culture: Beyond Benign Mutual

Respect

Our empirical knowledge

and its creations, not only
including the co-created nature ofof
God,the cosmos but also of culture
requires
significant revision of several traditional theological claims, though
scientific respect for theology will probably continue to be benign as at
present. John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke are both scientists and
theologians, for example, and they realize that the empirical sciences
describe how the world works. A recent book on panentheism makes
clear that dipolar panentheism, the view advocated in this essay, is
problematic from the viewpoint of historical Christian doctrine. Yet it
clearly acknowledges that from an empirical standpoint there is no

21 Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the New Philosophy of Nature

(Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publisher, 1975, first published 1934), 271-72. Edgar A.
Towne, Two Types of New Theism: Knowledge of God in the Thought of Paul Tillich
and Charles Hartshorne (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 197-204.
22 Robert P. Scharlemann, 'The Forgotten Self and the Forgotten Divine," Julian N.
Hartt, Ray L. Hart, Robert P. Scharlemann, The Critique of Modernity: Theological
Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1986), 71. Edgar A. Towne, "Tillich's Postmodern View of the Actuality of God," The
North American Paul Tillich Society Newsletter 29, no. 3 (Summer, 2003): 24-29.
23 Whether eternity or everlastingness, it should not matter. Such things are
incomprehensible to a finite awareness within the universe as we know it. See Edgar A.
Towne, "The New Physics and Hartshorne's Dipolar Theism," American Journal of
Theology and Philosophy 22, no. 2 (May, 2001): 114-32.

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 212 American Journal of Theology & Philosophy

supernatural intervention in natural and historical processes, and several

authors favor some form of a noninterventionist view.24
The contemporary scientific picture of the world, especially in
light of the theory of special relativity, requires all inquirers to
acknowledge their radical cognitive relativity and the relativity of
simultaneity. The latter requires us to say that dipolar panentheism is
an imaginative construct; it is not demonstrable empirically. For the
theologian the doctrine of creation can become difficult for any type of
theism from the perspective of the problem of theodicy, the way God is
responsible for the laws of nature and for the co-creative potency of
human freedom, in light of the ambiguity and evil in historical and
natural processes to which Ruth Page and Bernard Loomer have been
especially alert.25 Dipolar panentheism, whose dialectics require God
to be in a significant way co-created by human beings, will appear less
than Christian as is stated in the anthology cited in note 24.
Another way the impact of science on theistic belief is not
benign, suggested in note 23, is that the use of such terms as "eternar'
and "everlasting" becomes problematic. Our radical cognitive relativity
means that whether we are theologians or scientists, our thinking is
space- and time-bound. But time and space are created as the universe
expands. The universe we observe had a beginning and we know the
earth environment we depend on will sometime have an end. We say
God is eternal and speak of life everlasting, but there is no time outside
of our time and no space outside of our space. Our finitude in space
and time seduces us to think there is. This means that to think of God
in terms of the infinity of space and time is both not empirically sound
and conceptually mind-boggling; the latter seduces us to pay a
"metaphysical compliment" by ascribing infinity to God. But we need
not say God is eternal or everlasting with this connotation. We need
not think God to exist "beyond" time or "prior to" time with these
spatial and temporal metaphors. We need only realize that when God

24 Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have our
Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2004). See my review article: Edgar A. Towne, "The
Variety of Panentheisms," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 40, no. 3, (2005):
779-86.
25 Ruth Page, Ambiguity and the Presence of God (London: SCM Press, 1985), and
idem., God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1996). On Loomer see:
Edgar A. Towne, "Theological Education and Empirical Theology: Bernard M. Loomer
at the University of Chicago," The Journal of Religion 84, no. 2 (2004): 212-33.

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 Vol. 27, Nos. 2 & 3, May/September 2006 213

exists God exists with time and an actual world. We need only realize
that God exists necessarily with the universe we know. We need only
respect our cognitive relativity and agree with Hartshorne that it is not
possible to know absolute nothingness because there would be nothing
to know and no one to know nothing.
Meland's theology of culture offers a method open to our
empirical knowledge of the world and also to our empirical
examination of the imaginative constructs of our embodied minds,
including those of the world's religious faiths and their theistic
knowledge.26 The evolutionary process has produced this theistic
knowledge on our planet. Metaphors and analogies lend it intelligibility.
Plausibility is conferred on this knowledge when it can speak of
specifiable actualities, ultimacies within immediacies, as Meland's
theology of culture does.

26 A recent and excellent account of Meland's method is Tyron Inbody, "Meland,

Bernard Eugene (1899-1993)," The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, John
R. Shook, General Editor, (Bristol, UK: Thommes Continuum, 2005), Vol. 2, 1663-70.

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