Process Theology Quiz

The primordial nature is God’s eternal, unchanging envisagement and valuation of all possibilities. It is complete and timeless; God does not gradually discover new possibilities as the world evolves. The realm of eternal objects is infinite from eternity, and what the world produces is new actualizations of those possibilities, not new possibilities themselves. God holds these possibilities in a graded order with appetite for their realization, which is why God can be the ground of both order and novelty. Memory hook: primordial nature = God’s eternal, complete ordering of all possibilities.

The consequent nature is God’s concrete, growing reception of the actual world. Every completed occasion is woven into the fabric of God’s experience and preserved there eternally. Nothing that creatures achieve or suffer is simply lost. Unlike the primordial nature, which is timeless and fixed, the consequent nature grows as new occasions come into being. This is how process theology can say that God is genuinely affected by the world and that creaturely existence has ultimate significance. Memory hook: consequent nature = God’s ever-growing reception and eternal preservation of actualities.

The primordial nature concerns what could be; the consequent nature concerns what has actually happened. Together they produce the initial aim: the consequent nature gives God the context of the actual situation, and the primordial nature provides the ordered field of possibilities, so God can offer the best relevant possibility for this occasion right now. An analogy: the primordial nature is like a perfect, eternally complete neural network with all conditional valuations already in place; the consequent nature is the input (what the world actually looks like now); and the initial aim is the output (the best possibility for this occasion). The difference from an actual neural network is that God’s ordering was never built or trained, is perfect rather than approximate, and holds its outputs with desire for their realization. A short formula is: primordial = all possibilities ordered; consequent = actual situation received; initial aim = the best possibility for this situation.

God does not override creaturely becoming from outside it. Instead, God lures each occasion toward the best available possibility for that moment. Divine power is therefore persuasive, not coercive: God influences, invites, and calls, but does not unilaterally determine outcomes. This is not a limitation God reluctantly accepts; it follows from God’s own purpose. God’s aim is at the maximization of experience, the richest possible intensity and depth of feeling. But richness of experience requires genuine self-creation, real freedom, and authentic responsiveness. A coerced experience is a diminished experience. If God determined every outcome, creatures would be mere puppets, and the very intensity and beauty God aims at would be impossible. Persuasion is therefore not weakness but the only form of power consistent with God’s goal.

God’s purpose is the maximization of experience: the richest possible intensity, depth, and beauty of experience for each occasion and for the world as a whole. God aims not at obedience, doctrinal conformity, or moral rule-following as ends in themselves, but at the fullest realization of experiential value. This is an aesthetic aim rather than a legalistic one. God wants creatures to realize the deepest beauty available to them and to contribute to the beauty of future experience. This purpose explains why God is persuasive (coercion would diminish the quality of experience), why God risks discord (greater complexity enables richer experience), and why triviality is evil (it fails God’s aim by settling for less than what was possible).

The initial aim is God’s offered best relevant possibility for a new occasion in its concrete situation. The world gives the facts inherited from the past, and God gives the best possible lure forward within those facts. Memory hook: the world gives the data; God gives the best next possibility.

The initial aim is what God offers; the subjective aim is what the creature actually does with that offer. A subject may receive, modify, narrow, distort, or resist the divine lure. So subjective aim is the creature’s own concrete appropriation of the initial aim.

Pan-experientialism is the view that experience in some very basic sense goes all the way down. It does not mean electrons think or feel pleasure. It means consciousness is only the most complex and visible form of a much more primitive kind of feeling or responsiveness. The basic units of reality are not bits of dead matter but drops of experience or feeling. This solves the mind-body problem by claiming that richer forms of experience emerge from simpler forms, rather than arising mysteriously out of wholly non-experiencing matter. Memory hook: experience is the rule, not the exception; consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.

Pantheism says God and the world are identical: everything is God. Classical theism says God is wholly separate from and independent of the world. Panentheism says the world is in God, but God is more than the world. God includes every creature within the divine life, feels every experience, and is affected by what happens, yet God also transcends the world through the primordial ordering of possibilities and the integration of all experience into a greater unity. Process theology is panentheistic: God is intimately present in every occasion (not distant or detached), the world genuinely contributes to God’s life (not irrelevant to God), but God is not reducible to the sum of worldly events. Memory hook: pantheism = God equals the world; classical theism = God apart from the world; panentheism = the world in God, but God is more than the world.

Unilateral power is the ability to affect others without being affected by them; it is the power of control, domination, and insulation. It treats vulnerability as weakness. Relational power has three components: (1) being actively open to and affected by the world, (2) creating oneself out of what one has received, and (3) influencing others by having first been affected by them. In process thought, the highest form of power is not detachment but fruitful participation. God exemplifies relational power supremely: God is infinitely open to every creature’s joy and pain, and influences the world through persuasive love rather than coercive domination. Memory hook: unilateral power shuts out; relational power takes in.

An actual occasion is a minute moment of becoming, not a static substance. It inherits a past, feels possibilities, becomes something definite, and then perishes into the past as data for later occasions. Memory hook: an actual occasion is one pulse of becoming.

To prehend is to feel, take account of, or inherit what is given. It is broader than conscious thought or perception. A new occasion does not start blank and then choose to prehend; it begins already shaped by its prehensions. Every creaturely occasion starts from two sources: the inherited past (physical prehension of prior occasions, especially one’s own immediate past) and God’s initial aim (hybrid prehension of God). Together these give the occasion everything it starts with. Because no two occasions inherit the same past or receive the same initial aim, every occasion’s prehensive situation is unique and unrepeatable. Most prehension is below the threshold of consciousness; at the human level it shows up as memory, bodily sensation, mood carrying forward, and intuitive responsiveness to the environment. Prehension makes interdependence ontological rather than optional: you are constituted by your relations, not a self-contained unit who later chooses to relate.

Physical prehension is the feeling of past actualities as settled fact. It is how a new occasion inherits the world that came before it. The most vivid physical prehension is of your own immediate past: your mood, bodily state, and ongoing thoughts pressing into this moment. But you also physically prehend the wider environment, other people’s completed occasions, and even (in very attenuated ways) the distant past. Physical prehension is the basis of efficient causation in Whitehead’s system: one actuality influences another by being taken up into it as inherited data. This is also the metaphysical structure underlying what Whitehead calls perception in the mode of causal efficacy.

Conceptual prehension is the feeling of possibilities or eternal objects as such. It is how an occasion confronts ways it could become, apart from any specific past actuality carrying that possibility. When a possibility simply presents itself to you as something that could be realized, without being attached to anyone else’s valuation of it, that is closer to conceptual prehension. It is the basis of the conceptual pole in every dipolar occasion and is what makes openness to novelty possible.

Hybrid prehension is the feeling of another actual entity’s conceptual valuation, meaning you pick up not just the entity as a brute fact but its orientation toward a possibility. For example, when a friend shares an idea she is excited about, you are not just registering the sound of her voice (physical) or independently contemplating the idea on your own (conceptual). You are catching her feeling for the possibility, her valuation of it, as it is already alive in her. The most fundamental instance of hybrid prehension is how every occasion receives God’s initial aim: the creature feels God together with God’s valuation of the best relevant possibility for that moment. However, hybrid prehension is structurally neutral: you can also prehend another entity’s orientation toward something destructive. Being around someone consumed by rage means feeling their valuation of violence as a live pressure in your own becoming. This is why environment and community matter so deeply in process ethics: they shape what orientations you are prehending, and therefore what you must work with as you form your subjective aim.

Dipolar means that every occasion has both a physical pole and a conceptual pole. The physical pole is the inherited pressure of the settled past, and the conceptual pole is the relation to possibilities. Memory hook: dipolar = facts plus possibilities.

Concrescence is the process by which an occasion becomes concrete: the act of integrating many inherited inputs (past occasions, God’s lure, bodily conditions) into one definite outcome. It is where self-creation happens, because the inherited data constrain but do not fully determine the result. The margin where the occasion settles matters for itself is inside concrescence. Satisfaction is the completed outcome, when the occasion has become what it is going to be. At satisfaction, the occasion perishes as a living subject and becomes a settled fact for the future. So concrescence is the becoming, satisfaction is the achieved result, and the distinction between them is what makes the past settled and the present open.

Subject-superject names the double status of every actual occasion. While becoming, the occasion is a subject, a living center of experience creating itself. Once it reaches satisfaction and perishes, it becomes a superject, an objective fact that later occasions must take account of. The hyphenated term reminds us that these are not two separate things but one reality seen from two angles: the living becoming and the completed contribution. Memory hook: subject = the living moment; superject = the fact it leaves behind.

Presentational immediacy is ordinary sense-perception: the clear, vivid sensory images by which the world appears to us (colors, shapes, sounds). Causal efficacy is deeper and more primitive: our direct feeling of being affected by the world, of arising causally out of prior moments. You feel it when your body recoils before you consciously register danger, when your mood carries forward from the last moment without your choosing it, or when you sense tension in a room before anyone speaks. Presentational immediacy is actually derived from causal efficacy: you see redness because light causally affected your retina, which causally affected your nervous system, which causally affected your experience. The clear sensory image is the end product of a causal chain you feel through causal efficacy before it becomes conscious perception. We don’t infer the world is real; we feel ourselves arising from it. Note the relationship to physical prehension: physical prehension is the underlying metaphysical reality (one occasion feeling a past occasion), and causal efficacy is what physical prehension feels like when it shows up in experience at a level complex enough to be called perception. Memory hook: presentational immediacy = what things look like; causal efficacy = how things push on you.

Eternal objects are pure possibilities rather than actual events. They are ways things could be. Whitehead uses the category very broadly: it includes sensory qualities like redness, blueness, or a particular shade of warmth; mathematical forms like circularity or the ratio of a spiral; relational patterns like symmetry or rhythmic repetition; and qualitative possibilities like harmony, intensity, patience, or cruelty. An eternal object is never itself an actuality. Redness as such never exists on its own; it is always realized in some actual occasion of experience. But it is a real possibility that can qualify how an occasion becomes. Occasions do not merely inherit what has happened; they also confront eternal objects as possible ways of becoming.

Enjoyment does not mainly mean pleasure. It means the lived immediacy of being an experiencing subject, the sheer felt actuality of being one among many and becoming out of many. Whitehead’s fuller phrase is “the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.” A moment can involve suffering, tension, grief, or boredom and still count technically as enjoyment in this sense, because the occasion is still experiencing, still actualizing itself, still having its own subjective immediacy. This matters because it means value is not limited to pleasant experiences. Every occasion of experience has some degree of intrinsic value simply by virtue of being a subject at all. It also helps explain why process thought can say that experience goes all the way down without claiming that electrons feel pleasure: even the most minimal occasion “enjoys” its own becoming in this bare technical sense.

Objective immortality means that every completed occasion becomes an ineradicable fact for the future. It no longer exists as a present subject, but it continues as data that later occasions must take account of. In Cobb’s Process Theology, the stronger claim is that all actual occasions are taken up into God’s consequent nature and are never lost. God receives every creaturely achievement, joy, and suffering into the divine life, where it is preserved and integrated forever. This is not standard personal immortality in the sense of a soul surviving death, but it does mean that nothing of value simply drops out of reality. What creatures achieve persists both in the world’s past and in God. Memory hook: nothing real is simply erased; everything achieved is preserved in God.

A society is a patterned stream of occasions that inherit defining characteristics from one another in a regular way. This is how process thought explains enduring things without turning them into changeless substances. A person, a cell, or even a molecule can be understood as a society of occasions.

Creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle of novelty shared by God and the world alike. It is not a separate being but the fact that reality is unfinished and capable of new actualization. This is why the universe is a creative advance into novelty rather than a closed mechanical repetition.

Every occasion aims at both self-creation and self-expression. Self-creation is the act by which the occasion becomes this definite occasion rather than some other one. It is not creation out of nothing but self-determination within inherited conditions. Self-creation maps directly onto concrescence: the process of integrating many inherited inputs into one definite outcome is itself the occasion’s act of self-creation. There is no prior self doing the integrating; the integrating is the self coming into being. Self-expression is the anticipation of oneself as a contribution to the future world. An occasion does not aim solely at its own private enjoyment; it also aims to become in a way that can enrich future experience. This double orientation, toward one’s own becoming and toward the future one will help create, is one reason process theology can speak naturally about moral responsibility.

The Logos is God’s primordial nature as it actively engages the world, reaching outward toward creatures and providing initial aims. The primordial nature is the eternal ordering and valuation of all possibilities considered as an aspect of God’s own being; the Logos is that ordering as it functions relationally toward creatures. The initial aim given to each occasion is one concrete way the Logos reaches a creature. So the chain is: primordial nature (God’s internal ordering of possibilities) -> Logos (that ordering as it actively reaches creatures) -> initial aim for this occasion. Note that Christ is not the same as the Logos in general. Christ is the Logos specifically in its transformative mode, what Cobb calls creative transformation. The Logos is universally present in all ordering and sustaining; Christ names the Logos when it breaks open inherited patterns and generates genuinely new and richer possibilities.

For Cobb, Christ names God’s active presence as creative transformation, not merely the historical proper name “Jesus.” Jesus is centrally and uniquely related to Christ, but Christ is broader than the historical individual. This allows Cobb to say that Christ is the incarnation of God without collapsing Christ into a simple synonym for Jesus of Nazareth.

It means that God’s creative transformation is embodied in Christ, and that this presence is uniquely and decisively bound up with Jesus. Cobb’s point is not that Jesus ceases to be fully human, but that in Christ the divine creative transformation is incarnate in history. Incarnation here is relational and dynamic, not a replacement of humanity by deity.

Jesus is viewed as fully human, sharing the same creaturely conditions as every other person. No part of his humanity was displaced or overridden. What made him unique is that Christ, the Logos in its mode of creative transformation, was incarnate in Jesus to an unsurpassed degree. Cobb says that God’s presence constituted Jesus’ essential selfhood in a unique way: the “I” of Jesus was centered by his prehension of God, so that he perceived and weighted the world from that divine center. In other words, the creative transformation that is universally present as a possibility became, in Jesus, the organizing center of his entire existence. This is what incarnation means in process theology: not that a divine substance replaced a human one, but that Jesus’ responsiveness to God was so total that his selfhood was constituted by it.

Creative transformation is Cobb’s name for God’s active, transformative presence in the world. It is what Christ names: not merely the historical person Jesus, but the divine power that disrupts simple continuity with the past and opens creatures to God’s present gift of new possibility. The new does not displace the past but creatively transforms it. Creative transformation is not the same as the initial aim. Every occasion receives an initial aim from God, and most initial aims sustain order and continuity. Creative transformation is what happens when the initial aim calls for something more radical: breaking open inherited patterns and generating genuinely new and richer possibilities. So every instance of creative transformation involves an initial aim, but not every initial aim is an instance of creative transformation. Memory hook: initial aim = God’s lure for every occasion; creative transformation = the initial aim at its most radical and disruptive.

Cobb proposes that Jesus’ life and death generated a field of force, and that to enter that field is to be opened to creative transformation. This is not a metaphor for mere moral influence. It means that what Jesus achieved, including his unique responsiveness to God, his disruption of inherited patterns, and his opening of new possibilities, continues to shape the conditions that later occasions inherit. Entering the Christian community means entering that field and being concretely affected by it. Memory hook: Jesus did not just teach transformation; his life created an ongoing transformative field that others enter.

Think of it this way: God is the ultimate divine reality, Christ is God’s active creative transformation in the world, and Jesus is the historical person uniquely and decisively identified with that transformative presence. Short version: God is the source, Christ is the active incarnation, Jesus is the historical embodiment.

God’s aim is at the maximization of experience, specifically at the richest possible intensity and depth of experience for each occasion and for the world as a whole. Whitehead spoke of this variously as intensity, importance, and strength of beauty. God does not aim at obedience, doctrinal correctness, or moral conformity as ends in themselves. God aims at the fullest realization of experiential value. This is why process theology frames everything in aesthetic rather than legalistic terms: the question is not “did the creature follow the rules?” but “did the creature realize the richest experience available to it, and did it contribute to the richness of future experience?” God’s initial aim for each occasion is always directed toward the greatest achievable intensity of experience given that occasion’s concrete situation. This also explains why God risks discord: a world of greater complexity and intensity of experience is worth the risk of suffering, because the alternative is triviality, and triviality is a failure of God’s own aim.

Intrinsic value is the value an occasion has in and for itself as a subject of experience. In Whitehead’s fuller language, this is closely tied to beauty or “strength of beauty,” the achieved richness and harmony of experience. Only subjects have intrinsic value in this strict sense.

Instrumental value is the value something has for another subject or future experience. It is about contribution, not self-enjoyment. In process ethics, morality is largely about how present occasions become instrumental to the future beauty of oneself and others.

Discord is intrinsically evil because it is destructive clash within experience, where elements obstruct and damage one another instead of being harmonized. Physical pain and mental suffering are classic examples. At the same time, process thought also says that some discord can become the basis for higher value later, so its destructive character does not mean it is always pointless.

Triviality is evil because it is a failure to realize richer possibilities of value. An experience can be very harmonious and yet still be shallow, thin, or low in intensity. Memory hook: discord is evil because it destroys harmony; triviality is evil because it settles for too little.

Discord is too much destructive conflict; triviality is too little depth, intensity, or richness. Discord names the clash of incompatible elements, while triviality names a flat harmony that never rises to stronger beauty. Whitehead thinks both are forms of evil, but they are opposite failures.

Cobb and Griffin’s value theory uses five evaluative categories, which form a grid with one extra term:

1. Intrinsic good: beauty or strength of beauty, the value an occasion has in and for itself as a subject of experience.
2. Instrumental good: the value an occasion contributes to the future beauty of other occasions.
3. Intrinsic evil (discord): destructive clash within experience, where elements obstruct rather than harmonize (e.g. pain, horror, anguish).
4. Instrumental evil: contributing negatively to future experience, causing discord or loss for others.
5. Triviality: the evil of settling for too little, a failure to realize the richer possibilities that were available. Triviality does not fit neatly into the intrinsic/instrumental grid, which is why it feels like the odd one out.

Memory hook: four form a 2x2 grid (intrinsic/instrumental × good/evil), and triviality is the fifth that breaks the grid.

Note: separately, in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead names five qualities of civilization: Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, and Peace. These are a different list from the value theory categories above.

Beauty is the fundamental aesthetic value in Whitehead. It is not the beauty of paintings or nature as such, but the beauty of experience itself. It is defined as harmony of contrasts or strength of beauty: an experience that achieves both richness (many diverse elements) and harmony (those elements fitting together rather than clashing). An experience can have considerable beauty even in an ugly environment, because beauty is primarily emotional and experiential rather than sensory. The chief ingredients are emotional depth, memory, thought, and relational feeling. Beauty is not one value among many for Whitehead; it is the ground of all value, and moral and religious ideals are best understood as aesthetic achievements. Memory hook: beauty = rich harmony of contrasts in experience, not pretty objects.

In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead names five qualities of a civilized society: Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, and Peace. These are not the same as the value theory categories (intrinsic/instrumental good and evil, triviality). Truth is clarity and correspondence of ideas to reality. Beauty is the harmony and intensity of experience. Adventure is the risky pursuit of novelty that prevents decay into staleness. Art is the expression of creative vitality. Peace is the crowning quality, the Harmony of Harmonies, that binds the other four together and excludes restless egotism. Without adventure, civilization stagnates; without peace, the pursuit of the other four becomes anxious and self-serving.

Process theology rejects classical omnipotence. God does not unilaterally control events and therefore is not responsible for evil. Instead, God faces a genuine dilemma built into the structure of reality: God can aim for richer, more complex experience (avoiding triviality), but greater complexity brings greater risk of discord. The process God chose to encourage the development of complexity, and therefore bears some responsibility for the discord that follows, but the alternative was triviality, which is itself a form of evil. The consolation is not that God secretly planned every suffering, but that God suffers with every creature, preserves every achieved value in the consequent nature, and continually lures the world toward healing. Memory hook: God risks discord to avoid triviality, suffers with us, and draws us forward.

In Process Theology, Cobb treats peace as a more inclusive value than even strength of beauty itself. There is a real tension in life between one’s desire for personal satisfaction and one’s recognition of the needs of others. Peace is the overcoming of that tension: it occurs when one’s genuine personal desires become desires for the strength of beauty of all, not simply one’s own. Peace is therefore not the suppression of desire but its transformation, so that caring for the wider good is no longer at war with personal fulfillment. It comes as a gift rather than a controlled achievement, and it results in “a wider sweep of conscious interest” where “the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.”

Whitehead’s broader treatment in Adventures of Ideas adds further depth. He defines peace as “a quality of mind steady in its reliance that fine action is treasured in the nature of things” and calls it the Harmony of Harmonies that binds together Truth, Beauty, Adventure, and Art. Its counterfeit is anesthesia, the numbing of feeling rather than its enlargement.

Morality concerns how the present contributes to the future beauty of experience, both for oneself and for others. It is not mainly obedience to abstract rules but responsiveness to concrete situations and consequences. In short, morality is about becoming a good instrumental value for future life.

Yes, they are usually understood as basically the same referent, with Matthew often using “kingdom of heaven” where other traditions say “kingdom of God.” The difference is mainly linguistic and traditional rather than a major doctrinal split. For memorization, treat them as two phrasings for the same divine reign unless a specific text gives strong reason otherwise.

Process theology tends to interpret the kingdom as the communal realization of God’s responsive love, justice, peace, and transformative possibility within history. It is less a distant supernatural realm and more a mode of life aligned with divine lure. In some process summaries, the kingdom of heaven is described as the fullness of God’s responsive love as enjoyed in creaturely life.

Use this chain: actual occasion -> prehension -> initial aim -> subjective aim -> concrescence -> satisfaction -> objective immortality. That sequence captures how a new subject inherits the past, receives a lure, becomes something definite, perishes, and remains as fact for the future.

This phrase from Process and Reality captures the nature of divine action: God does not dominate the world from outside it like a tyrant or engineer. Instead, God shapes, lures, harmonizes, and saves, “with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” Like a poet, God works through evocation and vision rather than mechanical force. The metaphor also connects to Whitehead’s five qualities of civilization. Beauty is the foundation (the ultimate value), truth protects beauty from falsehood, adventure prevents beauty from becoming stale, art gives adventure concrete form, and peace binds all four together by freeing the pursuit from ego. Without any one of them, civilization becomes distorted: beauty without truth is fragile, truth without beauty is sterile, adventure without art is chaotic, art without adventure is repetitive, and all four without peace become anxious competitions for personal glory. God as poet is the one who holds all five together and lures the world toward their realization. Memory hook: a poet evokes and lures; a tyrant commands and forces.

This is one of Whitehead’s most famous phrases from the closing pages of Process and Reality. Because God’s consequent nature receives every completed occasion into the divine life, including every joy, pain, failure, and triumph, God is not untouched by the world. God experiences every creature. The “understanding” here is not merely intellectual but participatory: God knows suffering because God shares it. This directly contrasts with classical theism’s emphasis on divine impassibility (God being unaffected by the world). Memory hook: God does not observe suffering from a distance; God enters it.

The superjective nature describes how God’s consequent nature flows back into the world. God receives the world (consequent nature), integrates creaturely achievements into the divine life, and then feeds back to every creature a lure toward the possibilities that are best for it. This means divine influence is not only the primordial ordering of possibility but also shaped by what has actually happened. The full divine cycle is: primordial nature (possibilities) -> initial aim (lure to creatures) -> creatures act -> consequent nature (God receives) -> superjective nature (God feeds back). This is the meaning of Whitehead’s phrase that “the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world.”

Omnipotence: Classical theism says God can unilaterally determine any event. Process theology says God’s power is persuasive rather than coercive; God lures and invites but does not override creaturely self-creation. Omniscience: Classical theism typically says God knows the future exhaustively. Process theology says God knows everything there is to know, but since the future does not yet exist, it is not there to be known. God knows all actualized realities and all possibilities perfectly, but not a future that has not yet been made. Memory hook: God knows everything knowable and can do everything possible, but the future is open and creatures have real freedom.