Alfred North Whitehead - Mathematician, Natural Theologian, Philosopher and Physicist

I discovered the work of Alfred North Whitehead when I was a graduate student at Saint John’s University, School of Theology, in Collegeville, Minnesota.

I had heard of him before, some of my undergraduate professors had attempted to direct me to his work, or more importantly, to the school of thought that he founded. Though, it was at St. John’s where I actually discovered Whitehead and his Process Theology. It was not until then that I came to understand how his perception of the world had been influencing me throughout my life.

Whitehead’s influence came in part through the writing of philosophers and theologians who had taken up his work in continuation of the process tradition, but his influence also manifested itself through osmosis, from the general principles which he articulated that I had absorbed unconsciously through pop culture.

Because I found that the cosmologies of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and other mind/body dualists such as Descartes and Kant completely inadequate to the task of resolving key tensions between what the church prays and hopes for, in terms of the salvation of the world, and what it considers possible in regard to its view of the nature and structure of reality…a cosmology entirely reliant on false predicates; because I could not rely on these fundamentally flawed systems of reason, I needed something new to build my arguments on.

Even modern interpreters of those dualistic traditions could not escape the fallacies that thousands of years of enculturation had layered into their cosmologies: not Kierkegaard, not Neitchze, neither Wittgenstein, nor Foucault.

Even though the so-called enlightenment philosophers who grappled with scientific theory, making new discoveries in physics and mathematics, even they could not escape the morass they were in; neither the Copernican nor the Newtonian revolution were not sufficient to the task of reworking those ancient cosmological assumptions.

Through his work in physics and mathematics Whitehead provided philosophers and theologians like me with a means of escaping the classical (or quasi-classical) world view, while also providing the best analysis and explanation of the work that had been produced by the aforementioned luminaries which I have ever encountered.

There is no better explainer of enlightenment thinkers than Whitehead.

Isaac Newton brought us a revolution in physics, but his work was still steeped in the Neo-Platonic structures that had not changed since the 3^rd century CE. Whitehead provided a framework for stepping away from Newton and Plotinus, Aristotle and Plato, whose influence was still at work in the twentieth century in such schools of thought as logical positivism, dialectical materialism, and of course…the theology of the church.

Whitehead’s school of thought, his process-thinking, provided me with exactly what I was looking for, an alternate cosmology within which I could contemplate the theological questions I was grappling with. He provided me with the tools of discernment that I desperately needed and continue to rely on as my work matures.

I found Whitehead’s thinking to be dense, it needed explication, and there were many authors that had been students of his, who were busy at the work of doing so. However, Whitehead’s students oftentimes carried their conclusions to very different ends than their teacher did.

From my own studies of Whitehead I developed a theology of relationality that is a principle feature of my work on the doctrine of universal salvation.

This theology says that all humans are concrescent beings. Each and every one of us is a unique society of interests; and yet, at the most fundamental level those interests are relational. Our relationality is not merely something that is discerned in time and space, our relationships are intrinsic elements of self-hood. In fact, relationality is so fundamental to human existence that it is proper to say that our relationships with each other, are constitutive elements of our being.

We are ontologically relational.

Whitehead’s work illuminated the reality that our relationships are so fundamental to who we are that they influence us no matter how far removed we are from one another in time and space, whether we know each other or not, our relationships to one another exist as determinants in the fabric of our being.

Coming to the knowledge of this provided me with the framework for articulating the notion that the salvation of any-one-person is not complete, that it cannot be complete, without the salvation of every-other-person; discovering this in Whitehead was uplifting, and for that I will ever be grateful.