To Whom Belong the Covenants?:

Whitehead, Wesley and Wildly Diverse Religious Traditions

 Michael Lodahl

Professor of Theology, Point Loma Nazarene University

for Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki,

mentor and inspirer

            This paper itself is mildly, if not wildly, diverse: its three sections will explore three different paths for reflecting upon the reality of the plurality of religious traditions in the world. In the first section, I will set forth the general contours of the process metaphysic as it creates a backdrop for thinking about this issue. In the second section, I will move to the thought of the 18th-century Oxford don and Methodist evangelist John Wesley as it contributes its own unique, and perhaps somewhat surprising, perspective on religious diversity. Finally, in the third section I will explore some of the particularly Jewish contributions to this issue as I discover them in the Bible and the Talmud.

            If there is a consistent, connecting theme among these three paths of thought, it is best summarized in the notion of covenant.

 God works with the world as it is in order to lead it toward what it can be.

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki

            This is the promise and genius of the process vision of God and the world. In her writings Marjorie Suchocki repeatedly has offered this proposition as a kind of programmatic statement about the nature of reality. Sometimes she explicitly associates it with Whitehead or process thought,¹ and sometimes she does not.²   Nonetheless, the proposition’s pedigree is obvious; in this process-relational vision of things, God is always and everlastingly working with the world as it is, in this moment and in the next, in order to lead the world toward what it can be.

            The question is, What are the implications of this vision of things for our attempts to understand the vast number and variety of religious traditions in the world?

            So much depends upon how one thinks about God in relation to the world, and the world in relation to God! For the process model of thinking, God always works with the world as it is because there always has been, is now, and always will be a world, a “that-which-is-not-God,” with which God labors. The point at which this vision of things becomes particularly troublesome to traditional theology is in its elucidation of the doctrine of creation; generally, the process model does away with the abstract idea of a worldless God who, at some undefinable “point” in eternity, began to create the world out of nothing. Instead, the process portrayal offers an everlasting God working with an everlasting world – a world of one kind or another, of varying degrees of harmony and complexity, of various possibilities for growth and development. God always labors with this world toward greater measures of harmony and beauty, but must always work with the world that is given to God in any and every given moment. Thus, we have here a vision of things that is inherently, everlastingly relational – and thus shot through with all of the ambiguities implied in true relation. The world is not under God’s “control,” at least if control means tight-fisted rule. Further, the nature of truth is not a unilateral decree or pristine and eternal ideal unsullied by the mire and muck of the world as we know it; instead, truth truly does emerge out of the give-and-receive dynamic between God and world – and among the innumerable interactions of events within the world – occurring billions upon billions of times in every millisecond throughout our vast and wildly diverse universe.

            How does God work with this world? Essentially, in this vision of things God works by being present to each and every occasion of the world. God’s presence, however, is clearly not an obvious or overwhelming determinant of each or of any occasion. God cannot be such a unilateral determinant, since the world itself with all its energies contributes a great deal of momentum to each occasion’s becoming. Further, in this vision of things each occasion exercises a measure of self-direction, even if that measure is miniscule. Nonetheless, God is also working: God is present as the offer from a Future that the occasion, in and of itself and its past, could not and would not have striven for. So God is always working with the world as it is, and is working in this way everywhere.  At all times and in all places, God is present as the subtle calling onward, as the whisper of something better than what is in this moment. God has always worked in this way, is always working with the world as it is – for God receives each moment of experience, for what it is, into the incomprehensible abyss of divine knowing. God receives what the world offers – and out of the sheer facticity of that offering of the world, God weaves something new, a new vision for what could be, what might yet become.

We understand that, in this vision of things, the world’s vast variety of experiences and experiments are really, truly the world’s to give to God. We need not be burdened by the misconception that everything happens in accordance with some divine blueprint, for the world in all of its varieties of creaturely response to God’s evocative presence truly does make much of its own history – but always in response to ever-new, ever-renewed divine aims for the world. Both God and the world, then, are sources of novelty; by all appearances, God is well pleased to labor creatively and redemptively with the novelties the world offers! God does have a will for the world, but it is a will that is pliable, flexible, buoyant; it has to be so, in order to take into account all of the peculiar contributions of every creature to the world, and thus to every other’s creature’s becoming, and thus also to God. The divine will is always fitted to the particularities and history of each and every creature “with each passing moment” (to quote an old “process” hymn!), with each and every creature securely knitted to all others in the interconnected webbing of Indra’s net.

Some critics object that this vision of things is too far removed from the biblical description of God’s relation to the world to be of much theological help. However, for starters, one need not stretch the opening creation passage of Genesis very much, if at all, to accommodate the process model. Process thinkers are far from alone in arguing for a less tidy interpretation of the Hebrew text in its opening lines.3  Rather than the traditional insistence on a clean-cut, clear-cut creatio ex nihilo in the very opening of the Torah – a reading which would, of course, yield a deity who, ultimately, works alone – it appears likely that Genesis draws back its opening curtain to reveal a formless, watery chaos with which God begins the labor of creating. If this is correct, then Genesis does not begin with the pure omnipotence of divine fiat, but with God’s evocative, alluring call to deep, unformed possibilities that swirl in the darkness.4  Of course, even before God speaks a word there is the divine ruach, the breath/wind of God, that “hovers” or “broods” upon the face of the deep.5  Here we encounter a truly pregnant image of the blowing, whispering gift of the life-giving Spirit, stirring and troubling the dark and threatening waters, brewing up a world.

It is toward, and into, this chaotic abyss that God outpours the life of the Spirit; it is toward these unfathomable depths that the Maker faces and speaks the creative word. And what is the nature of the word that God speaks? In Genesis 1 this divine speech repeatedly is let there be; it is a word that allows for, makes room for – indeed “creates space” for! – the creatures of sea, sky and land. It is not so much a word of command as it is a word of hopefulness, a word that offers promise and evokes possibilities. This becomes all the more apparent in the Hebraic word plays lurking within the divine invitation to the earth and the waters: the earth is invited to “put forth”(tadse) vegetation (dese) and the waters are called upon to “bring forth”(yisresu) living creatures of the sea (seres). In other words, God’s creative activity is expressed precisely through the appropriate creaturely contributions; God’s creating fits, and is fitted to, specific creaturely capabilities.

Then there is that marvelous refrain reverberating throughout the opening chapter: and God saw that it was good. The fact that, for Genesis 1, God “sees” that various creatures of the world are good after they have been produced by the earth and the waters – rather than God simply pronouncing or announcing or simply knowing that they are good de facto – implies a real and timely interactivity between the Creator and the developing creation. God does not “already know from eternity” that the creatures are good; God sees their goodness, their fittedness to God’s creative purposes. God, in other words, responds with approval to the world’s own response to the divine invitation to let there be. There is on the opening page of the Bible something of a call-and-response relation that we who are shaped by biblical traditions have learned to call covenantal.

In this covenantal (Lat., co vene, “to come together with”) understanding of creation, the particular and peculiar energies that each creature has contributed to the making of this world are respected by God, lovingly received and cherished by God, and help to create new possibilities for the world as it continues to come to being, to become. Every creature’s own striving and struggle, its own yearning to be, to persist and perdure – indeed, to survive – is taken seriously in this process vision of things. In thinking of the world in this way, we find help for appreciating that vast number of experiments in living, in surviving and thriving, that the evolutionary history of our world has included. These experiments, of course, continue into this present moment. Creatures of all sorts continue to seek niches in which to thrive and to grow and to reproduce themselves.

The pressing question is, How might this vision of things help us to interpret the variety of religious traditions, practices and experiences of our world? Let us return to the epigram for this first section of the paper: God works with the world as it is in order to lead it toward what it can be. We believe that there has never been a time or place where this has not been true. Because the way in which God works is the way of covenantal co-laboring, the world is teeming with difference and diversity. The world hosts an unimaginable plurality of creatures, all working to carve out a place for themselves. Correspondingly, among the human species there is a vast variety of cultures, languages, modes of life and of thought, of customs and of dress – and certainly, intertwined with all of these has been a variety of ideas, intuitions, institutions, experiences and social practices. Human beings, like the rest of the world, make their own responses to the quiet presence of God, the subtle working of “the poet of the world” (Whitehead).

Since all creatures, including human beings, participate with God in their own creation, God never begins with a clean slate: God works with the world as it is in order to lead it toward what it can be. God’s call, then, is always shaped by previous creaturely responses, and while all creatures offer their own novel experiences, responses and ways of being, it is human agency that in particular contributes new twists in the world’s becoming. God is always working with those twists, attempting perhaps sometimes to turn those twists in a different direction, other times to reinforce and to build upon them. Real diversity is inevitable in such a world as process-relational thinkers imagine, and perceive, our world to be.

            I have attempted in this opening section of the paper to offer a broadly-stroked portrait of God and the world as construed by the process vision of things. This is the metaphysic that has inspired and grounded Marjorie Suchocki’s theological reflections, and clearly has important ramifications for thinking about religious diversity. I suspect that other conference participants will develop such themes as these in greater detail. My intention now is to add a new wrinkle to this process vision of things – a Wesleyan wrinkle.

II

Conscience . . . varies exceedingly, according to education

 and a thousand other circumstances.

John Wesley

Any estimation of, or appreciation for, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s thought and life is incomplete without acknowledging the role of the writings of John Wesley (1703-1791), the Anglican founder of the Methodist movement, in her theological development. She explored that role autobiographically in her essay “Coming Home: Wesley, Whitehead and Women,”⁶ making explicit the ready connections among Wesley’s theology, Whitehead’s cosmology and feminist sensibilities. A personal reminiscence may help to make this point: in the mid-90s I was part of a conference on Wesley studies in which Marjorie was the keynote speaker. Our assignment was to wrestle with the question, “What is missing in our Methodist and Wesleyan churches?” In her plenary address Marjorie answered the question simply, “John Wesley is!” She then proceeded in a compelling, rapturous retelling of Wesley’s little classic, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, arguing that the book deserved careful study in Methodist churches everywhere. What was so memorable about her address was that she really made Wesley alive by reading him through a new lens – her feminist, process-relational lens. Thus, it seems appropriate to ask whether Wesley, as a looming figure in the undoubtedly always-evolving mix of Suchocki’s theological growth, may contribute some element to the issue of how we might interpret the fact of religious diversity. Further, by utilizing Wesley as a guide, we are moving from a general cosmological framework as explored in the paper’s first section and attempting now to think in more consciously and particularly Christian ways about religious diversity.

In the opening section I suggested that the inviting, interactive and responsive nature of God’s evocative speaking and satisfied seeing in Genesis 1 goes a long way toward softening the more popular traditional notion unilateral divine fiat. In this section, we shall see that such a reading of Genesis 1 also corresponds nicely with Wesley’s ideas about the loving, noncoercive and responsive nature of God’s interactions with human beings. I shall not suggest here, though, that Wesley can be read as some kind of proto-process thinker. Nonetheless, I think it is clear that the proclivity of so many Methodist theologians of the second half of the twentieth century toward the process vision of things is no mere coincidence. Wesley’s practical, preachable theology spun a heritage of Methodist thought that has a history of taking with great seriousness the real life of creatures, to say nothing of the real agency of human beings, in relation to their Maker.

            Further, as it is for contemporary process thinkers, so also it was for Wesley: God's creative and sustaining activity in the world is predicated upon God’s immediate presence – and yet this presence does not overwhelm or negate the creaturely integrity and energies. God works, speculated Wesley, by "every moment superintending everything that he has made; strongly and sweetly influencing all, and yet without destroying the liberty of his rational creatures."⁷  It is fitting to argue, beyond Wesley, that if God is concerned not to destroy or negate human agency then there is likely a corresponding integrity and energy for all of creation in its vastly complex relations to the Creator. We are far less likely than Wesley and his contemporaries to suppose that human agency could be a simple and grand exception to everything else in the world.

            Thus, while Wesleyan theologians typically have spoken much of the doctrine of prevenient grace as indicative of God’s loving, sustaining and convicting presence in human lives, it is time for us now to appreciate in the Wesleyan corpus the hints of a broader, more cosmically oriented category for speaking of the Holy Spirit as "strongly and sweetly influencing all."  I submit that we deem this category creative grace. Granted, Wesley seemed most concerned that the "liberty" of God's "rational creatures" (i.e., human beings) be upheld and sustained, so that, significantly, the "influencing" (or inflowing) divine presence does not displace or dispel human energies and agency. It is incumbent upon us, nonetheless, to broaden Wesley's concern to include the creaturely integrity and real contribution of all creatures to the ongoing creative activity of God.  

            In the past two centuries since Wesley, the ecclesial tradition his preaching and practices spawned has argued cogently that human agency – our wondrous capacity to do evil against ourselves and one another, as well as to do good – is consistent with the convictions that God is love and God acts in love. In order that love might have opportunity to flourish in creation, responsible agency is offered to, and nurtured in, creatures of intelligence. God’s creative power, in Wesley's phrase, “continually co-operates with” God’s wisdom and goodness, laboring in a fashion expressive of a love that bestows, encourages and evokes a response of love from the creature. Having embarked upon the divine adventure of calling forth creatures of responsible freedom, God “cannot deny himself; he cannot counteract himself, or oppose his own work”⁸ - and God’s work is to allow the creaturely elements “room” to be, to grow, to exercise creaturely freedom for the sake of the possibilities of love.

Were it not for this [God] would destroy all sin, with its attendant pain, in a moment. He would abolish wickedness out of his whole creation, and suffer no trace of it to remain. But in so doing he would counteract himself, he would altogether overthrow his own work, and undo all that he has been doing since he created man upon the earth. . . . Were human liberty taken away men would be as incapable of virtue as stones. . . . God . . . [wills] to assist man in attaining the end of his being, in working out his own salvation - so far as it can be done without compulsion, without overruling his liberty, . . . without turning man into a machine . . . ⁹

            In Wesley’s cosmological reflections, this creative grace that is God laboring in and with the world is of the greatest intimacy. In his 1786 sermon “On Divine Providence” Wesley explicitly connected God's other-empowering omnipresence to omni-science, or God’s knowing of all things:

. . . as this all-wise, all-gracious Being created all things, so he sustains all things. . . . Now it must be that he knows everything he has made, and everything he preserves from moment to moment. Otherwise he could not preserve it: he could not continue to it the being which he has given it. And it is nothing strange that he who is omnipresent, who “filleth heaven and earth,” who is in every place, should see what is in every place, where he is intimately present. . . . Especially considering that nothing is distant from him, in whom we all “live and move and have our being.”¹⁰

            This last phrase above, of course, is a quotation from Paul's Athens discourse in Acts 17.  It is noteworthy that Wesley insists that "nothing is distant from [God]," for it underscores the notion that God's creative and intimate presence somehow actually makes each creature possible – and thus that the mode of God's activity is in, with and through the actual and authentic contributions of all creatures. In fact, just as the Paul of the Athens sermon could quote pagan poets as testifying to the radical immanence of God, so Wesley was bold enough to cite Virgil’s Aeneid in describing God as “the all-informing soul, that fills, pervades and actuates the whole.”¹¹ Thus, Wesley’s understanding of God’s knowing and sustaining of creation is that God labors in and for the world by immediate presence, as “the omnipresent Spirit,” and not as a distant, objectifiable “deity.”  “God,” Wesley wrote in his third discourse on the Sermon on the Mount, “by his intimate presence holds [heaven and earth and all that is therein] in being, who pervades and actuates the whole created frame, and is in a true sense the soul of the universe.”¹²  

Wesley, then, offers us a surprisingly immanent and intimate God whose everlasting love and sustaining presence encompass the entirety of creation. In reality, of course, it could be no other way; if for Wesley all human beings are graced, it is equally true that all human beings are creatures who share inextricably in the complex webs of creaturely existence as a whole. Thus, there can be no sharp arbitrary line drawn between God’s loving, sustaining presence offered graciously to humans and God’s presence offered graciously to all of creation, since it is the one Holy Spirit “who pervades and actuates the whole created frame.” Thus, while we may create theological categories for prevenient grace and creative grace, there is finally one grace, for there is but one God, one Spirit, laboring in love throughout creation.

            It is, however, precisely at this point of God’s evocation of the human response that Wesley offers a viable contribution to our reflections upon the reality of religious diversity. This point, for Wesley, is experienced by human beings most often as conscience. He repeatedly insisted that “natural conscience” is not “natural,” i.e., not simply a creaturely phenomenon reducible to social and cultural factors. Instead, for Wesley conscience is “supernatural,” which for Wesley, it must be noted, did not imply a miraculous, unilateral activity on God’s part, but in fact suggested the dynamic interaction of God with human beings in their actual, concrete socio-cultural circumstances.¹³  This is prevenient grace understood as the sustaining nearness of God to all human beings in their situatedness, their concretely historical settings. In fact, in his comments on Acts 17:28 (“in God we live and move and have our being”), Wesley writes, "We need not go far to seek or find [God].  He is very near us; in us.  It is only perverse reason which thinks [God] is afar off.”¹⁴   It is important for our purposes to keep in mind that Wesley, staying true to the intent of the text of Acts 17, is not meaning only Christian believers, or even just religious people, when he writes that God is “very near us,” even “in us.”  This is the God who, in the imagery of the Qur’an, is nearer to each of us than is our own jugular vein!

Thus, for Wesley the human conscience is a con-fluence, a flowing together: there is the influence, the inflowing, of all of our experiences, education and relationships; there is also the inflowing of God’s own Spirit to quicken, to address, to call, to convict. In practice, indeed in reality, these influences are inseparably intertwined. We find this notion particularly clearly in Wesley’s sermon “On Conscience,” where he points out that the term’s etymology is “to know together with” another. He takes this “other” to be God – but not “none other than” God! Hence, on the one hand he rejects the phrase “natural conscience” because “properly speaking, it is not natural, but a supernatural gift of God, above all his natural endowments. No, it is not nature, but the Son of God, that is ‘the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world.’”¹⁵  On the other hand, conscience “is that faculty whereby we are at once conscious of our own thoughts, words, and actions, and of their merit or demerit, . . . But this varies exceedingly, according to education and a thousand other circumstances.”¹⁶

Education and a thousand other circumstances! There are undoubtedly more than just a thousand such circumstances: events significant and not so; memories (often at least half forgotten); countless conversations; habits of thought and behavior; political, religious and moral authorities; all kinds of relations with others, etc. These all contribute their presence, their effects, their energies into our psyches and bodies. But Wesley of course intended the number of “a thousand” not as a limit, but as an exorbitant and wild gesture toward the infinitely incalcuable particulars of each of our lives. If con-science is on the one hand a “knowing with” the Spirit of God who searches our hearts and all things, it is on the other a “knowing with” those numberless particulars. Thus, according to Wesley, because God does not negate or cancel the contributions of those “thousand other circumstances,”¹⁷ conscience is not a stable, unvarying universal standard.  Indeed, it “varies exceedingly”!

And yet! – on that other hand, it is God who calls, who moves, who draws and woos us from within “the boundaries of our habitation” (Acts 17:26). God respects the inflowing of those “thousand other circumstances” in their felt presence in our lives. Wesley found further support for this idea by drawing upon the familiar words of Micah 6:8:  “So that we may say to every human creature, ‘He,’ not nature, ‘hath showed thee, O man, what is good.’”¹⁸  For Wesley it was significant that the one addressed in the text is “O man” (or, much more faithful to the point, “O human”) – and not “O Christian” or “O Jew.”  In Wesley’s reading of the Micah text, God works in the world to show all human beings the good path on which to walk. We must keep in mind, however, that God, working with the world as it is, offers this path to real human beings of particular times and places, dwelling as they do within “the boundaries of their habitation” – which means that in actual creaturely experience God’s “path” is many paths.

            Further, Wesley notices that “Balak king of Moab” and “Balaam the son of Beor” are mentioned a few verses earlier (6:5); thus, not without some justification he assumes that this “beautiful passage” is given “a peculiar force” when we “consider by whom and on what

occasion the words were uttered.” Wesley suggests that Balaam the pagan prophet was “then under divine impressions,” and that “probably Balak too, at that time, experienced something of the same influence. This occasioned his consulting with, or asking counsel of, Balaam, – his proposing the question to which Balaam gives so full an answer . . . “¹⁹  In other words, Wesley assumed that this classic prophetic text calling its hearers to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” was originally and long ago the answer given by the pagan prophet Balaam to King Balak’s tortured query, “With what shall I come before Yahweh?” (Micah 6:6-8). Wesley’s is a fascinating reading, for it implies that this well-known and well-loved text is essentially a textual fragment of prevenient grace!²⁰

            Indeed, following the moral philosophy of Frances Hutcheson (1694-1746), Wesley recognized both a “public” and a “moral” sense as included under the rubric of conscience; the public is roughly equivalent to what we would mean with our term empathy, while the moral is essentially what we would mean by our desire for justice. Wesley reiterated that “both the one and the other is now a branch of that supernatural gift of God which we usually style, preventing grace.”²¹ Indeed, even to exercise the most intimate of capacities associated with conscience – that of self-knowledge, or “discerning . . . [one’s] own tempers, thoughts, words and actions” –  “is not possible for [one] to do,” insisted Wesley, “without the assistance . . . and the continued influence of the Spirit of God.”²²  The crucial point to grasp here, though, is that this “continued influence” – we might construe the phrase as continuous inflowing – of God’s Spirit does not undo the identity, negate the agency, or squelch the energies or education (e.g., religious formation) of the human creatures.

In his sermon “On Faith” Wesley pursued similar themes. As he surveys the various kinds of faith which he purports to observe in the world, he writes that he prefers the faith of “Heathens” over that of the mild, rational English deists. He proceeds to associate his category of heathen faith with that of Muslims because “they are rather to be pitied than blamed for the narrowness of their faith.”²³  Even while we grant the condescending and undoubtedly largely ignorant tone of his writing on this topic, let us also note his magnanimity:

It cannot be doubted, but that this plea will avail for millions of modern Heathens. Inasmuch as to them little is given, of them little will be required. As to the ancient Heathens, millions of them likewise were savages. No more therefore will be expected of them, than the living up to the light they had. But many of them, especially in the civilized nations, we have great reason to hope

. . . were quite of another spirit; being taught of God, by his inward voice, all the essentials of true religion.²⁴

            Wesley apparently had a penchant for large numbers, as well as for the optimism of grace! After all, ‘millions of modern heathens’ will find a measure of grace in Jesus’ dictum that people are answerable only for what they actually have been given – in this case in the glimmerings of prevenient grace, “the light they had.” Again, even while we grant the thinly veiled superiority complex of colonialism in his allusion to heathen in “civilized nations,” let us not miss the finer point: Wesley harbored hopes that these people – context suggests he was referring primarily to faithful Muslims! – “were quite of another spirit; being taught of God, by his inward voice, all the essentials of true religion.” But why would those in “the civilized nations” be more likely to be so “taught of God”? Even while Wesley could signify “[God’s] inward voice,” is it not clear that at some level he assumed the critical role of (an Islamic or, equally, in this case, a “civilized”) “education and a thousand other circumstances”? In other words, one is never “taught of God” apart from those thousand-plus circumstances. Further, it is obvious that Wesley, by adopting such an understanding of the nature of divine evaluation of human life and character, was implying that God’s “general manner of working” is precisely within those wildly variable circumstances, i.e., within the particulars and contours of every human life.

The Jewish tradition is the next item under Wesley’s sermonic consideration of the varieties of faith. Though he had been relatively kind to so-called heathen faith, Wesley states that  “it is not so easy to pass any judgment concerning the faith of our modern Jews.”²⁵  Let us be frank: on the issue of Judaism Wesley undeniably stood in the long and shameful heritage of Christian anti-Jewish bias. Not surprisingly, he cites negative judgments from both the apostle Paul and the book of Acts regarding the predominantly negative response of Jews to the gospel of Christ. Nonetheless he concludes his brief reflections upon Judaism, rather tantalizingly, with this caveat: “Yet it is not our part to pass sentence upon them, but to leave them to their own Master.”²⁶  Of course “their own Master” is, for Wesley, none other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; nevertheless, as the Jewish people’s own Master God is addressed and obeyed – the experience of God is shaped, the perception of God framed – by an education other than Christian teaching, and surely by “a thousand other circumstances” than those of the typical Christian. God is “their own Master” as the God of the Torah, the God who liberated a slave people out of Egypt and called them to become God’s own covenant people. This is their own Master, One who has become their own Master through a particular historical (rabbinically formed) “education and a thousand other circumstances” uniquely a part of Jewish memory and identity.  

Obviously, “heathen” (whoever they are) and Muslims and Jews do not believe the same things regarding God as do Christians, nor or course do they believe the same as each other.  They walk on differing paths. Saving faith is not affirming the items on a creedal list, in any case.  Rather, Wesley draws on the story of Peter at the home of Cornelius (Acts 10) to define faith as a divine conviction of God, and the things of God, as, even in its infant state, enables every one that possesses it to ‘fear God and work righteousness.’ And whosoever, in every nation, believes thus far, the Apostle declares, is ‘accepted of [God].’ He actually is, at that very moment, in a state of acceptance. But he is at present only a servant of God, not properly a son. Meantime, let it be well observed, that ‘the wrath of God’ no longer ‘abideth on him.’²⁷

The remarkable insight of Peter, in responding to the fledgling testimony of the Gentile God-fearer Cornelius, is not lost on Wesley. In the words of a surprised Peter, “In every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God” (Acts 10:35). Indeed, Wesley mildly chastises his own Methodist preachers of a half-century prior who, when they “began to preach that grand scriptural doctrine, salvation by faith, . . . were not sufficiently apprized of the difference between a servant and a child of God” such that people with no conscious assurance of divine forgiveness were condemned as “child[ren] of the devil.”²⁸  Wesley, now older, wiser and presumably kinder, is far more willing to take into account the “education and a thousand other circumstances” of every human being as the real context and material of God’s laboring in the world for salvation.

There may be a host of reasons why a person does not consciously experience divine mercy through Christ, including of course the education of a differing religious tradition. God does not – indeed, according to the process vision of things actually cannot – unilaterally overcome or overwhelm those concrete variables that, in fact, help (God) to make us what we are. Nonetheless, for Wesley God’s intention for every person is salve-ation – a salving of life in every dimension, a healing of heart and affections toward the image of God, a being “renewed in love”²⁹ – through living faith in Jesus Christ. Thus salvation is a deliverance from the presence and effects of sin – and a healing toward the truly human life of love for God and neighbor. “And, indeed, unless the servants of God halt by the way, they will receive the adoption of sons,” Wesley confidently proclaimed. “They will receive the faith of the children of God, by his revealing his only begotten Son in their hearts.”³⁰

            Within the confines of the typical set of rubrics, Wesley’s thinking about people of other religious traditions is, at best, inclusivist. Yet his respect for the “education and a thousand other circumstances” of every human life gives us a little room to think more seriously about the real and irreplaceable role that distinct, particular religious traditions contribute to God’s labors in the world. Further, his willingness to believe that (at least some) Muslims are “taught of God . . . all the essentials of true religion” and that, finally, Jews should be “[left] to their own Master” moves us, if ever so budgingly, toward a pluralist rendering of God’s salving work. Further, if we push even harder on his recognition of the importance of “education and a thousand other circumstances” in the formation of human conscience alongside and in concert with the presence of the divine Spirit, then – particularly with Whitehead’s help – we arrive at the conclusion that God and world together have constructed many very different paths on which humans may walk with, and toward, the Soul of the world.

III

Rabbi Yehoshua rose to his feet and said: ‘It is not in the heavens.’

Bava Metzia 59b

What was it, again, that Wesley had preached regarding “the faith of our modern Jews”?  Interestingly, he suggested that “it is not our part to pass sentence upon them, but to leave them to their own Master.” Their own Master, indeed! In the Talmudic passage that provides the epigraph of this third section of the paper, God does not behave much like a “Master”! Further, it would be difficult to find a more fitting passage with which to begin our reflections upon the Jewish covenantal consciousness as it provides a complementary piece to our thinking about the wild diversity of religious traditions in our world.³¹

In this famous rabbinic story, a certain Rabbi Eliezer is attempting to persuade a group of his colleagues in a debate on certain purity laws. As the story proceeds, Eliezer attempts to convince his fellow rabbis that he is right, and they are wrong, by performing all kinds of miracles and wonders. When his opponents are unmoved, Eliezer finally appeals to heaven. “Suddenly a heavenly voice went forth and said to the sages, ‘Why are you disputing with Rabbi Eliezer? The Halakhah [legal ruling] is in accordance with him in all circumstances.’”³² Such a phenomenon might be expected to have been just the trump Eliezer needed to win the argument, but the narrative turns out otherwise; instead of conceding the argument to Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua stands to his feet and quotes from Deuteronomy 30:12, “It is not in the heavens.” What is not in the heavens? The Torah! The word or commandment of God – the lure of God? – is not out of reach, not beyond human comprehension or application. “No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (Deut. 30:14). The word, God’s word, dwells in the human realm; it is fitted to, and relevant to, the capabilities of the people of Israel.

Yehoshua’s reply, in other words, appeals to Moses’ own description of the Torah as being the divine word entrusted to the people of Israel to read, to interpret, to apply, to carry out. No further appeals to heaven can be made, precisely because it is not in the heavens!  Equally interesting is the follow-up story, in which Rabbi Natan encounters the prophet Elijah, long a resident of the heavenly realm, and asks him, “What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do at that time?” The heavenly charioteer’s reply is classic, for it suggests a good-natured sense of humor and respect for Yehoshua’s bold argument: God, reports Elijah, “laughed, saying: ‘My sons have defeated me, My sons have defeated me.” Contemporary Israeli philosopher David Hartman writes that this Talmudic passage “signifies God’s self-limiting love for the sake of making His human covenantal partners responsible for intellectually developing the Torah,” such that “students of the Torah are called upon to exercise human initiative and creativity.”³³

This is a surprising sort of “Master,” one who entrusts to the teachers of Israel this way of walking called the Torah and is certainly not unhappy to be defeated in Talmudic disputation! Of course one of the purposes of the text is to downplay (if not deny) the validity of miraculous events as somehow signifying God’s presence, activity or sanction. The rabbinic impulse, instead, is to turn to a text, and to undertake the hard labor of arguing over that text in order to discern the divine call. How much easier would it be simply to seek, or at least to hope, for a secure sign from God! We can speculate at length as to the power dynamics that would inspire rabbis to tell this story, but we should not overlook the its implicit realism. Miracles and signs – divine evidences that would imply a purely divine inbreaking, a unilateral act – are not available. Ambiguity is, and in great abundance.

            It is not in the heavens!  It is noteworthy that the apostle Paul quotes the same Deuteronomic text in his letter to the Romans as Yehoshua does in this Talmudic tale. For Paul, the divine word that “is not in the heavens” is “the word of faith that we are preaching,” and it is not in the heavens because “it is in your mouth and in your heart . . . that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:8, 9). Where for Yehoshua and the rabbis the divine word is the Torah entrusted to Israel, for Paul and the apostles the divine word is the gospel of Christ. As New Testament scholar Richard Hays observes, “Both [the rabbis and Paul] . . . presuppose the legitimacy of innovative readings that disclose truth previously latent in Scripture.”³⁴  Yet Hays appears to overlook a more fundamental point: it is precisely because “it is not in the heavens” that both the rabbis and Paul can rightly presuppose the legitimacy of their innovative readings! God does not “step in and settle the argument” between the rabbis and Paul, or between the Jewish and Christian paths that would flow from their writings, any more than God settles the dispute between Eliezer and his opponents! Instead, the covenantal nature of the divine word, the divine calling and wooing, allows for a great variety of responses. Because God’s presence / activity / word “is not in the heavens” but rather enmeshed in the particulars of creation within the boundaries of our habitation, it is and shall always be ambiguous, multivalent and utterly diverse in its manifestations. God’s covenantal activity in the world opens up the possibilities for a vast number of “covenants”!

            Indeed, in his same letter to the Romans, Paul makes a tantalizing statement about his “kindred, . . . the people of Israel,” writing that “to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants” (9:3, 4). Though he writes in the light of his faith in Jesus as the Messiah, he does not relegate the biblical covenants with Israel to the past. To them belong, even now, the covenants. These covenants are framed by Paul as a present reality – and they are (of course) plural. Surely it is significant that Paul apparently did not consider these covenants to have been rendered obsolete by the “new covenant in [Jesus’] blood” (1 Cor. 11:25) – the covenant, we might suggest, that “belongs” to Christians. Of course Paul had not thought through the idea of a plurality of covenants, Jewish and Christian, to the point of arriving at some kind of religious pluralism. That is the task for Christian theologians, building upon Paul, to undertake.

            The point here, essentially, is that Scripture’s testimony to a variety of covenants between God and various groupings of people (or creation as a whole) bespeaks a covenantal deity, a God whose essential being and activity are covenantal, relational, dialogical. If this is the case, then the process view of things receives significant biblical and theological support. For in that view, God always is working with the world (including all of its peoples and cultures) where it is, and for what it is in this moment, in order to lead it to where it can be. Adding Wesley to the mix, we are reminded that for every human being in any and all times and places, God’s working is always inseparably entangled with “education and a thousand other circumstances.”

            All of this makes it all the more important that the first covenant mentioned in the Jewish and Christian Bibles is one made “with every living creature on earth . . . a covenant for all generations to come” (Gen. 9:10, 12). God in this covenant truly co-venes, convenes, comes together with the world as a whole and all of its creatures, for God’s covenantal promise is that “never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth” (9:11). The significance of this promise for our purposes is that it underscores the notion that God is on the side of sustaining the otherness, the utter unpredictability (cf. 6:6), the real power of creatures to make a difference in the world and (therefore also) to God. In light of the overcoming of the watery chaos of the flood that thereby ushers in a new creation, it is clear that this covenant is a reaffirmation of the divine wooing of Genesis 1 to “let there be” real and vital creatures who emerge from land and sea. It is fascinating to mull this over: it is a single covenant that God is making, and yet it is a covenant God makes with every living thing. There is something irreducibly and unavoidably plural about this universal covenant, especially as we move to consider those living things that are human, contoured and formed as they are by “education and a thousand other circumstances.” God’s creative relationship with all of creation is fundamentally covenantal – and thus inevitably plural.

            Once more, this means that the God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures works with the world as it is to lead it to what it might become. At one place and time in the world that working produces, in company with the world, a figure like Gautama; in another place and time, a Confucius emerges; in another, someone like Nanak. And we trace their teachings and influence as their disciples and heirs branch out into a host of sub-traditions in differing times and places, all of which continue to evolve under the constraints of history and God’s working. “Education and a thousand other circumstances” become magnified and multiplied, creating ever new streams of response to grace that become embodied in doctrines, practices and institutions. These are very different paths with quite distinct goals and values. But if the words of Deuteronomy, cited by both Yehoshua and Paul – “It is not in the heavens” – can find application beyond both the Torah and the gospel (a bit of real pluralism already, to be sure) and can be embraced as a general principle describing the nature of divine presence and activity, then all of these different paths are nonetheless the real fruits of a radically covenantal God – a deity whose working in the world unavoidably spawns a variety of ways of being, of praying, of living faithfully in the divine presence.

Notes

¹As she does, for just one example, in God-Christ-Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 94.

 
²As is the case throughout her popularly-written book, In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1996).

 
³See, for example, Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988); on a more popular level, see Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 9-14.

 
⁴For a provocative and eminently creative tour de force on the opening verses of Genesis, see Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep (New York and London: Routledge, 2002).

 ⁵See Keller, especially Chapter Five, “The Sea of Heteroglossia.”

⁶The essay appeared originally in The Drew Gateway 57.3 (Fall 1987), 31-43. It has since been reprinted in Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love: Wesleyan and Process Theologies in Dialogue, eds. Bryan P. Stone and Thomas Jay Oord (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2001), 49-65.

 
⁷Wesley, “On the Omnipresence of God,” The Works of John Wesley Vol. VII (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House), 240.

 
⁸ “On Divine Providence,” Works Vol. VI, 317.

 
⁹Ibid., 317-318.

 
¹⁰Ibid., 315.

 
¹¹ “On the Omnipresence of God,” 240.

 
¹² “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse III,” Works Vol. V, 283.

 
¹³See “Working Out Our Own Salvation,” Works Vol. VI, 512.

 
¹⁴Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (Wimbledon: Epworth Press, 1976), 466.

 
¹⁵”On Conscience,” Works Vol. VII, 187-188.

¹⁶Ibid., 187.

 
¹⁷Of course, while Wesley believed that God does not negate or cancel the “education and a thousand other circumstances” of every human life, in the process vision of things God can not do so. I suspect the process vision is closer to the truth, but hope that Wesley is not incorrect. In other words, I still hope for a way to avoid this impasse.

 
¹⁸Ibid., 188.

 
¹⁹Ibid.

 
²⁰ The reading of Micah 6:6-8 as a “conversation” between the pagan ruler Balak and the pagan prophet Balaam bears yet another tantalizing possibility.  Balak asks how he is to come before Yahweh, the God of Israel, in worship; Balaam replies that Yahweh requires of the human being (“O mortal”), who on this reading is of course not an Israelite, that “you . . . do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your” elohim. A likely interpretation of elohim throughout the Hebrew Bible is “local god(s),” the god(s) with whom one (or one’s people) most directly relates and has to do. At the risk of placing too much theological freight on this one passage, reading it along these lines yields an interesting kind of inclusivism!

 
²¹ “On Conscience,” 189.

²²Ibid., 189-190.

 
²³”On Faith,” Works Vol. VII, 196-197.

 
²⁴Ibid., 197.

 
²⁵Ibid.

 
²⁶Ibid., 198.

 
²⁷Ibid., 199.

²⁸Ibid.

²⁹A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1966), 30.

³⁰”On Faith,” 199.

³¹There are several reasons for taking this third path of Jewish reflection in this paper. First, I believe that Christian theologians who wrestle with the challenge of religious pluralism are best served by beginning with Judaism, since it is very likely that any sustained reflection upon the real differences, as well as undeniable relationship, between the Jewish and Christian traditions may in fact shed some light on how Christians might reflect upon their relationship to other religious traditions as well. Second, Jewish theological reflection has historically begun its labor textually, attempting to reflect upon the faith community’s holy writ, often in remarkably creative ways, in order to provide that community with persuasive rationales for thinking and behaving in new ways. I believe that Christian theologians, in order to be persuasive to the great bulk of Christians believers, must also allow their thinking to be grounded in, and responsive to, the tradition’s canonical texts. If some manner of religious pluralism is to be persuasively argued, it must be discovered and nurtured from within the tradition. Third, the particularly Jewish sensibilities regarding the theme of covenant do offer some especially inviting possibilities for thinking about religious pluralism – and, of course, also connect well with the process-relational and Wesleyan themes explored in the first two sections.

³²The Talmudic text, along with a masterful bit of theological commentary, can be found in David Hartman’s A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights, 1997), 32ff.

³³Ibid., 33, 34. We should add, to be sure, that where Hartman, comparably to Wesley, writes of God’s “self-limiting love,” in the process vision of things God absolutely, metaphysically, can do no other than to work in such a way as to encourage “human initiative and creativity.”

³⁴Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3-4.