Process theology proposes that God learns as events unfold. If God did not know an evil was coming, the reasoning goes, he cannot be blamed for failing to stop it. This guide gives that idea a fair hearing and then tests it against Scripture. Read closely, the Bible presents a God who feels deeply and responds to people, and who also knows ahead of time what free people will do. Many readers will conclude that the trade process theology offers costs more than it pays. The goal here is to reach that conclusion, or a different one, only after you can state the other side well.
You can work through this alone in about an hour, or with a group over one or two sessions. The guide asks you to do three things repeatedly: restate a position until its defenders would accept your wording, find where two positions actually agree, and name the precise question that divides them. Bring a Bible, paper, and a willingness to be slower than your first reaction.
Agree on the rules before the argument starts
The conversation behind this guide is a Jude 3 Project podcast episode in which Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, talks with Rev. Darin Jones, an associate pastor and the Director of Discipleship and Christian Education at the Greater Allen AME Cathedral of New York. Jones studied process theology in seminary and rejects it. He still describes it without mockery, and he warns at the outset that his summary is “definitely a grotesque oversimplification.” That warning sets the first rule. You are weighing one core claim of a large school of thought, not the whole school.
If you are leading a group, read the next three rules aloud and ask everyone to hold to them:
- No one critiques a view until someone has restated it and a person sympathetic to it has said, yes, that is what I mean.
- When you disagree, say whether you disagree about a text, about how to read a text, or about what follows from it.
- Name what would change your mind. If nothing could, say so honestly.
The view in its strongest form
On Jones’s account, process theology holds that “God is a learning God.” God has new experiences, sees things happen that he did not previously know would happen, and reacts to them. The benefit for the problem of evil follows directly. Jones states the conclusion this way: “God doesn’t allow human beings to do bad things. God didn’t know that human beings are going to do them.” Lisa Fields put the effect in one plain sentence: “So he’s almost excused because he didn’t know about it.”
Notice what is attractive here. The hardest form of the problem of evil asks why a God who saw a tragedy coming, and could have stopped it, let it happen. Process theology does not dodge that question. It removes one of its premises. For a grieving person, a God who was as surprised as they were can feel closer than a God who knew.
Practice: the two-sentence restatement. Before reading further, write the process view in two sentences, without any word that signals disapproval. Then read your sentences as if you held the view. Would you sign them? In a group, have two people read their versions aloud and let the group pick the fairer one. The usual failure is a restatement that already contains its own refutation, such as calling God “clueless” or “weak.” The process theologian would describe God as genuinely responsive, so your sentences should too.
Where the two sides already agree
It is easy to imagine that process theology and the classical view disagree about everything. On Jones’s description, they do not. Both treat evil as real and not an illusion. Both say God responds to what people do. And both accept that some biblical texts show God knowing the future. Jones reports that process theologians read those passages as genuine foreknowledge, but “they do not use those as a blanket rationale for God knowing everything.”
That last point narrows the dispute considerably. The question is not whether God ever knows the future. It is how far that knowledge reaches. Getting this right keeps a group from wasting time proving something the other side already grants.
First fault line: what God knows ahead
According to Jones, process theologians draw the line at orchestration. Where God knows the future, it is because God is arranging the outcome. God arranged Judas’s betrayal because the cross required it. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Even Jeremiah’s call is read narrowly, as God knowing in advance “what God would have Jeremiah to do if Jeremiah follows God’s will,” without knowing whether Jeremiah would obey.
This is a real proposal and it deserves a real test. If God foreknows only what he himself brings about, then the decisive evidence would be a text where God knows in advance a free creaturely act he does not cause. That is the question that could settle the first fault line.
Practice: sort the texts. Read each passage below in its setting. For each one, decide which column it belongs in: God announces what God will do, or God knows what a person will freely do. Write one sentence explaining your choice.
- Jeremiah 1:5, where God says, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” Read verses 4-10. Is the knowing about Jeremiah’s choices, or about God’s commission?
- Exodus 4:21, where God tells Moses before the confrontation that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart. Who is acting in the announcement?
- Matthew 26:31-35, where Jesus tells Peter he will deny him three times before the rooster crows. Does the passage suggest God causes the denial?
- Psalm 139:4, where David prays, “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.” Read verses 1-6. Whose words are these, and when does God know them?
Then compare columns. If the second column is empty, the orchestration reading holds up well. If it has entries, ask how a process theologian might answer them, and whether that answer fits the text or has to be imposed on it. Jones’s own conclusion is cumulative rather than resting on one verse: “biblically we see too many instances of God knowing ahead of time what’s going to happen.” Your sorting exercise lets you check whether you see the same pattern.
Second fault line: the God who relents
Here the process view has its strongest material, and fairness means letting it land. Lisa Fields had been reading Zephaniah 3 that morning. In verse 7, God says he expected the people to fear him and receive instruction after his judgments, yet they rose early and corrupted their doings. That reads like an expectation that failed. Lisa admitted the pull of such passages: “I could see in a sense how one could take those passages and kind of vacillate with whether God knows all things.”
Jones added Abraham’s intercession for Sodom in Genesis 18, which process theologians take to show “that malleability of God’s will” in response to human prayer. He offered a reply, that “one could argue that God knew ahead of time that Abraham would not find that,” and then conceded, “we can go back and forth all day.” That concession is worth modeling. These texts do not settle the question by themselves.
Lisa proposed reading them differently: “Instead of looking at it through the lens of God has real emotions,” she suggested, the extreme conclusion that God lacks knowledge is drawn too quickly, and the genre and writing style of the Old Testament should shape how the passages are heard. Jones agreed that in these moments “we definitely see that God’s a God of emotion,” a God deeply invested in human outcomes and eager for mercy to have its say. In his view, that emotion does not imply ignorance.
Practice: hold two verses side by side. Read Genesis 6:6: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Then read Numbers 23:19: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.” In the KJV, repent in these verses means to relent or change course, not to confess sin. Write out two readings of how both verses can be true:
- A process reading, in which Genesis 6:6 shows God discovering something and responding.
- A classical reading, in which Genesis 6:6 expresses real grief while Numbers 23:19 denies that God changes his mind as a fickle human does.
Then ask which reading explains more of the surrounding verses, and which one has to set one of the two verses aside to work. The answer is an interpretation either way. Your task is to see which interpretation the texts themselves make easier.
Third fault line: where the thinking starts
Lisa Fields raised a question about method that sits underneath the textual debate. Process theology, she argued, “forces God to change in our minds and not us to change.” In her words, “the starting point is not God, it’s us and our understanding versus understanding that God is above us and we must alter our understanding.”
Jones grounded the same concern in what the word God means. A God who can be “stripped or deprived of those specific particular characteristics causes that God to not be God,” he said, because such a God ends up shaped by creation rather than supreme over it.
Restate this challenge, then test it fairly. A process theologian might answer that they too start from Scripture, specifically from the passages where God relents and grieves. So the real question is which texts get to interpret the others. Do the relenting passages qualify the passages about foreknowledge, or the reverse? A group that can name that question precisely has found the actual center of the disagreement.
Lisa and Jones also offered an alternative to shrinking God’s knowledge. Lisa put it this way: “So in order to solve the problem of evil, we don’t take away God’s attributes. We just have to understand that his definition of evil could be potentially different from ours.” Jones added that “God’s understanding of good and God’s journey to actualizing good supremely universally globally probably extends beyond our ability to understand it.” Notice that this is a claim about the limits of human judgment, not an explanation of any specific loss. Ask whether it can be held without becoming a way to wave off real cruelty. Lisa also acknowledged that the problem of evil is one not everyone will agree on and that theologians spend whole careers on it. Rejecting one answer does not close the question.
The question underneath the argument
Late in the conversation, discussing a Kendrick Lamar track about leaving Compton while friends and family stayed behind, Jones named a form of the problem that no theory of foreknowledge touches: “why do some of us survive it and others don’t.” He also observed that, in his experience, people facing the least severe suffering are often quickest to use evil against God, while many who suffer most keep trusting him. That is his pastoral observation, not a study, but it raises a fair point for a group to weigh. The person asking about evil is never a neutral calculator.
If someone in your group is carrying a recent loss, let this section slow down. No one needs to explain their own suffering or defend a position about it. The debate over what God knew is worth having. It is not a substitute for lament, for the company of others, or for professional care when grief or trauma requires it.
Questions for the conversation
- After the two-sentence restatement, what did you find hardest to state fairly about process theology, and why?
- Did your sorting exercise put any passage in the second column? How would a process theologian respond, and does that response arise from the passage or get placed on it?
- Lisa Fields suggests the relenting passages show real emotion rather than limited knowledge. What in Genesis 6, Zephaniah 3 or Genesis 18 supports that reading, and what makes it harder?
- If God still responds to evil once it begins, does a learning God actually remove the problem of evil, or move it somewhere else?
- Which texts should interpret which: the passages about foreknowledge or the passages about relenting? What principle are you using to decide?
- Where might Lisa’s claim that God’s definition of evil may differ from ours become unhelpful or even harmful if pressed too far?
- What evidence would change your mind about this question, in either direction?
A question to carry
Before the week ends, try explaining process theology to someone who has never heard of it, in terms its defenders would accept. Then explain why you land where you land. If you cannot do the first part, you are not yet ready to do the second. If you can, ask yourself one more thing: when you picture God in your own hardest moment, do you picture one who was surprised, or one who knew and was grieved? Then read Psalm 139 again and see which picture the psalm actually gives you.