Becoming-Religion: A. N.

Whitehead and
the Process Metaphysics of Religion
Fr. Kenneth C. Masong, PhD

“Those societies which cannot combine

reverence to their symbols withfreedom
of revision, must ultimatelydecayeither
from anarchy, or from the slowatrophy
of a life stifled by useless shadows.”1

A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism (1927)

1. The “re-/turn” to religion

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) begins his treatment

of religion in his seminal book, Religion in the Making, with a peculiar
statement that largely defines the contours of our perception of religion.
He says, “[i]t is the peculiarity of religion that humanity is always shifting
its attitude towards it.”2 It was believed that the legacy of the
Enlightenment, coupled with the rise of science and technology, would
result in the breakdown of religion. As Bainbridge and Stark point out:
“The most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology and psychology
have unanimously expressed confidence that their children—or surely
their grandchildren—would live to see the dawn of a new era in which, to
paraphrase Freud, the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown.”3
But one can observe that in the horizon of contemporary period, religion is
still a thriving domain of human existence. It is true that religion’s appeal
to authority seems to have waned; it is true that much of its supernatural
claims are either peculiarly questioned or largely ignored by most people,
both believers and non-believers; it is true that if one measures the health
of religion, say Christianity, by Church attendance and the reception of
the sacraments, then religion is definitely standing before the doorway
of its demise.4 Yet, it remains to be said that religion, though a silent
presence at the periphery of contemporary pedestrian life, is still there

1
Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Capricorn
Books, 1955), 88.
2
Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press,
1926), 13.
3
William S. Bainbridge and Rodney Stark, The Future of Religion: Secularization,
Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 1.
4
For an interesting recent study of the decline of organized religion in the West, see Bob
Altemeyer, “The Decline of Organized Religion in Western Civilization,” The International Journal
for the Psychology of Religion 14, no. 2 (2004): 77-89.
Vol. 1 Number 1 2011 Issue 57 | PAMISULU
with a presence to be reckoned with. “In religion’s perpetual agony,” avers
de Vries, “lies its philosophical and theoretical relevance. As it dies an ever
more secure and serial death, it is increasingly certain to come back to life,
in its present guise or in another.”5 If this is the case, religion has not gone;
we have simply shifted our attitudes toward it.

In Western philosophy, it is very striking to notice a

strong “re-/turn” to religion. The use of this term “re-/turn” largely
characterizes our shifting attitudes toward religion. Firstly, in some
domain, there are a marked number of instances of “returning to the
faith,” instances of people retrieving their religious roots. After centuries
defined by “departures”, we enter into a period of “return,” although as
Derrida cautions, it is not a simple return.6 It is a going back to our own
tradition (although now with a different set of critical bifocals) because
we know that such an element of the past defines likewise our identity,
and for us to face our future, we need to look back, analyze and
hopefully learn to appreciate our own rootedness in a certain tradition.
For some people, this tradition involves the domain that religion appeals
to (Gianni Vattimo, Anthony Kenny, Alistair McGrath, Jacques Derrida,
etc). Secondly, for some it is not exactly a return as a “turn” to religion.
The period between the 17th to the 20th century is markedly influenced
by the revolt of some atheistic humanistic thinkers that abhor the very
notion of an appeal to transcendence. For some of them, religion is not
only false, it is evil, and thus the generations that follow them are given
birth in a freedom of life that may even be possibly devoid of the
slightest presence of religious influence. There is no return to religion
because they have never been there, nor been rooted in there in the first
place. For them, it is a deliberate attempt to consider religion as it is in itself
(Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, etc.). Whether we see it as a return or a turn
to religion, the important thing is that religion has once again become a
matter of consideration for his generation, reentering into the public
sphere.

There are a number of factors that may explain this “re-/turn”

to religion. For Gianni Vattimo, two factors define the horizon from

5
Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), 3.
6
“The said ‘return of the religious,’ which is to say the spread of a complex and
overdetermined phenomenon, is not a simple return, for its globality and its figures (…) remain
original and unprecedented. And it is not a simple return of the religious, for it comports, as one of its
two tendencies, a radical destruction of the religious (…). Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: the
Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni
Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 42.
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where religion reemerges.7 Firstly, the fin-de-siècle state of anxiety that
humanity now experiences. Never before has the human civilization faced
with a threat of global proportion, nuclear war, genetic manipulation,
ecological disaster and its impending global threat like global warming,
and the loss of meaning in Western culture. All these contribute to a
far-reaching state of anxiety that leaves humanity with a sense of
hopelessness, a feeling of uncertainty over impending events that rock the
boat of complacency. In this century, we encounter a humanity unanchored
and being tossed by Herculean waves of improbability. Secondly,
modernity’s sanction on religion has caved in, that is, we are now confronted
with “[t]he breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion.”8 The
philosophical underpinnings that seek to delegitimize religion have
become its own undoing. The legacy of the Enlightenment is the close
scrutiny of everything under the watchful gaze of reason. Everything has to
pass through the thorny passage of the rational, otherwise it is displaced as
mere superstition that should hardly concern a decent Enlightened fellow.
But if there is one strong impulse brought about by postmodernism, it is the
undoing of a form of rationalism, a species of rationality that has no open
space for a domain beyond the rational. Religion then in this respect won by
default; reason could not sustain itself, could not keep up to its game,
bowed low at the silent triumph of religion. However, this “re-/turn”
to religion is far from a comeback of religion in its traditional garments.
What we see is a religion and a humanity transformed by global upheavals
and revolutions from the 17th to the 20th century.

Perhaps today the prevalent interest on the concept of religion

derives from questions that plaque not so much the domains of
philosophy or theology but that of economics, jurisprudence, and
socio-politics.9 Religion is making headlines not so much because of its
endeavor to invite people under its fold, but because of how global politics
is being shaped by certain forms of religious fundamentalism, intolerance
and dogmatism. Religion makes the headline, but only because it has been
casting shadows. This “religious scenario” effects only the worsening of
irritation of anti-religionists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and
Michel Onfray.10 Nonetheless, it also invites deeper reflection on what

7
See Randy J.C. Odchigue, “The Radical Kenoticism of Gianni Vattimo and Interreligious
Dialogue,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 16, no. 2 (2006): 174-75.
8
Gianni Vattimo, “The Trace of the Trace,” in Belief, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Jacques
Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 81.
9
On this regard, see the excellent reader on religion that just came out of the press: Hent de
Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University press, 2008).
10
See, for example, their following publications: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a
Natural Phenomenon (London: Penguin Books, 2006). Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case
against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (New York: Arcade Publishing,
2008).
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exactly is the role of religion, especially in the social domain of politics,
economics and international law. Religion makes a comeback in
philosophical discourses, not so much because philosophy itself
primarily has become interested in religion but because the current
“religious scenario” has made it incumbent upon philosophy to rethink, to
re-ponder, the concept of religion.

What is philosophically exigent is a rethinking of the concept of

religion and how it is to be thought, conceived, and made relevant, no
longer in the medieval sense of a hegemonic absolute, but as a humble yet
relevant factor in what Whitehead would refer to as the creative passage
towards civilization. That is, how does religion contribute exactly to the
civilization of contemporary experience? One avenue to throw light into
this question is to inquire into the metaphysical models that inform
religious identity.

2. Religion and its Metaphysics

There is a strain in the relation between religion and philosophy,

especially with the latter’s realization that its vocation exceeds beyond
the measly ancilla theologiae. Indeed, the very concept of “philosophy of
religion” is almost conceptually incoherent. Is philosophy doing justice
to religion when, as Marion notes, “[t]he field of religion could be simply
defined as whatever philosophy excludes or, in the best case, subjugates”?11
Is the relation too overwrought that the most tenable alternative becomes
the categorization into different exclusive language games? Despite the
dominant fragmentation brought about by postmodernism, the emerging
interest in the philosophy of event, from phenomenology to Badiou’s
ontology of the multiple, promises a new mode of thinking that offers fresh
insights on religious importance.12 One of the philosophers who
conceptualized on the event is Alfred North Whitehead who contends

11
Jean-Luc Marion, “The Saturated Phenomenon,” in Phenomenology and the
“Theological Turn” (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 176. Cf. also James K. A. Smith,
“Liberating Religion from Theology: Marion and Heidegger on the Possibility of a Phenomenology of
Religion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46 (1999): 17-33.
12
In contemporary French thought there is a growing interest in the philosophy of
l’événement mostly centered in French phenomenology as a result of an abiding reflection on
Husserl’s thoughts on temporality and Heidegger’s Ereignis. The significant thinkers on this field
would include, among others: Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of
Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Françoise Dastur, “Pour une phénoménologie de l’événement: l’attente et la surprise,” Études
Phénoménologiques 25 (1997): 59-75. Claude Romano, L’événement et le monde (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1998). Badiou’s philosophy of the event is a sui generis, emerging from his
philosophical reflection on the metaphysical import of transfinite set theory. See Alain Badiou, Being
and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007).
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that the genuine encounter between philosophy and religion only
promises conceptual purification and experiential enrichment.13

Whitehead argues that religion needs a metaphysical backing.14

This is more than a mere philosophical platitude. The history of how
Christian faith has come to understand itself is a history of how belief
appropriates metaphysical concepts and principles in the articulation of
its central propositions. Religion will not survive with the fideist ghetto
mentality of a Tertullian. This is at the heart of Augustine’s and Anselm’s
fides quaerens intellectum. This is not simply because of a need for a critique
of its fundamental concepts and beliefs, but because it needs
metaphysical structures, conceptual scaffoldings in order to coherently
and intelligently make sense of its own belief. The problem here lies on
the sort of metaphysics that inform religious beliefs and practices, the
philosophical presuppositions that motivate and influence its own
coming to terms with self-understanding. Although Christianity has been
well judicious in its selection of conceptual scaffolding in order to erect
its theological edifice, the flow of transformation has never been a totally
one-way street. The effect is a mold of religion that occasions some
accusations of it being unavoidably intolerant and fundamentally
dogmatic, saying that it is at the heart of religious life to be so. Is this
really the case? Is it inscribed in religion’s own grammatical faith logic
that it likewise speaks the language of fundamentalism?

Nowadays, due mostly to the influence of the writings of René

Girard, the intimate link between religion and violence has become a
philosophical subject.15 Nonetheless, the knotty issue of religious
fundamentalism is deeper than the current concern over religion and
violence that informs much of the contemporary debate on religion.
Violence does have a deep historical resonance in a genealogy of religion,
but violence is mostly a religious practical consequence.

Fundamentalism, or more properly, dogmatism is at the root of

religion’s recourse to violence. Religion embraces forms of violence, either
to itself or to others because of an apodictic faith, a set of incorrigible

13
Whitehead says, “Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness by its close
relations with religion and with science, natural and sociological…. Religion should connect the
rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a
particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents….
Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which
philosophy must weave into its own scheme.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in
Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne, Corrected ed. (New York: The Free Press,
1978), 16.
14
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 83.
15
Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Continuum,
1977).
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beliefs, that legitimizes violence itself. Violence is justifiable only in a
complex set of religious propositions that do not accommodate the
possibility of its own fragility, that fail to recognize its own
provisionality.

One may generally argue that, ontologically speaking, there are

two metaphysics that inform the conceptual articulation of religion, a
metaphysics of substance and a metaphysics of event.16 According to
Whitehead, these two metaphysics are the deliverances of an integral
experience. We all experience that some things change while others do
not, some things move while others do not: Being and becoming,
substance and process. Most process philosophers argue that the history
of Western philosophy has given undue importance to substance over
process, being over becoming, especially among those philosophical
systems where movement, change, and transformation are nothing but
attributes, effects, derivatives. To a certain degree, the success of
substance metaphysics is owed to the mode of thinking that cultivates
such mentality, that is, during the early times, perfection is synonymous
to that which does not change, that which does not move. It even has
a geometric symbol, that of the sphere whose points are equidistant to
each other and whose cyclical movement not only suggests the
abandonment of beginning and end, but also gives the illusion of stability.
Greek thought was conducive to substance-thinking. The fundamental
import of a metaphysics of substance is that reality is explicable only in
the logic of a basic unchanging substratum to which all observations are
predicable as its attributes.

When this metaphysics entered the domain of religion, there was

an almost perfect fit, especially with the rise of religious monotheism. As
the concept of movement, change, becoming suggests imperfection, the
idea of Being, immutability, impassibility inversely suggests perfection.
The metaphysical search for the unchanging ground of changing reality
became a religious search for an ultimate ground which was found in the
arms of an impassible, omniscient, omnipotent God. When substance
metaphysics found its ultimate category in the concept of Being, religion
found its religious ultimate in God that put on the attributes of Being
itself. God became the Ultimate Being, and from then on the history of
Western metaphysics and religion had followed the track of what
Heidegger would later call as onto-theology, the forgetting of the

16
Cf. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, 209. Whitehead utilizes
the phrase “metaphysics of flux” especially since in Process and Reality the concept of event has
significantly changed from his earlier theorizing. Nonetheless, in this paper, flux, event, process and
becoming are concepts used interchangeably.
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ontological difference between Being as it is in itself and God.17 The
problem of onto-theology is not only metaphysical; it is also religious. If
the metaphysical ultimate coincides with the religious absolute, what
results is an apodictic faith, a set of unshakeable religious beliefs that
fails to accommodate the possibility of revision, of provisionality, of
contextuality. This becomes a fertile ground nurturing seeds of
intolerance over differences, dogmatic reification of non-final beliefs, and
the absolutization of a particular at the cost of the most.

What is needed is to appeal for the possibility of thinking religion

away from a metaphysics of substance towards a metaphysics of process.
One may argue that religion can speak and reflect on itself philosophi-
cally not only with the conceptual scaffolding of a substance metaphysics
where religion becomes objectified, but likewise with the shifting waves
of a metaphysics of flux where religion remains in the making.18 There
is freshness to be had with the deterritorialization of religion from the
category of object to its reterritorialization in the flux of event.19 The
appeal is to dislodge religion from the certainty of standing on
demarcated substantial land and to invite it to journey into the vast fluid
sea. To follow the path of faith is not to remain in the security of standing
on the port, but to embark on a risky journey of going off-shore, sailing
into the expanse of the unknown and uncertain.

The displacement of religion from the field of substance

metaphysics was not simply a result of Heidegger’s diagnosis of Western
philosophy’s metaphysical malaise. Much of it was also informed by
the advancement of science. Even during the time of Newton, one can
already discern that the basic presupposition of reality is not stability but
movement. It was no longer stability explaining movement, but
movement explaining stability. Nature is in a flux, such that things that
are stable are said to be only “at rest”, being permeated with kinetic
energy (kinesis). The credence of Aquinas’ first way, that of the unmoved

17
Cf. Heidegger’s essay “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics” in Martin
Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002), 42-74.
18
As Whitehead reiterates, “[t]he continuity of nature is to be found in events, the atomic
properties of nature reside in objects.” Alfred North Whitehead, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles
of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), 66.
19
In the contemporary landscape of religious inclinations, there is a growing bifurcation
of concepts that proceeds along the channels of “object” and “event.” On the one hand, there is the
channel of growing critique against institutional religion (and sometimes of religion in its entirety);
and on the other hand, there is the channel of growing interest in lived spiritualities (ranging from
traditional spiritualities to the “New Age” forms). Although this bifurcation is patently a
generalization of the religious scenario, there are already noticeable and concrete upshots to this
religious disjunction. These upshots are suggested by such catch-phrases as “believing without
belonging,” “being spiritual but not religious,” “spirituality vs. religiosity,” etc.
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mover, rests only in a mode of thinking wherein one asks, “who or what
is it that moves something else?”. Nowadays, one inquires, “Who or
what hinders one thing from moving?” Previously, change or process is
derivative or attributable to being or substance, nowadays, being and
substance are derivative of process and becoming. The classical principle
operari sequitur esse is reversed into esse sequitur operari.20

3. Three Models of the God-World Relation

If such be the characterization of process metaphysics, one then

may ask oneself, how does process metaphysics affect the fides quaerens
intellectum of religion? What is the religious contour of the sacred if the
soul that animates it is a metaphysics of flux?

When one considers Whitehead’s 1926 book, what one

immediately takes cognizance of is its striking title: Religion in the
Making. That religion changes is not foreign to religion itself. Indeed,
Christianity has known well the saying ecclesia semper reformanda, the
Church is always reforming, changing, transforming itself. However,
knowing that in Whitehead one finds a fully developed metaphysics
of process or of becoming, a philosophical system that puts becoming,
rather than being, as the ultimate metaphysical category, one
immediately wonders on the effect of this mode of thought in the
rethinking or contemporary reflection on the concept of religion.

Whitehead argues that “[r]eligion is the reaction of human

nature to its search for God.”21 Broadly conceived, religion is about the
relation between God and the World.22 Much of the conceptualization of
religion is based on how the relation between these two poles (heaven/ earth,
God/creatures) had been conceived, both religiously and metaphysically.
But what are the conceptual models available explicative of the relation
between the two? One may locate an avenue for this in Whitehead’s
remark concerning progress and the relation that exists between what

20
Cf. Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy: A Survery of Basic Ideas (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 7.
21
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press,
1925), 191.
22
Indeed, the suggestiveness of religion in the last section of Whitehead’s Process and
Reality is already revealed in the title itself.
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 he calls “the Republic on Earth” and the “Kingdom of Heaven.”23 He says:
“[p]rogress consists in modifying the laws of nature so that the Republic
on Earth may conform to that Society to be discerned ideally by the
divination of Wisdom.”24 In these words, Whitehead alludes to the
adventure of ideas, the discerned humanitarian ideals, which shape the
outlines of various civilizations beyond immediate determinations. Ideas
emerge from the sensitivity towards the complex but determinate order
of possibilities that pass through “the divination of Wisdom.” Against
naturalist process philosophers who incise the divine from Whiteheadian
metaphysics,25 God figures significantly precisely because God proffers
the initial aim by which concrescence accrues, accounts for the introduc-
tion of novelty in the created order, and promises objective immortality
in the perishing of actual occasions. Despite certain inconsistencies in
Whitehead’s creative and speculative input, the ontological principle
requires that eternal objects have to be somewhere.26 In the vision that
God offers, humanity discerns its proper ideals. Nonetheless, the issue is
not straightforwardly uncomplicated. It is not just a case of God
offering ideals, suggestions, possibilities, and then humanity decides to
realize them, admitting their ingression in the conformed determina-
tion of the actual state of things. In the relation between God and the
World, the metaphysically crucial word is “conform,” that is, how the
World needs to conform to the divine Wisdom, and whether this is just a
one-way street. Religiously, the brief statement of Whitehead is almost
a re-echo of a famous prayer among Christian denominations, that is, the
Pater Noster, wherein we say among other things: e0lqe/tw h9 basilei/a sou
genhqh/tw to\ qe/lhma/ sou w(v e0n ou0ranw~| kai\ e0pi\ gh~v [“your kingdom
come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”] (Matthew 6,10). That the
coming of God’s kingdom (basilei/a) is realized only insofar as his
will (qe/lhma/) is done or accomplished on earth provides the crucial
framework for a fertile dialogue between metaphysical models and
religious beliefs. What is the nature of this qe/lhma/ to which we are
to conform? Is it a plan mapping the ideal order where digression promises

23
The phrase “kingdom of heaven” itself does not appear as such in Adventures of Ideas.
It features significantly though in Religion in the Making especially pages 72, 87-88, 154-155. It is
interesting to note that Whitehead does not refer to the common Christian expression of “the Kingdom
of God.” Indeed, in the whole of Religion in the Making, such expression is absent and references
alluding to such are identified more as a subliminal glorification of power that he critically dismisses
as barbaric.
24
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933), 42.
25
This is significantly present in the revisionist writings of Sherburne. See Donald
Sherburne, “Whitehead without God,” in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Delvin
Brown, Ralph E. Jr. James, and Gene Reeves (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1971).
This article set into motion the so-called “Whitehead without God Debate.” See John Jr. B. Cobb, “The
‘Whitehead without God’ Debate: The Critique,” Process Studies 1, no. 2 (1971). Also, Donald W.
Sherburne, “The ‘Whitehead without God’ Debate: The Rejoinder,” Process Studies 1 (1971).
26
Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, 46.
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only a muddled chaos? Is it a law to which the world ought to comply and
where non-compliance promises only a chastisement? Or, is it a wish, an
expression of purpose that invites us to become God’s co-workers
(qeou= sunergoi&) in the building up of the Republic on Earth (cf. I
Corinthians 3,9).

The first model explicative of the relation between God and

the World may be called Repetition. This model draws heavily from the
Platonic and neo-Platonic influences within Christianity.27 When the
world was created by God, he already had an idea, a plan defining his
qe/lhma/. In God’s mind, there is already a blueprint, and this blueprint
guides him in his creation and relation with the created order. To pray the
words “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”
suggests on this model that humanity’s exercise of freewill is constituted
by the repetition of this same celestial blueprint into the created order.
Approximating Whitehead’s Eastern Asiatic concept of God, qe/lhma/
refers to “an impersonal order to which the world conforms.”28 Evil is
characterized by the departure from this celestial blueprint in the
passage of history. The coming of the kingdom of God is characterized
by the repetition of what God has in mind into the realm of the created
order because “this world [is] a lost cause.”29 However, this very concept
of repetition effects its own undoing. This is defined by the tyrannical
absoluteness characteristic of theocracies where God’s will reigns
supreme and to which human wills’ only contribution in the passage
of nature is to repeat this same will in terrestrial domain. Being God’s
co-worker is about copying the blueprint in the heavens into this world.
Humanity is a servile amanuensis writing the dictates of God’s will into
the Book of Nature.30 God’s plan for the world is something complete
and unchanging. Definitiveness is patent for the celestial blueprint is
ultimate and final. Holiness is a passive submission to God’s will.
God is an absolute tyrant who wants to colonize not only heaven but
also earth. “In the origin of civilized religion,” avers Whitehead, “gods

27
This model is prevalent among theologians of the Middle Ages wherein there is the
abandonment of “this world to the Evil Prince thereof, and concentrated thought upon another world
and a better life.” Whitehead argues that Plato did consider this solution but gave it a twist not
adopted by later theologians. Plato “conceives the perfect Republic in Heaven as an immediate present
possession in the consciousness of the wise in the temporal world.” The model of Repetition taken
here is a flipside of mediaeval Christianity’s “temptation to abandon the immediate experience of this
world as a lost cause.” Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 32.
28
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 68.
29
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 32.
30
This stance makes a parody of Hugh of St. Victor’s statement that the World is like a
book written by the hand of God. “Universus mundus iste sensibilis quasi quidam liber est scriptus
digito Dei…” Quoted in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 93.
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are like dictators.”31 This model expresses the extreme form of religious
absolutism.

The second model is Representation and proceeds from a fixated

interest in absolute transcendence. To pray the words “your kingdom
come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” suggests in this
model that God’s qe/lhma/ is effectively present in the domain of
heaven where he reigns, but suggests further that whatever is present in
God’s eternity can be re-presented likewise in created temporality. The
economy of salvation is not about making a heaven of earth (Repetition),
but of actualizing the mode of order of the heavens as something relevant
and also effective in the domain of the world. However great an improve-
ment this model already is compared to the first, it still falls victim to
the pitfall of absolute religious transcendence. If God is absolutely
transcendent from the world, representation is exigent. Indeed, much of the
political history of Christianity, as Marcel Gauchet illustrates, is
reflective of this model because the secular and religious leaders become
the absolute God’s exclusive representatives to this world.32 If the first
model is a theocracy, the second model is religious oligarchy, the rule of
the few representatives of the divine. If in the first model God is fashioned
as an imperial ruler in the image of Caesar, the second model sees the
religious and civil leaders as emissaries of a divine sovereign.

The third model is Participation. Here, God and the World are
immanent to each other, that is to say, “considering the world we can
find all the factors required by the total metaphysical situation; but we
cannot discover anything not included in this totality of actual fact, and
yet explanatory to it.”33 Unlike the second model where absolute
transcendence necessitates representation, this model affirms God who is
immanent, or at least, not wholly transcendent. To pray the words “your
kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” means that
God’s qe/lhma/ becomes a relevant factor in the becoming of the world,
not to the extent that the exercise of human will becomes repetitive or
representational but collaboratory or participative. qe/lhma/ is not
simply “will,” final and decided. It also expresses wish, purpose,

31
Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan Publishing Inc.,
1938), 49.
32
As Gauchet remarks, “With the State’s appearance, the religious Other actually
returns to the human sphere.” Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political
History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 35. Cf also
André Cloots, “Marcel Gauchet and the Disenchantment of the World: The Relevance of Religion for the
Transformation of Western Culture,” Bijdragen 67, no. 3 (2006): 253-87.
33
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 71.
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suggestion or proposal for a future event.34 God’s will does not
necessarily imply blind obedience, but an invitation for collaborative
work, for participation. The vision that God offers is dependent on the
elements comprising the actual world of each concrescence and it changes
in view of the transformation that accrues in the immediate environment.
Though God’s will is definite for the moment, it is never final. It invites
humanity’s contribution as genuine co-workers. This is one of the
fundamental insights that Alain Badiou gathers from Saint Paul. Before
the Christ-event, we are all established in equality as God’s co-workers
in the World’s becoming: co-ouvriers de Dieu.35 In this respect, religion is
a democracy of wills, both divine and human. This may be referred to
as the ethnopoietic character of religion.36 The evental encounter between
God and humanity extends over, passes onto wider spatio-temporal
extensionality or results into the emergence of a particular nexus of actual
occasions. That is, the event of religion constitutes (poie/w meaning “to
make”) a people, a group, a nation (e1qnov). We need to rehabilitate the
human element in religion’s identity. The process of becoming-religion
is not simply a mandate of the divine fiat but is given birth in the
enduring democratic consent of those who enter into its constitution
through faith.37 The so-called “Clash of Civilization”38 is not the

34
Although the Greek word qe/lhma/ is proper to the New Testament, its verbal form
qe/lw is a shortened form of e0qe/lw meaning “to will,” “to wish that…” See Liddell and Scott, An
Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), s.v.
35
“The most powerful expression of this equality [of the sons], necessary correlate of
… universality, can be found in I Corinthians 3, 9. We are all qeou= sunergoi&, God’s coworkers
[co-ouvriers de Dieu]. This is a magnificent maxim. Where the figure of the master breaks
down come those of the worker and of equality, conjoined. All equality is that of belonging
together to a work. Indubitably, those participating in a truth procedure are coworkers in its becoming.
This is what the metaphor of the son designates: a son is he whom an event relieves of the law and
everything related to it for the benefit of a shared egalitarian endeavor.” Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The
Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 60,
emphases added and text modified.
36
This neologism is the third variant in Whiteheadian studies. Firstly, Isabelle Stengers
coined the word ethopoiesis and used it in reference to the concomitant transformation of the
knower in the production of knowledge. See Isabelle Stengers, “Thinking with Deleuze and
Whitehead: A Double Test,” in Deleuze, Whitehead and the Transformation of Metaphysics, ed.
André Cloots and Keith Robinson (Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgie voor
Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2005), 8. Secondly, Roland Faber used the word theopoetics as
characterizing process theology. See Roland Faber, Gott als Poet der Welt: Anliegen und Perspektiven
der Prozesstheologie, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004). Also the talk
he gave: Roland Faber, “Process Theology as Theopoetics,” (Kresge Chaple, Claremont, CA:
Unpublished paper, 2006). Theopoetics as such is an emerging discipline of study (in theology) where
theological reflection is worked out along the symbolic and interpretative principles of poetry.
37
The event of the religious (e.g. Badiou’s Christ-event) is creative of a community, and as
Alistair McGrath argues, this is one of the positive aspects of religion that needs rethinking. “The role
of religion in creating and sustaining communal identity has been known for some considerable time,
and has become increasingly import since about 1965.” Alistair MacGrath, The Twilight of Atheism:
The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (London: Random House, 2004), 264-65.
38
See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1996). Cf. also his earlier article on the subject, Samuel P.
Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22-49.
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schizophrenic doubling of a God or a celestial variance among Gods. It is
chiefly the zealous collision of human wills in their enthopoietic
constitution arising from their singular encounter with the divine. What
religion is is not just due to what God wills but also because of what
we, humanity, want of it. The role and fate of religion in contemporary
times rest to an equal degree on how and what we want it to be. There
is no infantile escape into the will of God when religion is becoming
intolerant and fundamentalist. Being co-workers demands the synergy of
wills in the advancement of history towards God’s vision of “Harmony
of Harmonies.”39 There is no definite celestial blueprint because every
possibility for the future is always determined on the decisions made
in the present in view of the past. “The world is a mutually adjusted
disposition of things, issuing in value for its own sake.”40 There is no need
for representation because God and humanity are immediate co-workers
in the unfolding event of civilization. In the fine words of Whitehead:

“God’s rôle is not the combat of productive

force with productive force, of destructive
force with destructive force; it lies in the
patient operation of the overpowering
rationality of his conceptual harmonization.
He does not create the world, he saves it: or,
more accurately, he is the poet of the world,
with tender patience leading it by his vision
of truth, beauty and goodness.”41

What God offers is a vision to which God invites us to journey

onwards in the progress towards civilization. For Whitehead, God is
not the destination of religious sojourn, but a companion to the pilgrimage
itself.42 In the becoming-religion, God is not its teleological object as if
to suggest the goal of religion is a divine homecoming in a transcendent
locus where God expectantly stands at the door with arms wide open.
Whiteheadian ethnopoiesis postulates that God is a co-worker in
becoming-religion and constituting believers as a nation peculiarly his
own (cf. Deuteronomy 26,18).

In Whitehead, religion engenders hope because religion is the

prime agent in the dynamic quest for the ideals of civilization. It is not
coincidence that, despite some events that cast a shadow on the
achievements of religion in a particular civilization, religion is
significantly present in most great civilizations of ancient times, in Egypt,
Persia, Rome, Greece, Jerusalem, etc. Whitehead argues that the “great
39
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 296.
40
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 143-44.
41
Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, 346.
42
Cf. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 17, also 154-55.
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social ideal for religion is that it should be the common basis for the unity
of civilization. In that way it justifies its insight beyond the transient clash
of brute forces.”43 Religion is a potent “transforming agency” that nurtures
the fermentation of the ideals of civilization—truth, beauty, adventure, art
and peace,44 ideals that constitute the reasonable hope for things to come
despite the “transient clash of brute forces” of the immediate present.
Indeed, the constant challenge for any religion that sinks back into
sociability, that sinks back into tribalism, authoritarianism, xenophobia,
is to reorient itself to that fundamental experience of the religious spirit
where distinctions and specificity fall asunder under the mantle of
universality to which solitariness is fundamentally oriented.45 Solitariness
is that raising of oneself beyond the transient, contingent and mundane.46
Through solitariness, there “is an endeavour to find something permanent
and intelligible by which to interpret the confusion of immediate detail.”47
This apprehension of the permanent and the intelligible coerces us to
transcend our complacency in prepackaged hand-me-down beliefs and
practices. The apprehension of the permanent and the intelligible impels
us to that reorganization of belief in order to make religion the potent
agent in the ordering of life, a life that gains the approval of ethical
scrutiny.48

4. Fallacy of Dogmatism

However, religion can only engender hope for the advancement of

civilization only if it does not fall into the pit of the fallacy of dogmatism.
For Whitehead,

Religions commit suicide when they

find their inspirations in their dogmas. The
inspiration of religion lies in the history of
religion. By this I mean that it is to be found
43
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 172.
44
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, Part IV.
45
As Whitehead famously remarked, “[r]eligion is what the individual does with his own
solitariness.” Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 16, also 47, 60.
46
As Lundeen argues, Whitehead’s solitariness “refers to those immediate aspects of
experience which are beyond exhaustive penetration and control. It is the manner in which every
individual transcends his environment without being separated from it. It is not solitariness in the
sense of being alone, but rather in the sense of appropriating the data of experience in one’s own
way.” Lyman T. Lundeen, Risk and Rhetoric in Religion: Whitehead’s Theory of Language and the
Discourse of Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 227.
47
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 47.
48
This refers to what Whitehead “unfortunately” calls Rational Religion: “Rational
religion is religion whose beliefs and rituals have been reorganized with the aim of making it the
central element in a coherent ordering of life—an ordering which shall be coherent both in respect to the
elucidation of thought, and in respect to the direction of conduct towards a unified purpose
commanding ethical approval. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 31.
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 in the primary expressions of the intuitions
of the finest types of religious lives.49

Dogmatism is the reification of religious intuitions, the

petrifaction that lies at the root of the prevailing decadence of religious
influence. It stifles the spirit whereby religion contributes hope for a
better world. This is central to Whitehead’s critique of religion. If religion
is to find its brighter future, it should face its crisis “in the only way in
which such problems can be studied, namely, in the school of experience.”50
This entails both the anamnesis of the singular religious origin, e.g. the
Christ-event, and likewise our own proper religious experience that led
us into the footsteps of devout conviction. Grounding faith in experience,
one recognizes that the Christian tradition is more than a mere deposit
of faith. It is an unfolding of event. It is in this paradigm of event, of
happening, of actual occasions that Whitehead offers to religion in
general, and Christianity in particular, a conceptuality where religion
itself not only engenders a high hope of adventure but becomes an
adventure itself. Religion is grounded on genuine human experience;51 it
is not an illusion or a desperate attempt to conceive of hope in a hopeless
world. “The religious spirit is always in process of being explained away,
distorted, buried. Yet, since the travel of mankind towards civilization, it
is always there.”52

Religion engenders hope because religion itself is a “noble

discontent.”53 It tries to reach beyond what it is, beyond that which no
humanity can ever reach. Religion not only engenders hope in itself,
it offers to each of its citizen that grain of hope germane in all human
experience. It offers this hope because religion itself is a vision. It is the

vision of something which stands beyond,

behind, and within, the passing flux of
immediate things; something which is real,
and yet waiting to be realised; something
which is a remote possibility, and yet the
greatest of present facts; something that
gives meaning to all that passes, and yet
eludes apprehension; something whose
possession is the final good, and yet is
beyond all reach; something which is the

49
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 144.
50
Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 147.
51
Santiago Sia, Religion, Reason, and God: Essays in the Philosophies of Charles
Hartshorne and A.N. Whitehead, vol. 10, Contributions to Philosophical Theology (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 135.
52
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 172.
53
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 11.
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 ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.54

If religion then engenders hope, is there a hope also for religion in

our times? Whitehead’s answer is in the affirmative. There need only be
a strengthened reflexivity in solitariness and a cautioned appreciation of
religious intuitions that do not reify into dogmatism because these bring to
bear the dynamism inherent in religion. Religion needs to go beyond
itself in the adventure of the religious spirit: a religion beyond religion.
It needs to articulate its belief and identity according to the religious
eventum tantum in order to rehabilitate its essence as pure happening
between transcendence and immanence, between the celestial and the
mundane, between the actual and the possible. Religion needs to find its
identity not as an accomplished-promise but as an already-but-not-yet;
that it is in essence a becoming-religion.

54
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 191-92.
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