Divine Omnipresence in Process Theism

Abstract Process theism draws principally from the works of Alfred N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, although many writers, some dating from antiquity, contributed to its development. Process thinkers are not in the habit of addressing the topic of divine omnipresence specifically. However, their categories provide for novel ideas concerning God’s presence in the universe. In this chapter, we outline the key elements of a process account of omnipresence, including that God is essentially in give-and-take relationships with the creatures, that divine–creaturely interactions require a principled distinction between abstract and concrete aspects of deity (dipolarity), that God’s awareness of the world is not merely notional or intellectual, but affective (what Hartshorne called ‘feeling of feeling’), and that God’s relation to the world is best characterized as panentheistic, using as a model a carefully refined analogy of the relation that a person has to the cells of his or her body.