THE CHRISTIAN GOSPEL FOR AMERICANS

It is hard to disagree with a statement on the back cover of this book by Thomas Jay Oord that this is David Ray Griffin's Magnum Opus, bringing together as it does his philosophy of religion, systematic theology and socio-political analysis. Unusually for a philosopher of religion, David also takes an interest in psychical research, and is a founder and co-director of the Center for Process Studies as well as being author of over 40 books. His more recent books that I have reviewed in these pages have been concerned with a critical view of 9/11 and American foreign policy, as well as a further major study on the environment. Here he returns to his roots in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, whose thinking was decades ahead of its time with its emphasis on process and experience.

Although written specifically for Americans, the book will have a much wider appeal as a formulation that transcends traditional dichotomies of conservative and liberal, while also presenting both universal and local perspectives. In the introduction, David distinguishes between what he calls the primary doctrines of Christian faith and secondary doctrines that have achieved undue prominence such as the virgin birth and the idea of divine omnipotence that in turn entails a huge challenge with respect to the problem of evil. Here his distinction between 'God' and 'Gawd' is very useful, where the latter is omnipotent in the traditional sense and male – it is this concept that is in fact the target of the new atheism. A further preliminary is the status of doctrines as respectively literally true, symbolically true, or simply false, which brings up demythologisation and David's transition from supernaturalism to what he calls theistic naturalism. He points out that modern liberals accept naturalism as embodied in scientific materialism, but it is possible to formulate a constructive post-modernist position drawing on William James and Whitehead whereby 'there are no supernatural violations of normal rules of nature.' Importantly, this does not exclude the findings of psychical research.

The book is structured in five major parts: God, the Bible and humanity; the prophets, Jesus and other religions; sin and the demonic; salvation and the reign of God. David begins by considering traditional theological method compared to science and philosophy with their criteria of self-consistency and adequacy to the facts. Theology, by contrast, has historically put the emphasis on revealed doctrines and apostolic tradition, an approach that has been progressively undermined by biblical criticism. David argues that the world was created out of chaos rather than nothing and exhibits anthropic fine-tuning for life. This is a particularly interesting section, where he argues, persuasively in my view, that the hypothesis of a cosmic mind makes more sense than resorting to the logically unparsimonious multiverse, especially when one takes into account other factors such as 'the existence of truth, religious experience, evolution, the reality and efficacy of moral and mathematical forms.' (p. 47) Process theism maintains that our universe was fine-tuned for life and that divine power is persuasive ('luring' in Whitehead's terminology) rather than controlling – even the greatest possible power, according to Hartshorne, is one power among others.

In a chapter on human consciousness, David analyses the reasons for the modern denial of soul and spirit based on the conviction that 'human perception is limited to sensory perception', reflecting the position of Kant vis-à-vis Swedenborg, although this is not mentioned. Panexperientialism provides a framework that bypasses the philosophical difficulties associated with materialism and dualism while asserting the possibility of freedom, soul-brain interaction and the moral and religious experience, without resort to supernaturalism.

David places Jesus firmly within the Hebrew prophetic tradition that champions the Kingdom of God over worldly values and dominating power, introducing the anti-imperial gospel of Jesus in the context of the Roman Empire, which he later compares in detail with the American Empire. The earliest gospel text, Q, depicts Jesus as a prophet crucified as a threat by the Roman authorities for proclaiming the coming 'Reign of Divine Values' rather than as a sacrificial lamb dying for the forgiveness of sins. From this, David draws the important conclusion that American Christians today should likewise be anti-imperialistic, a position sure to be anathema those who still believe in American moral exceptionalism. Further chapters in this section address religious pluralism, Christology, Trinity and the nature of the Resurrection, which David places, rightly in my view, within modern research on apparitions (p. 177). He quotes Whitehead's reference to the need for wider truths 'within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found' (p. 194) – a central aim of our Galileo Commission.

The section on sin and the demonic sums up David's recent work on American foreign policy, for instance The American Trajectory – Divine or Demonic? He first places these categories within traditional Christian thought, retaining their mythological but not realistic aspect where the demonic represents a power and a risk inherent in a creative universe. Culturally, this is embedded in the war system and the drive for domination and therefore imperialism as a response to the anarchical state of civilisation. David's case for the American Empire as demonic is built on their overthrow of thirty governments during the Cold War and a further seven since that time; then on the use of false flag attacks and other events justifying engagement in war including Pearl Harbour, Northwoods and 9/11; the development and use of nuclear weapons in Japan; and finally climate destruction by means of the current economic system and its impact on the environment. This leads him to the conclusion that the American Empire is extremely demonic because, 'for the sake of power and money, it is in the process of prematurely destroying the Holocene, all forms of life that depend on it, and all that creativity made possible by the development of civilisation…. also because its leaders have been too preoccupied with military projects to devote time and money to the evidently boring task of saving humanity and civilisation.' (p. 326)

The final two parts come back to theological issues and their social expression in terms of the nature of salvation and the relationship between the Reign of God and the emergence of global democracy. Here David treats the position of modern philosophy against life after death, given its commitment to scientific materialism and reading evidence exclusively from this perspective. He advances the idea of the resurrection of the soul, arguing that this can be understood in terms of degrees and that the capacity for life after death may be an emergent possibility (as also argued by the philosopher Tim Freke). He puts this in context of Whitehead's contention that the purpose behind the evolutionary process 'is the development of creatures with increasingly greater capacity for intrinsic value.' (p. 350) He then looks at evidence for life after death, especially well-documented veridical out of body experiences and apparitions, though he could have added cases directly suggestive of survival in terms of veridical messages through mediums.

David sees the advent of global democracy as a necessary development, and draws here on the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, illustrating this with two pertinent quotations: 'Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary; evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole.' The question becomes how to combine power and goodness in terms of a moral order that is fully informed, impartially benevolent and impartially sympathetic; we need to move towards a universalist logic and beyond both statist and imperialistic logic – needless to say we are currently a long way away from this and the trend is towards more surveillance and control. I agree that we need to embrace a perspective where global democracy is 'necessary for the very survival of human civilisation.' (p. 385)

The final part discusses morality in relation to the golden and silver rules, attempting to reconcile the 'thin' universal with the 'thick' local and particular. David suggests that the golden rule of doing to others what you would like done to yourself should apply to our immediate circle, while the silver rule of not doing to others what you would not want done to yourself you should be applied on a larger scale and should also be embodied in the principles of the foreign policy. He spells out the social implications of his position of resistance to imperialism in the final chapter, drawing parallels with German Lutherans, who developed a binding doctrinal stance (status confessionis) on socio-political questions during the 1930s. In the light of prior analysis, this is a powerful challenge to the American people to go beyond narrow patriotism (Make America Great Again) and to embrace a more universalist logic – one has to say that there is little sign of this at present, but it may represent the ultimate direction of travel. This magisterial work deserves the widest possible readership for the way it brings together philosophy, theology, science, ecology and politics in a coherent intellectual synthesis – it is a crowning achievement.