God And The World

Abstract

Professor Cobb undertakes to present in minimally technical form reconception of the nature of God and of God's relationships to the world, which he thinks is both necessary and adequate for our understanding of God as God is made known to us through Christianity. First he presents a consensus of contemporary with which he agrees, God must be reconceived in way more faithful to Jesus Christ. The new conception of God is based upon our experience of a call forward into the future an analysis which discloses to originate from an everlasting, actual agent, capable of bearing the predicates appropriate to God. In his third chapter, Cobb shows that the concept of God, as developed in the reconception of the first two chapters, is compatible with and complementary to the conception of the that we find in contemporary science and philosophy (in Whitehead, primarily). In the fourth chapter, Cobb applies the process of reconception to the problem of evil, showing that if we conceive God as he proposes, the difficulties over evil which appeared insuperable in previous theologies will be vastly mitigated. The fifth chapter is somewhat of dislocation of the lines of the whole and may be bypassed here. The sixth chapter returns to the main theme with discussion of the conditions under which Christian theology is possible, the important conditions being that the conception of God and the conception of the universe should be coherent and compatible with the achievements of secular inquiry; Cobb argues that the conception of God as creator, inherent in Whiteheadean philosophy, is satisfactory both religiously and intellectually and provides the vision of the world within