Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who spent seventy years arguing that a God who cannot be moved cannot love. + For most of Christian history the theologians agreed on a short list of things God is: unchanging, unaffected by anything outside himself, and able to bring about whatever he wills. Charles Hartshorne spent a very long career insisting that the first two items on that list, taken strictly, make the third one cruel and make the love of God a figure of speech. He was not a village atheist taking cheap shots. He was a Harvard-trained philosopher who believed in God, argued for God’s existence in the symbols of modal logic (the logic of what must be true, as against what merely happens to be true), and thought the classical description of God was the main obstacle to believing in him. The position he built is usually called process theology, and it is the reason he is on a Christian apologetics site. The name says what it means. On this view the basic stuff of the world is not things that sit still and endure, but events: moments of experience that happen, take in whatever came before them, and hand themselves on to whatever comes next. God is not the exception to that description. God, for Hartshorne, is the supreme case of it. Much of the modern debate about whether God suffers, whether God knows the future exhaustively, and whether omnipotence is even a coherent idea runs back through him. So does the revival of the ontological argument, the argument that the very concept of God implies that God exists: Hartshorne was defending a version of it in 1941, nineteen years before Norman Malcolm made it famous and thirty-three years before Alvin Plantinga gave it the form philosophy students learn today. One fact about him tends to stick. He was also a working ornithologist. He published a book on bird song, compiled a world list of the best singers among birds, and argued in print that some birds sing because they enjoy singing. He lived to a hundred and three, and his last book came out in the year he turned a hundred.

(●) 1897 AD: Born in a Pennsylvania rectory, the second of six children, and a birdwatcher by thirteen. + Charles Hartshorne was born on 5 June 1897 in Kittanning, a small town on the Allegheny River in western Pennsylvania. His father, the Reverend F. C. Hartshorne, was an Episcopal clergyman with Quaker ancestry on both sides of the family; his mother was Marguerite Haughton. He was the second of six children, and one of his younger brothers, Richard, grew up to be one of America’s leading geographers, so the household clearly ran to careful thinking. He later named three people as the shaping influences of his boyhood: his father, a science teacher whose name he did not record, and the Quaker writer Rufus Jones, who would later teach him at college. What they gave him, he said, was a religious reverence for intellectual honesty. It is a useful thing to know about him. Hartshorne argued against most of what the churches taught about God, and he did it because he had been raised to think that getting it right mattered to God. The other lifelong habit started at about the same age. During a Christmas visit to Philadelphia, aged thirteen, he bought a copy of Chester Reed’s pocket guide to songbirds, then sent off for the three-dollar field glass advertised in the back. Sixty years later he would still be recording birds in the field, in Costa Rica and Australia and Japan, notebook in hand.

(●) 1915 AD: He spent two years at Haverford, and at about seventeen took from Emerson a resolution he kept for the rest of his life. + He went from boarding school to Haverford College, the Quaker school outside Philadelphia, and stayed two years. Rufus Jones taught him there. Jones was a mystic and a historian of mysticism, a man who believed that God is directly available to ordinary experience, and something of that conviction stayed with Hartshorne for the rest of his life. He never treated God as a remote inference at the end of a chain of proofs. He thought we are in contact with God constantly, whether we notice or not. Somewhere around this time, at about seventeen, he read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays and made himself a promise that he kept for eighty-six years. He resolved, in his own phrase, "to trust reason to the end." Whatever else you think of his conclusions, he did not flinch from them. When his premises led somewhere the churches would not follow, he followed anyway and said so in print.

(●) 1917 AD: He spent twenty-three months as an army hospital orderly in France, with a box of books. + College stopped when America entered the First World War. Hartshorne volunteered for the Army Medical Corps and spent twenty-three months in France as a hospital orderly, which meant carrying, washing, feeding and holding down young men with their bodies torn open. He took philosophy books with him and read them in whatever hours the ward allowed. It is worth sitting with that for a moment before reading anything he wrote about suffering. The man who would argue for the rest of his life that God feels what creatures feel, and that a God incapable of being hurt by his creatures is not worth worshipping, formed that conviction in a country where he had spent nearly two years at the receiving end of other people’s wounds. He almost never wrote about the war directly. It is in the work all the same.

(●) 1923 AD: He took a Harvard doctorate, spent two years in Germany, then came home to Peirce’s papers and a semester at Whitehead’s side. + He finished at Harvard instead of Haverford, taking his bachelor’s degree in 1921, his master’s in 1922, and his doctorate in 1923, all in four years. The dissertation was called An Outline and Defense of the Argument for the Unity of Being in the Absolute or Divine Good, and much of what he spent the next seventy years defending is already sitting in it. That date is worth holding on to. He had his doctrine of God on paper in 1923, before he had so much as met the man he is usually said to have got it from, Alfred North Whitehead. A travelling fellowship took him to Germany for two years, to Freiburg and Marburg, where he attended Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the one already famous as the founder of phenomenology (the patient description of experience exactly as it shows up to us, before any theory is laid over the top of it), the other still two years from the book that would make his name. He came home in 1925 unconverted. What actually changed him was the job waiting at Harvard. With another young philosopher, Paul Weiss, he was set to work editing the enormous, chaotic, unpublished manuscripts of Charles Sanders Peirce, the American logician who had died in 1914 leaving thousands of pages in boxes. The two of them produced six volumes between 1931 and 1935 and effectively introduced Peirce to the twentieth century. Hartshorne always said that job shaped him more than Husserl and Heidegger together. In those same Harvard years he served a semester as assistant to Whitehead himself, the English mathematician who had turned to metaphysics, which is the attempt to say what the world is made of at the deepest level and how its pieces hold together. Whitehead’s Process and Reality would appear in 1929, and it gave Hartshorne a vocabulary and a whole picture of the universe, so that the two names have been welded together ever since. He accepted the debt cheerfully and spent decades correcting the record about which way it ran. The core of his doctrine of God was in the 1923 dissertation, written before he had read a word of Whitehead’s philosophy.

(●) 1928 AD: He spent twenty-seven years at Chicago, where he wrote the two books that gave process theology its God. + He arrived at the University of Chicago in 1928 and stayed until 1955. The same year brought the other long partnership of his life. He married Dorothy Eleanore Cooper, who would go on to compile the bibliography of everything he wrote and who stayed at his side for sixty-seven years, and in 1940 their daughter Emily was born. The household was as plain as the career was long: he never owned a car, and he did not smoke, drink, or take coffee. Chicago was where the work landed. He taught in the philosophy department and, from 1943, in the Federated Theological Faculty, which put a metaphysician in front of a divinity school every year for over a decade. Two books came out of it. Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941) laid out his charge that traditional theology had made a simple logical mistake, putting God on only one side of every pair of opposites: unchanging rather than changing, absolute rather than related, active rather than passive. The Divine Relativity (1948), delivered as the Terry Lectures at Yale, argued the positive case that God is the most related being there is. By the time he left, two of his students, Schubert Ogden and John B. Cobb Jr., were on their way to becoming the leading American theologians of the next generation, and the movement that would be called process theology had its doctrine of God in print.

(●) 1955 AD: He moved to Emory, and then to Texas at sixty-five, where he put Anselm’s argument into modal logic and surveyed the songbirds of the world. + Seven years at Emory University in Atlanta were followed, in 1962, by a move to the University of Texas at Austin, where he was sixty-five and where he remained for the last thirty-eight years of his life. Most philosophers are finishing at that age. Hartshorne was about to publish his best-known technical work. The Logic of Perfection (1962) and Anselm’s Discovery (1965) took the eleventh-century argument of Anselm of Canterbury, which almost every modern philosopher had written off as a trick, and rebuilt it with the tools of modal logic, the branch of logic that deals with the difference between what happens to be true and what must be true. Anselm had actually made his case twice over in the Proslogion: once to the conclusion that a being than which nothing greater can be thought must exist in reality and not only in the mind, and then again, in the next chapter, to the stronger conclusion that such a being cannot even be thought not to exist. Hartshorne was not the first to notice that there are two arguments there rather than one, but he was the one who spent two books on the second and stronger one, and the ontological argument has been a live question in philosophy ever since. The birds ran alongside all of it. He joined the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1951, published more than twenty papers on bird song in the ornithological journals, and in 1973 brought out Born to Sing, a survey of the singing of birds across the world built from his own field recordings and from reports sent by colleagues on every continent. In it he ranked a list of one hundred and ninety-four superior singers and defended a theory he called the monotony threshold: a bird whose song is simple must pause longer between repetitions, or it will bore itself. The claim underneath was the one he cared about, that birds have some small share in feeling and even in enjoyment, which is exactly what his metaphysics said about everything that exists.

(●) 2000 AD: He died in Austin at a hundred and three, still arguing. + Dorothy died in 1995. Hartshorne died at home in Austin on 9 October 2000, aged a hundred and three. He had published his last book, The Zero Fallacy, three years earlier, in the year he turned a hundred, and left an unfinished one behind along with some sixty unpublished papers. That hundredth birthday had brought him a tribute of a kind metaphysicians do not usually receive: the Texas Senate passed a resolution in his honour. What he thought about the end itself he had written down long before, and he did not change it. On his own account of immortality, nothing that has once happened can be taken away, because God has it; what death ends is only the making of new experiences. The titles he chose late in life are worth reading together: The Darkness and the Light: A Philosopher Reflects Upon His Fortunate Career and Those Who Made It Possible, and then Wisdom as Moderation. He thought he had been lucky, he thought most disputes were between two exaggerations, and he thought the right answer was almost always in the middle and harder to state.

What He Taught

(T1) God’s perfection is not an inability to change, but the ability to surpass himself. + Suppose you are the finest pianist alive. There are two very different ways that could be true. It could mean nobody plays better than you and you cannot possibly play better than you do now, which would mean that every hour of practice from here on is wasted. Or it could mean nobody else could ever play better than you, but you yourself might play better tomorrow than today. The second is a stranger kind of supremacy, and it is the only one that leaves room for a future. Hartshorne said God’s perfection is the second kind, and he coined a phrase for it that stuck: God is the self-surpassing surpasser of all. No other being can catch him. He can still exceed himself, because tomorrow he will have taken in everything that happened today, and that is more than he had before. He got there by attacking what he called the monopolar prejudice. Lay out the great pairs of opposites: necessary and contingent, unchanging and changing, absolute and relative, cause and effect. The classical theologians, he said, assumed that one side of each pair is always better and gave God only that side. But nobody actually believes that about the ordinary pairs. We do not think a man is finer for being unable to be moved by his friends. So Hartshorne’s God is dipolar, which simply means two-poled: in his character, his goodness and his wisdom and his knowing-everything-there-is-to-know, God never changes at all, and in his actual experience from moment to moment he is always receiving something new. Hold that distinction and, he argued, the contradictions in the doctrine of God dissolve. This is a real fork in the road, and it is worth naming rather than blurring. Historic Christian theology has its own answer here: God is not frozen but fully alive, already possessing without loss every good that creatures reach for in time, and Scripture’s point in saying that the Father of lights has "no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17) is that he cannot be talked out of his goodness, not that he is inert. Hartshorne thought that answer was a dodge. Christians have thought his answer trades God’s fullness for God’s growth.

(Q) "Or again, let us say that the perfect is the ‘self-surpassing surpasser of all.’" + Source: Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity, chapter 1, page 20 (Yale University Press, 1948). He has just set out the dilemma he means to escape. If perfection means no other being could be greater, fine. If it also means this being could not conceivably become greater, then God cannot receive anything from anyone, and the world adds nothing to him. Hartshorne’s formula keeps the first and drops the second (T1).

(T2) A God who cannot be affected by his creatures does not love them; he only benefits them. + This is the argument that made him famous, and it is aimed at a doctrine called divine impassibility. To be impassible is to be incapable of being acted on from outside, incapable of being made to suffer. Classical theology has held that God is impassible: he loves us, but nothing we do produces any change in him, because a God who could be changed by us would depend on us, and dependence looks like weakness. Hartshorne’s reply was to ask what that ideal looks like when a creature holds it. Picture a father who has arranged his life so that his daughter’s happiness and misery make no difference at all to him. She flourishes, she falls apart, she turns kind, she turns vicious, and he goes on in exactly the same state, dispensing exactly the same benefits, entirely untouched. We would not call that man serene. We would call him monstrous. Yet one-sided independence of precisely that shape, he argued, had been enthroned as the crowning glory of deity. There is a homelier way of putting the same complaint. If God is loving only in what flows out of him and never in what comes back, then what is being worshipped is a benefit machine: the sun ripens crops and the crops are genuinely better for it, but nobody thinks the sun cares. Hartshorne wanted a God who is genuinely glad and genuinely grieved, whose experience is different because you exist, and who takes in your life the way a mother takes in her child’s. The fair thing to say is that Christian theology has never been as flat on this as he made out. The same tradition that teaches impassibility teaches that God the Son took a human nature and in it was hungry, angry, and weeping at a grave, and that he was crucified. Where the two views genuinely diverge is not over whether God enters our suffering but over whether he is at the mercy of it.

(Q) "The father that as little as possible depends upon the will and welfare of his child is an inhuman monster." + Source: Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity, chapter 1, page 43 (Yale University Press, 1948). He is midway through asking which kinds of independence we actually admire. He grants in the same breath that some kinds of independence are admirable, and a page later he gives an instance of one: a man should do his duty whatever anyone else may do. What he denies is that being unmoved by those you love belongs on that list (T2).

(T3) God’s power persuades the world; it does not decide what each creature will do. + Two people walk into an intersection. One decides to turn left, the other decides to cross; neither decided the collision. Hartshorne built a whole doctrine of providence on that small observation. Where there is more than one genuine decider, the combination of their decisions is settled by nobody, and calling it chance is not a confession of ignorance but an accurate description. From this he concluded that omnipotence, defined as the power to determine in full detail everything that happens, is not a great power but an incoherent one. A world absolutely determined in every detail would contain no other deciders, which means it would contain no creatures at all, only extensions of the divine will. He thought this was the single worst idea in theology, and he said so in print about as bluntly as a philosopher ever says anything. What he put in its place was persuasion. God acts on every creature at every moment, setting limits on the disorder that freedom makes possible and drawing each thing toward the richest experience it is capable of, and creatures answer or fail to answer. On this account the problem of evil largely dissolves, because there is no single agent who decided that your tumour should grow: cells, molecules, and people all decide, and no one of them, God included, writes the whole script. The cost is severe and he knew it. This God cannot guarantee any particular outcome. He cannot part a sea, stop a war, or raise a body, in the sense of simply deciding that it will happen. What Scripture presents as God acting, Hartshorne has to present as God influencing.

(Q) "No worse falsehood was ever perpetrated than the traditional concept of omnipotence." + Source: Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, chapter 1, "Six Common Mistakes about God," page 18 (State University of New York Press, 1984). He goes straight on to call it a piece of unconscious blasphemy that condemns God to a dead world. He is answering the charge that he has limited God: his reply is that the doctrine he rejects is the one that does the limiting, by leaving God nothing to rule over but himself (T3).

(T4) If God can exist at all, then God cannot merely happen to exist. + Start with two ways a thing can be true. It happens to be true that you exist; the world could perfectly well have gone on without you, and one day it will. It does not merely happen to be true that two and two make four; there is no possible state of affairs in which they make five. Philosophers call the first kind contingent and the second kind necessary, and modal logic is the machinery for reasoning carefully about the difference. Anselm of Canterbury, writing around 1077, noticed something about God and this distinction. A being that might not have existed, that owes its existence to a happy accident or to somebody else’s decision, is not the greatest conceivable being, because you can conceive of something better: a being whose non-existence is not even a possibility. So if God is the greatest conceivable being, God cannot be the kind of thing that merely happens to exist. Hartshorne called that Anselm’s discovery, and he thought nine centuries of critics had missed the point of it. The discovery is not a proof that God exists. It is a proof that God’s existence cannot be a matter of fact at all. Either the idea of God is coherent, in which case God exists necessarily, or the idea is incoherent, in which case God is impossible. The middle position, that God might have existed but as it happens does not, is ruled out. Hartshorne set the whole thing out formally, in ten numbered steps of symbols, and the shape of it is simple enough to say in words. God’s existence is possible. If it is possible then it is necessary, because Anselm’s point rules out the only other way it could be true, the way where God merely happens to be there. Therefore it is necessary. He was honest about what this does and does not do. He did not think it would convince a determined sceptic, and he said it was not why he himself believed. What it does is price the alternatives. Whoever rejects theism must be prepared to say not merely that God does not exist but that the concept of God is nonsense, which is a much heavier claim to carry.

(Q) "The sole alternative to the necessary truth of theism is its logical impossibility." + Source: Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery, part one, section 1, "Blunder or Discovery?", pages 3 to 4 (Open Court, 1965). The opening pages of the book, where he states the discovery in what he calls crude anticipatory outline. He immediately draws the consequence that ordinary atheism and ordinary theism, both of which treat God’s existence as a question of evidence, are alike mistakes about what kind of question it is (T4).

(T5) The world is inside God, and nothing that has ever happened is ever lost. + Your body is full of cells that are alive on their own account, doing their own work, dying and being replaced, and you do not decide most of what they do. Hurt them and you have hurt you. Hartshorne used that relation as his model for God and the world: the world is God’s body, and every creature in it is something like a cell, with its own small life and its own small say, living inside the one who includes it all. The name for this is panentheism, from the Greek for all-in-God, and it is worth separating carefully from its neighbour. Pantheism says God simply is the universe and nothing more. Panentheism says the universe is in God, while God is more than the universe and would still be God if this universe had never existed. Hartshorne was insistent on the difference and thought it was the whole point. Out of that came his answer to the question everyone eventually asks him: what happens to us when we die? He rejected the traditional answer flatly. There is no continuing career after death, no new experiences in a new place. But he also rejected the idea that death reduces a life to nothing. God has it. Every moment you ever lived is held perfectly in the divine memory, with its joys and its griefs and the hidden things nobody else knew, and it can never be taken away. He called the picture a book: it ends at the last word, and the ending does not turn the pages before it into blank paper. He knew it would not satisfy people who wanted their mother back. He said so plainly, and answered that the human condition does not come with a guarantee that our wishes are met. This is the point at which Christian readers and Hartshorne are simply not talking about the same hope.

(Q) "The book of life is all its ‘words’ (actions, experiences), and these form an imperishable totality, as adequately retained in the divine life." + Source: Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, chapter 1, "Six Common Mistakes about God," page 34 (State University of New York Press, 1984). He has just asked whether life ends in death, and answered with the analogy of a book that ends at its last word without becoming the blank page that follows. What he is denying in the same breath is a career after death; what he is affirming is that the completed life is permanently possessed by God (T5).

(Q) He resolved, at about seventeen, "to trust reason to the end." + Source: Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection, preface, page viii (Open Court, 1962). He is explaining, at the start of his most technical book, what he has been trying to do since he was a boy reading Emerson: to make his thinking about God good thinking, judged by the standards of thinking rather than of persuading or edifying or expressing emotion. Christians who read him have found both the promise and the limit of that method in the same sentence.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His students carried this God into the seminaries, and process theology was the result. + Whitehead supplied process thought with a metaphysics; Hartshorne supplied it with a doctrine of God, and it was the doctrine of God, not the metaphysics, that the churches actually received. Two of his Chicago students did most of the carrying. Schubert Ogden, at Southern Methodist University, and John B. Cobb Jr., at Claremont, spent long careers turning the position into working theology, and Cobb founded a research centre for it that is still running. Daniel Day Williams and Norman Pittenger worked the same ground from the side of love and of Christology, the question of how one man, Jesus of Nazareth, is to be understood as both God and a human being. By the 1970s process theology was a recognised option in mainline Protestant seminaries in America, and not only there: it found readers in Catholic theology, in Japan, and later among theologians working on ecology, where a God who is intimately bound up with the world’s flourishing has obvious appeal. The influence also travelled outside the movement in a form Hartshorne would not entirely have owned. In 1994 a group of evangelical theologians published The Openness of God, and the view it argued for came to be called open theism: God knows everything that can be known, but a genuinely open future contains nothing yet to know, so God takes real risks with genuinely free creatures. Clark Pinnock and his colleagues were careful to distance themselves from process theism at the points that matter most to them: they held to creation from nothing, to the Incarnation, to miracle, and to God’s power to accomplish what he promises. But the questions they were answering were Hartshorne’s questions, and the debate that consumed evangelical theology for the next fifteen years was in that sense his doing.

(†) Analytic philosophers took his ontological argument and left his theology behind. + Here the traffic ran in a direction Hartshorne did not plan. Kant was widely thought to have finished off the ontological argument in 1781, and for a century and a half it was taught mainly as a cautionary tale. Hartshorne defended a modal version of it in Man’s Vision of God in 1941, and by the time he had given it two further books it was impossible to keep calling it dead. Norman Malcolm’s article of 1960 put the distinction between Anselm’s two arguments in front of the whole English-speaking profession. Alvin Plantinga then produced the version that is now standard, in The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom, and Evil in 1974, built on possible worlds (a way of talking about how things might have gone, one world for each complete way reality could have turned out) and on a being that is maximally great, and Plantinga engages Hartshorne and Malcolm by name. Every undergraduate who now meets the modal ontological argument is meeting the descendant of Hartshorne’s. The irony is worth stating plainly. The philosophers who did most with his argument were, in the main, defenders of exactly the God he was attacking: Plantinga, Richard Swinburne and the analytic philosophers of religion who followed them held to creation from nothing, to genuine omnipotence, and to the Incarnation. They took the logic and declined the theology. Hartshorne, for his part, thought the argument only worked for his kind of God, and said the classical version of theism could not survive its own proof.

(†) His hardest question, whether a God who cannot suffer can love, made orthodox theologians answer it properly. + The most useful thing a critic can do is force the other side to stop waving its hands and say exactly what it means. On divine impassibility, Hartshorne did that. The evangelical replies came first and came hard. Royce Gruenler, a New Testament scholar who had spent time in the process camp before returning to his evangelical convictions, wrote The Inexhaustible God (1983) specifically against Hartshorne and Cobb, arguing that process theism fails both as rational metaphysics and as an account of the Bible’s God. Ronald Nash gathered a further volume of critiques, Process Theology, four years later. Their common charge was that a God who cannot guarantee any outcome cannot be trusted with any promise. The more interesting response came from the classical side, which was pushed into saying what impassibility had always meant. Thomas Weinandy’s Does God Suffer? (2000) is the best-known statement of it: God is not impassible because he is indifferent, but because his love is already at full strength and cannot be increased, diminished, or knocked off course by anything that happens; and the way that love meets human agony is not by God being worn down from a distance but by the Son taking flesh and dying. Orthodox theology, on this telling, has the thing Hartshorne wanted, the God who is in the suffering, and has it without making God a fellow victim of circumstance. Christians disagree among themselves about how far to press this, and the disagreement is old and honest. Some hold impassibility strictly; others, reading the prophets, hold that Scripture means what it says when it speaks of God grieved by his people. What is not in dispute among them is the thing Hartshorne denied: that God was under no compulsion to make a world at all, and that having made it he is able to keep every promise he makes to it.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: creation from nothing, the risen body, and a book that is God’s own word. + Hartshorne did not present himself as an orthodox Christian and would not have wanted the label defended for him. He attended Unitarian congregations in Atlanta and Austin and was cautious even about that description of himself. The disagreements are ones he stated himself, in his own words and without softening, and Christians who learn from him have to face them squarely. - Creation. He rejected creation from nothing outright: on his account God and some world or other have always existed together, and God has never been without a world to include. Scripture begins somewhere else. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), and the universe was made "so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible" (Hebrews 11:3). A God who must always have a world is not free with respect to the world, and everything else follows from that. - Power. His God influences but cannot determine, so no outcome can be promised. The God of Scripture "does all that he pleases" (Psalm 115:3), and the answer Job finally gives is that no purpose of God’s can be thwarted (Job 42:2; see also Jeremiah 32:17, Luke 1:37). Hartshorne’s question, how such a God is not then the author of every evil, is a serious question and deserves a serious answer, which Christians have spent centuries giving. What the answer cannot be is that God could not have prevented it. - The future. On his view a genuinely open future contains nothing determinate to know, so God does not know it. Isaiah has God marking himself off from every idol by exactly the opposite: "declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose" (Isaiah 46:10). - The dead. He offered memory in God in place of resurrection: your life is kept, but you do not live again. The New Testament’s hope is not a record but a rising. "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live" (John 11:25), and Christ is raised as "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20). Death is a real appointment with a real judgment (Hebrews 9:27), not simply the last page of a book. - Revelation. He held that no book written and translated by human hands can literally be the word of God, and that treating one as infallible is a step from faith into idolatry. Christians have confessed the opposite, that Scripture is "breathed out by God" (2 Timothy 3:16) and that its writers "spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21), which is what makes it possible to correct our ideas about God by something other than our ideas about God. - Christ. The Incarnation has no real place in his system, and he did not claim one for it. A God who is always already related to every creature does not need to become one of them. What remains after all that is a genuine gift, and it is the reason he is worth reading. Hartshorne pressed harder than almost anyone on the question of whether Christians actually mean it when they say God is love, and he refused to let the word be softened into benevolent indifference. The answer the church gives is not his answer. It is a manger, a cross, and an empty tomb: God, without ceasing to be God, coming close enough to be killed. Hartshorne looked for a God who could be touched by our suffering, and the gospel says he is, by a route that Hartshorne’s logic ruled out before it began.