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The utopian visions of 1960s America affected more than the devotees of Flower Power. The theological world became similarly captivated by revolutionary notions about God and his dealings with the world. Royce Gordon Gruenler remembers those turbulent days. He was an inquisitive young scholar teaching religion and philosophy at Hiram College in Ohio when a colleague introduced him to the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Both men had pioneered the liberal movement in theology known as process theism at a time when, according to biographer Alan Gragg in his book Charles Hartshorne, it stood "forth in the theological sunlight as one of the most creative and viable options on the American scene." Gruenler was hooked.

His detour into process theism began a spiritual pilgrimage that would lead him to near-despair. In time, he returned to his evangelical roots and gathered a small cadre of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship-types whom he discipled. In 1979 Gruenler left Hiram to become professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, where he remains today. He has written many articles and books, including The Inexhaustible God: Biblical Faith and the Challenge of Process Theism (Baker, 1983). Senior writer Wendy Murray Zoba recently visited her former professor in Massachusetts, where he weighed in on the current theological debate about the openness of God and its relationship to process theology.

What exactly is process theology?

Process thought is the idea that God is engaged in the time sequence. He doesn't know the future. He has ideals for the future, and he tries to lure us to actualize those ideals, but he does not control each individual or occasion on the atomic scale. God needs us because without us he's not concrete. He sets the ideals, but then we create the content and God expands his actuality through us. We add to him.

How did you become attracted to process theism?

So God is constantly advancing in what Hartshorne, in his book Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, calls a "creative advance." God is advancing at every moment in time, synthesizing all the data from every occasion throughout the universe. That happens again and again, multiple times per second, as we move on in time. God is in "process" and is, of necessity, limited to time.

A colleague came to the Hiram campus in the early 1960s fresh out of the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he had studied with Hartshorne. He got me interested in Whitehead, and I spent a summer reading Process and Reality, Whitehead's magnum opus. I thought it was wonderful and opened new vistas. This was the early 1960s, and we were taken in with the view that through political and economic idealism we could bring in Utopia.

When did you first begin to have your doubts about process theology?

I taught a course on Romans in the late '50s and early '60s using Karl Barth. He sees Christ enveloping everybody in the yes, and there's not an ultimate no. It was a first step toward liberalism. At the same time, I was working on the social nature of the Trinity and had been concerned about the role of God the Father. Process theology helped because it spoke of a God active in time with us. This made God much more personal.

Toward the latter part of the 1960s my colleague and I began to detect a real flaw. If God is limited to our time, that means he's constrained to move at 186,000 miles per second—the speed of light. That's a very slow time for God to be synthesizing everything in the universe instantaneously, as process theology posits. The moment you say that, you enter irrationality.

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March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4