Part II. EXAMPLES OF CREATIVITY IN CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
Part I has presented creativity as the central notion of Whitehead‟s metaphysical
system—a notion which applies to every moment of the world‟s advance into novelty
and, derivatively, to every attempt to organize that experience for rational analysis.
Part II will now show how examples of creativity can be found in the history of a
specific area of knowledge, namely, the teachings of Christianity. The aim will be
two-fold: (1) to show that the development of Christian doctrine offers historical
verification of Whitehead‟s ultimate metaphysical principle; and (2) to demonstrate
that creativity is a novel conceptuality for explaining what is actually happening
when church teachings change.
If Whitehead is correct, what should we expect to find? Certainly we should expect
church teachings to exemplify the contrasts Whitehead upholds: reality-ideality,
objectivity-subjectivity, determinacy-indeterminacy, continuity-discontinuity. Above
all, however, we should expect Christian doctrines to exemplify the process
Whitehead identifies as creativity: “The many become one, and are increased by
one.” In other words, a study of Christian doctrine should yield instances in which
the Christian community, confronted with novel experience, created something new
out of the givenness of past teachings—thereby situating those past teachings in an
unprecedented context and restructuring their relationships.
A complete verification of Whitehead‟s theory would require study of all the doctrines
identified with Christianity. That, of course, is probably beyond the competence of
any one scholar—and obviously it exceeds the space-time limitations of an individual
dissertation. The present study, however, can be a useful beginning, if we can verify
the existence of creativity is a central doctrine of Christianity and then suggest how
it might be exemplified in the development of other doctrines.
To that end, the first chapter of Part II will deal with historical developments in a
specific doctrine of the Christian faith: the christological doctrine of the divinity and
humanity of Jesus. It will be seen that the Whiteheadian notion of creativity is in
fact verified—that research reveals instances in which future experience reshaped
past doctrine into something new.
This detailed study will be followed by a second chapter, whose intent is more
exploratory and supplemental. Reference will be made to several other doctrines, of
faith and of morals, to show how the Whiteheadian notion of creativity can be
observed variously in their histories—from doctrines which changes frequently and
dramatically over the centuries to those which exemplified lengthy periods of
repetition; from those which exhibited steady, unfolding growth to those which
changed suddenly in response to novel needs. Although further detailed study would
be necessary to prove that such exemplification of creativity does in fact take place,
this sketch of creativity patterns in various Christian doctrines will be offered as
important supporting evidence for the conclusions reached in Chapter One.
Thus Part II will support from actual historical examples what was said from a
philosophical perspective in Part I. With this evidence introduced, the way will be
cleared for the business of Part III, a theological effort demonstrating that „the
creativity of church teaching‟ is a theological alternative superior to the notion of
development of doctrine.
The Creativity of Church Teaching 1983 Gerald Thomas Floyd