How to Read Cobb and Griffin’s Process Theology as a Beginner

John Cobb and David Griffin’s Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition is still one of the clearest classic introductions to process theology, but it can be a frustrating book for beginners because its difficulty is not mainly the theology itself. The real barrier is the new vocabulary and the stretching of common words to new meanings. The first chapter introduces many of the key terms, but it is dense and moves quickly. After spending time with C. Robert Mesle’s introduction to Whitehead (Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead), I have come to think that Process Theology becomes more readable once a small number of Whiteheadian concepts stop feeling foreign. Much of the work a beginner has to do at the outset is really work in process philosophy before it becomes process theology proper. Cobb and Griffin are building theological claims on top of that metaphysical framework. This essay is my attempt to name those background concepts in plain language, drawing especially on Mesle and on the first chapter of Process Theology, without flattening them into something Whitehead and Cobb are not actually saying.

Whitehead’s Basic Picture

What makes Whitehead difficult at first is that he is not just adding new philosophical language. He is trying to replace a whole picture of reality that is ingrained in many of us. The world, on his account, is not a warehouse of self-contained things. It is a living process in which each moment inherits a past, confronts possibilities, and becomes something new. Time, in this view, is not a container in which events happen. Time is the passage from one occasion of experience to the next, the becoming and perishing of events. That shift has implications everywhere. If reality is process, then the self is not an unchanging mental substance but a flow of experience; knowledge is not a spectator’s detached picture of the world but participation in a causal world; power is not best understood as domination but as relational influence; and even God, in this tradition, is understood within the same metaphysical scheme rather than as an exception to it. Cobb’s theology only really starts to make sense once that broader Whiteheadian shift is in view.

The first and most important term is actual occasion, sometimes also called an actual entity. In creaturely contexts the two phrases are often used almost interchangeably. Still, “actual entity” is often treated as the broader term, because Whitehead and later process thinkers can speak of God as an actual entity without meaning that God is just one more perishing occasion like creaturely moments. When Whitehead says “occasion,” he is emphasizing that reality is event-like, momentary, and always becoming. When he says “entity,” he is emphasizing that this event is still real, definite, and actual rather than vague or imaginary. The easiest way I have found to hold the idea is this: an actual occasion is the smallest concrete unit of becoming. It is not a whole person, whole action, or whole thought process. It is one tiny pulse within a larger stream, something like a single frame in a film that appears continuous only because countless other frames are patterned with it. A human conversation, for example, is not one occasion but many. If someone insults me and there is a brief moment in which I inherit my mood, memory, bodily tension, and the tone of the insult, while several possibilities become live before I settle into one definite response, that tiny moment of becoming is closer to what Whitehead means.

The same idea is extended downward as well, and this is where Whitehead’s picture starts to look radical. An amoeba turning toward food is not, in this view, a blob merely being pushed from outside, but a stream of minute responsive events in which prior state and surrounding conditions are taken up into a new moment of becoming. Whitehead’s claim reaches all the way down: the world is composed not of enduring little billiard balls, but of momentary drops of experience or feeling woven together in relation. This does not mean electrons think the way people think. It means consciousness is only the tip of the iceberg of experience. Consciousness is not negligible when it appears; its presence transforms the character of the whole occasion. But human consciousness remains one especially complex form of feeling, not the standard by which all feeling must be measured. That extension beyond the human case is one reason process thought so often moves toward panexperientialism, the view that experience in some very basic sense goes all the way down.

This is why Whitehead’s metaphysics is so different from substance metaphysics. A thing-based worldview imagines stable objects that later happen to act. Whitehead wants to say that the most basic realities are not static things at all, but strictly individual events that arise, become, achieve definiteness, and then pass into the past. That is also why the language of “actuality” matters. An actual occasion is not just a possibility or a concept. It is a concrete fact once it has become what it is going to be. If I had to compress the point into one line, I would say that an actual occasion is one moment of becoming, and an actual entity is that same moment considered as a real fact.

Key Terms

The next term that matters is prehension. This is one of Whitehead’s most awkward words for modern readers, but once its point becomes clear it is not nearly as mysterious as it first appears. To prehend is to take account of, inherit, or feel what is given. The important caution is that “feel” here does not mainly mean emotion. It means something more primitive: to be affected by and to take into oneself. Whitehead needs a term broader than understanding, perception, or consciousness because he wants it to apply at every level of reality, not only at the level of reflective human thought. A new occasion does not begin from nowhere. It prehends previous occasions as inherited data. In this context, the “actualities” being prehended are prior realized facts, especially prior actual occasions that have already become definite and now stand in the past as data for the present. So when Whitehead says an occasion feels a past actuality, he means that the new moment is constituted in part by the influence of prior completed moments.

Memory is probably the clearest immediate human example. When I remember a past experience and feel the same emotion, the earlier moment is not simply repeated; what I have is a new feeling of the same emotion, felt from a different standpoint in the present. Cobb and Griffin call this relation incarnational: the past experience is incorporated into the present one, not as a replica but as living data taken up into a new act of becoming. That is why interdependence is not, for Whitehead, a moral add-on that we can choose to take seriously or ignore. It is an ontological given. We cannot escape it. We are constituted by relations we did not create. Efficient causation, in older philosophical language, means the way one actuality helps bring about another. For Whitehead it is more intimate than the image of one external thing bumping into another from the outside. One actuality influences another by being taken up into it as part of the new moment’s own formation. We affect each other not only from outside, but by leaving ourselves behind as data that later moments must inherit and respond to. The present does not start fresh. It inherits. This is also why Mesle is so helpful when he says consciousness is only the visible tip of a larger field of feeling and responsiveness: deeper inherited causation is already at work before we arrive at reflective awareness.

Whitehead then distinguishes several kinds of prehension. Physical prehension is the feeling of past actualities. Conceptual prehension is the feeling of possibilities, what Whitehead calls eternal objects. Hybrid prehension is more specific than simply “noticing a possibility in a situation.” Technically, it is a physical prehension of another actual entity that takes up one of that entity’s conceptual feelings. In plainer language, a new occasion receives a possibility as already valued by another actuality, not merely as an abstract option. Theologically, the most important case is the creature’s prehension of God: this is how Cobb and Griffin explain the creature’s reception of God’s valuation of possibilities in the initial aim. This leads directly into another important term, dipolar. Every actual occasion is dipolar because it has both a physical pole and a mental, or conceptual, pole, two inseparable sides of one process of becoming. The physical pole is the inherited pressure of the settled past; the mental pole is the occasion’s relation to possibilities. If I am deciding how to answer an insult, the inherited tone, memory, and bodily tension belong to the physical side, while the live possibilities of silence, retaliation, or patience belong to the mental side. Dipolarity describes the structure of an occasion as a whole, whereas hybrid prehension describes one mode of taking reality in within that structure.

The language of eternal objects can sound more obscure than it really is. An eternal object is a pure possibility, a way something could be, rather than an actual event. Redness, harmony, intensity, truthfulness, patience, and cruelty can all serve as rough examples, though Whitehead uses the category more broadly and formally than ordinary moral language suggests. What matters for Cobb is that occasions do not merely inherit past facts; they also confront possibilities for how to become next. That is why an actual occasion can be both conditioned and genuinely open. The past presses on it, but it is not exhausted by the past. Possibilities can qualify both the objective content of a feeling, what is felt, and the subjective form, how it is felt.

This is where concrescence enters. Concrescence is not the settled outcome of an occasion. It is the brief process by which the occasion becomes concrete. Put simply, concrescence is the becoming, while satisfaction is the achieved result once that becoming is complete. The occasion inherits the past, receives relevant possibilities, and moves toward one definite realization. During that becoming the occasion enjoys what Whitehead calls subjective immediacy. “Enjoyment” here does not mean pleasure, as though Whitehead were placing every event somewhere on a pleasure-pain continuum. He means the sheer lived fact of being an experiencing subject. To be, to actualize oneself, to act upon others, and to share in a wider community is already, in this technical sense, a kind of enjoyment. That is why Whitehead can speak of experience as the “self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.” When the process completes, the occasion reaches its satisfaction, the completed unity it has become. At that point it perishes as a present subject and becomes available to the future as part of the settled past. Whitehead’s term subject-superject points to this shift in status: what was a living subject in the act of becoming becomes an objective fact that later moments must take account of.

At this point one might ask the obvious question: if reality is made of momentary occasions, then what about things that endure? Whitehead’s answer is that enduring realities are not exceptions to process but patterned streams within it. Electrons, molecules, cells, and living organisms are enduring societies of occasions, stable patterns in which many occasions inherit one another in a regular way. The human soul, mind, or stream of experience is likewise not one long unchanging substance hidden behind experience, but a series of distinct occasions with enough continuity to form a personal order. In that sense, what we usually call a stable thing is more abstract than the concrete occasions themselves. The enduring pattern is real, but the fully concrete individuals are the occasions. This matters for reading Cobb because he wants to speak about persons, souls, freedom, and God without quietly slipping back into substance metaphysics.

From Metaphysics to Theology

Once those Whiteheadian metaphysical terms are in place, Cobb’s theology starts to come into view, but one more underlying principle needs naming first. Creativity is Whitehead’s ultimate metaphysical category, the principle of novelty that God and the world share alike. It is not an agent or a thing but the most general feature of becoming: inherited many become a new one. God exemplifies creativity supremely, but every occasion of experience participates in it. That shared ground is why process theology can hold creaturely freedom and divine action together without contradiction. The most important theological distinction is then between the primordial nature of God and the consequent nature of God. The primordial nature of God is God’s eternal envisagement, ordering, and valuation of possibilities. “Order” here means that possibilities are not just a chaotic heap. “Valuation” means they are not all equally good, fitting, or rich. And these possibilities are not envisaged neutrally; they are held with appetite for their actualization in the world. God knows not only what could be, but which possibilities are better, more harmonious, or more life-giving than others. The consequent nature of God, by contrast, is God’s concrete reception of the actual world as it happens. This is the side of God that takes every completed occasion into the divine life. When process theologians say that God is affected by the world, suffers with creatures, and loses nothing that creatures achieve, they mean that nothing real and valuable in creaturely life simply drops out of God’s experience.

This also means that divine reality is the ground of novelty. Every occasion inherits a past, but it does not inherit only what has already happened. It also confronts possibilities, including possibilities that were never actualized in its own past and may not yet have been actualized in the world at all. For Whitehead and Cobb, those previously unactualized possibilities are not detached options hanging in midair. They are grounded in God’s envisagement. That is why God-relatedness is constitutive for every occasion of experience. Each new occasion begins not only from the past world but also from God. With that said, this does not sanctify the status quo. It means that what is received from the past can be creatively transformed in light of a divine call forward toward new possibilities.

Whitehead’s God therefore feels very different from the God of classical omnipotence. God is not the absolute controller who unilaterally determines every event, but the supreme participant in the relational process. Whitehead’s memorable phrase that God is “the poet of the world” gets at this well: God does not dominate the world from outside it, but lures it toward truth, beauty, and goodness with “tender patience.” This matters for reading Cobb because when he speaks of divine persuasion, patience, and responsiveness, he is not reaching for devotional metaphor. He is drawing a theological account from metaphysical claims already in place. God is therefore not untouched by the world. God is, in Whitehead’s own famous phrase, “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

This distinction matters because it sets up initial aim, another term Cobb uses constantly. The initial aim is not simply an innate moral core buried inside us, though it can illuminate why some possibilities present themselves to us as better or more fitting than others. More precisely, the initial aim is God’s offered best relevant possibility for a new occasion in light of its concrete situation. The world gives the facts. God gives the best relevant possibility. The creature then forms its own subjective aim, taking up, modifying, or resisting that lure in the act of becoming. This is why process theology can speak about freedom without collapsing into either pure determinism or pure spontaneity. The creature does not choose from nowhere. It inherits a world. But it also does not merely repeat what has been given. It becomes in relation to real possibilities. That is Whitehead’s version of creative self-determination: self-causation within inheritance, not freedom from relation.

Just as important, the occasion’s aim is not only private self-creation. By self-creation, Whitehead does not mean making oneself out of nothing. He means the act by which a new occasion becomes this definite occasion rather than some other one. Whitehead’s account includes both self-creation and self-expression into the future. Each occasion aims to become itself, but also to become itself in a way that contributes something definite to the future world. However negligible the occasion may be, the aim to express oneself into the environment is universal. Like the aim at self-creation, the aim at self-expression is a form of final causation, that is, an orientation toward what the occasion is trying to become. But it is also the anticipation of oneself as an efficient cause, as something that will later help shape the future. Accordingly, an occasion does not aim solely at its own private enjoyment; it also aims to become in a way that can enrich the future experience of others. That double orientation, toward one’s own becoming and toward the future one will help create, is one reason process theology can speak so naturally about moral responsibility.

At that point, some of Cobb’s most characteristic claims become easier to follow. God is persuasive rather than coercive because God does not override creaturely becoming from outside it. In Whitehead’s basic technical sense, objective immortality means that every completed occasion becomes an ineradicable fact available as data for the future. Process theology gives that claim a further divine dimension: every completed occasion is also taken up into God’s consequent nature, received forever into God’s concrete experience of the world. Nothing that becomes real is simply erased. That does not mean process theology teaches standard personal immortality in the usual sense. It means that what creatures achieve is not finally lost, because it persists both in the world’s past and in the divine life.

If I had to say what a lay reader really needs before opening Cobb, I would put it this way: reality is made of occasions rather than substances; time is the passage of those occasions; prehension names inherited influence rather than merely conscious awareness; concrescence names the becoming of a new concrete subject out of the many, while satisfaction names the completed outcome of that becoming; enduring selves and things are societies or streams of occasions rather than static substances; and the most important divine distinction is between God’s ordering of possibilities and God’s reception of actualities, because out of that relation comes the initial aim offered to each occasion. Once those ideas become intuitive, Cobb’s book becomes much easier to follow. It still remains more abstract and systematic than Mesle, but it starts to read less like unfamiliar terminology piled up in every paragraph and more like a sustained effort to explain how God, world, freedom, suffering, and moral growth fit together.