God and Religion in the Postmodern World By David R. Griffin (series title "Essays in Postmodern Theology"). Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989, 175pp.

Abstract

Griffin's larger program in God and Religion in the Postmodern World
is to develop a process theology able to meet the challenges and opportunities
presented by science and modernity. This process theology draws extensively
on the work of Whitehead and Hartshorne and essentially entails destroying
modernity as an ideology while retaining certain parts of the scientific
worldview, returning to some aspects of premodernity (such as the view of
enchanted nature), and creating a holistic, pluralistic, dynamic view of the
nature of God and humanity.
Besides this program, Griffin develops a number of insightful ideas.
Getting around the problem of describing a phenomenon like postmodernism,
which wants to preclude all closure and definition, Griffin makes the case
that destructive postmodemism is really ultramodernism, modernism carried
to its logical conclusion. This avoids the confusion of "constructive" postmodern
thought.
Griffin also makes the case for panentheism, as opposed to pantheism
or the absolute dichotomy popular two or more centuries ago among Christian
theologians. Throughout the book, Griffin puts forward many original and
insightful ways of looking at Western thought, Christian theology, and the
rise of modernism. These insights deserve to be explored; they certainly should
stimulate fruitful discussion.
The major problem of Griffin's work for the Muslim is his desire, and
that of process theologians as a whole, to create a new religion. Huston Smith
addresses this issue in a forthcoming work where the two debate this and
other issues. (I look forward to reading this book.) Griffin is not sufficiently
aware of the perennial perspective, which makes me predict that Huston Smith
will offer quite persuasive arguments against process theology. This perspective
holds that no meaningful religious experience can take place without a
grounding and foundation in a divinely revealed tradition. Islam has been
completed and protected by Allah Himself in the form of the Qur'an and
the Sunnah, and so we need not create a new religion to appreciate
premodernity or to destroy modernity. It is the task of Islamic scholars to
engage the issues Griffin brings up, a project which will surely lead us to
rediscover ideas and processes in our heritage which may be fruitfully ...