c. 1997 Religion News Service

CLAREMONT, Calif. _ John B. Cobb Jr. _ the world’s leading apologist of process theology and arguably one of the most influential American theologians of the second half of the century _ retired from teaching seven years ago.

But typical of Cobb, he’s turned his retirement into something of a process project itself, never ceasing to explore the side roads and byways to which his theology brings him and continuing his efforts to make the church a more thinking place.

No wonder, then, he says that for fun, he likes to travel. But that doesn’t mean packing the Winnebago and going off to see America.

Cobb, 72, tells a visitor he’s just returned from a week in Washington, D.C. But he skipped the museums and monuments to conduct interviews at the World Bank for a new book he is writing on the moral implications of development policy. He and wife Jean also spent two weeks in Colorado this summer, but instead of hiking and riding he taught seminars on two books he’s written since retirement. This month, the Cobbs actually will vacation _ in Scandinavia – after attending a conference in Denmark.

All this is after post-retirement teaching stints at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Iliff School of Theology in Denver, and New York’s Columbia University as well as the Claremont Graduate School near his home and a continuing stream of books and activities applying his theology to such issues as development policy, the environment, feminism and, more recently, the rise of the Religious Right.”I recommend (retirement),”says Cobb, a slight, gray-haired figure with a hint of Georgia drawl.”I think it’s not a matter of whether one has more or less to do _ one can be choosier about what to do, and also freer to make the commitments one wants to make because one wants to do them.” When not traveling, home for Cobb is Pilgrim Place, a retirement community established for missionaries and others in religious callings.

It’s located in Claremont, a city some 40 miles east of Los Angeles, best-known as home of a cluster of institutions known as the Claremont Colleges.

The Cobbs live just a few blocks from the Methodist-affiliated Claremont School of Theology, where Cobb taught from 1958 to 1990.

It is also home of the Center for Process Studies that Cobb co-founded. The center is a repository of books and papers on the branch of theology that Cobb has explored and explained in a career that has spawned more than 20 books and hundreds of articles since his graduate days at the University of Chicago.

In simple terms, process theology begins with the notion that everything exists in a web of complex relationships that influence and affect each other. In other words,”processes”are more real than”things”and God is a part of the web.

Rather than an impassive, unaffected creator, process theologians say God not only influences the world, but is influenced by the world _ in other words, God is changeable.

From that comes one of the process theologian’s most controversial ideas _ that God is not all-powerful.

Process theology”directly and emphatically rejects and opposes the idea of God’s omnipotence,”Cobb said.”That’s a perfectly valid criticism. Part of my response is, `Why should one believe that God is omnipotent?’ Some people think that’s what the Bible teaches, but I don’t think the Bible teaches that.”Although there are statements in the Bible which certainly give some support to the notion of divine omnipotence, there are far, far more statements that imply that human beings take actions which are based on their decisions and are not being manipulated by God,”Cobb said.”In popular piety, it comes out more strongly when something terrible happens,”he added.”You know, `Why did God take my child?'”The answer, Cobb said, is that”the drunk driver took your child, not God.” Some more orthodox theologians say God limits his own power to make room for human freedom. The problem with that, Cobb said, is that”it implies that at any time God can overrule. When you get to a massive event like the Holocaust, (then say) God just did not choose to exercise divine power _ why not?” Cobb, who was born in Japan to missionary parents, acknowledged his theology is adaptable to many religious views _ there are Buddhist and Jewish process theologians. While encouraging interfaith dialogue and learning, however, Cobb very much considers himself a Christian theologian and has written a 300-page process view of Jesus.”In some crucial moments of Jesus’ life, there seems to be this identity or unity of the divine and human,”Cobb said. On the other hand, that unity was lacking when Jesus asked to have the cup pass from him in Gethsemene, or when he cried out on the cross that he was forsaken.

But Jesus’ saying”it has been said unto you, but I say unto you,”gives him”a claim to a certain authority that implies a relationship to God that I certainly don’t have,”Cobb said.

Cobb said he became a theologian to try to find answers to his own questions of faith. A member of a U.S. Army unit that translated captured Japanese documents during World War II, Cobb worked alongside more worldly Catholics and Jews, a far cry from his sheltered youth in Japan and Georgia.”I discovered the modern world and how different it was from the world of my Methodist piety,”he wrote in a recent autobiographical article. Looking for the answers to his questions, he abandoned his plans for a foreign service career to enter the University of Chicago in 1947 and study modern thought.

Now, a career later, Cobb is concerned with recreating a thinking laity in the church. His 1993 book,”Becoming a Thinking Christian,”for example, takes on what he calls the”lukewarmness”in mainline Protestant churches.”Laypeople have become quite passive,”Cobb said.”It’s a clerically run church, and laypeople are not encouraged by the church … to be Christian thinkers. One reason for that is because theology has been professionalized. (Laypeople) think of theology as scholarly discourse that is quite remote from their lives, and they don’t find it terribly interesting.” Cobb’s suggestion to revive the oldline Protestant churches includes creating small groups to talk about issues that concern them, such as abortion or sharing a church building with another group, and talk about them in a theological way.

Even if a church finds itself deeply divided on an issue and splits over it, Cobb said, that is better than maintaining the status quo.”There are dangers involved,”he said, but argued in mainline churches”we are on our way to oblivion. If the only way we can hold congregations together is by institutional loyalty, which puts the faith in second place or third place, then it’s not worth it.” (OPTIONAL TRIM – STORY MAY END HERE.)

As for the future of process theology, Cobb sees it may have greater application in the daily life of the church rather than in the academy. “Process theology is viewed by many theologians and academicians in sort of historical terms,”Cobb says.”It’s viewed as sort of having had its day … indigenous American developments always have a hard time. The New Wave from France, post-modernism, deconstructive thought _ if you’re a young theologian starting out, you really must be into that stuff. “I’ve jokingly said in the past that if the Germans or French really take up process thought in a big way, it will become the sophisticated avant garde thing to do in the United States.” In the meantime, Cobb said,”I have an impression that, among pastors who do think theologically, process theology … plays as large or larger role today than it ever did in the past.”

END RUTHSTIVER