John B. Cobb, Jr., is undoubtedly the most systematic and prominent of all American thinkers who have found in Whitehead’s thought a profound resource for rethinking Christian theology. His eminent career of teaching, lecturing, and writing has spanned more than fifty years and influenced the lives of hundreds of seminarians, graduate students, and colleagues. One reason Cobb is so highly respected among contemporary theologians—not only process theologians—may be because his approach to engaging diverse perspectives has always been irenic rather than adversarial. Indeed, Cobb’s theological method embodies Whitehead’s notion of creative advance—what Cobb has called “creative transformation” since his publication of Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975)—an approach which takes into account competing influences “in such a way that those [influences] retain their discrete integrity but attain harmony in a larger whole” (1985a, 7). I would add that another reason that Cobb has had broad respect among thinkers from diverse theological perspectives is because his engagement with Whitehead’s thought has been as vital to his personal faith journey as it has to his academic career.

1. Brief Vita

John B. Cobb, Jr., was born February 9, 1925 in Kobe, Japan, where his parents were serving as Methodist missionaries. Other than attending kindergarten in a Japanese school, most of Cobb’s early education took place in Canadian-run schools in Kobe. He completed his last two years of high school in Georgia, his parents’ home state, and then attended two years of junior college at Emory-at-Oxford, Georgia (1941–1943). He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943, and took Japanese language courses at the University of Michigan to be an army translator. Cobb never completed a bachelor’s degree, but after the war in 1947 he took examinations that allowed him to enroll in the Humanities graduate program at the University of Chicago where he was taught by Richard McKeon and Charles Hartshorne.

In an essay entitled “Christ and My Life” (1991b), Cobb describes his strong, Methodist pietistic upbringing and the intellectual challenges to faith he encountered from non-Protestant intellectuals in his army unit. At the same time he was exploring the intellectual challenges to his faith, he also had a strong experiential confirmation of that faith during a time of personal prayer in which he had a brief, “vivid sense of spiritual presence” and a feeling of “total acceptance and love” (1991b, 7). When Cobb enrolled in the University of Chicago’s Humanities graduate program, he initially planned to complete a masters degree exploring modern “objections to Christianity” and then to enroll in a Methodist seminary to pursue ordination (1991b, 8). However, his studies led to a profound personal crisis of faith: “[I]n a few months, I discovered that my understanding of Christianity melted away through my exposure to the thought of the modern world. I was appalled at how quickly a faith I had thought so secure was undercut” (1991b, 8). He felt that he needed to confront this existential crisis directly and so he transferred from the Humanities program to the Divinity School at Chicago where he found a “no-holds-barred inquiry centered around the common concern for fresh, contemporary articulation of the Christian faith” (1991b, 8). Cobb’s studies under Charles Hartshorne became a turning point in his efforts to resolve his faith crisis: “Through Hartshorne, I encountered the still richer and more complex conceptuality of Alfred North Whitehead, and I have been living with him ever since” (1991b, 9). Indeed, anyone who has read Cobb’s writings over the span of his career can readily see that Whitehead’s thought has been the thread that ties together Cobb’s varied interests and collaborations not only in Christian theology but also in ecology, economics, inter-religious dialogue, science, ethics, and political thought.

Cobb’s dissertation, “The Independence of Christian Faith from Speculative Beliefs,” represents his first steps at drawing directly upon Whiteheadian thought as a resource for a theological method which could better account for the reality of faith experience, on the one hand, and current secular knowledge, on the other. The close relationship between Cobb’s intellectual pursuits and religious faith is further illustrated by the fact that while completing his doctoral dissertation, Cobb taught part-time at Young Harris College in Georgia, and served as a Methodist pastor of seven rural churches. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1952.

From 1953–1958, Cobb served on the philosophy faculty at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. When the School of Theology at Claremont was established in 1958, he was invited to serve on the theology faculty as the Ingraham Professor of Theology. In 1960, he was given a joint appointment with the Claremont Graduate School as the Avery Professor of Religion. He held these positions until his retirement in 1990 as Professor Emeritus. In 1973 Cobb co-founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin to promote the study, development, and application of the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and other process-oriented thinkers.

Cobb has held numerous visiting professorships both before and after retirement, including positions at Rikkyo University of Tokyo (1978), Chicago Divinity School (1980), Harvard Divinity School (1987), Iliff School of Theology (1991), Vanderbilt Divinity School (1993), and Drew School of Theology (1999). Cobb has also received honorary degrees from the University of Mainz (1968), Emory University (1971), Linfield College (1983), DePauw University (1989), and the University of Victoria (1998). In 1992 he received, with Herman Daly, the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for their book on sustainable economics, For the Common Good.

2. Creatively Transforming Theology

Cobb undertook his theological studies when the dominant form of Protestant Christian theology was neo-Orthodoxy. Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr were required reading in most schools of Divinity, and Chicago was no exception. The liberal and social gospel theologians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Schleiermacher and Rauschenbusch, had fallen into disrepute following the devastating world wars of the early twentieth century. The center of Protestant theology shifted epistemologically from confidence that there is rational knowledge about God to the conviction that God can only be talked about in terms of special revelation disclosed through non-rational faith; it shifted ethically from optimism that Christians could make progress toward establishing the kingdom of God on earth to a “Christian realism” convinced that temporal affairs are always perverted by human sinfulness and can seldom, if ever, approximate true justice.

Cobb found neither traditional liberalism nor neo-orthodoxy offered a satisfactory approach to his own crisis of faith. How can theology be done so that it is neither as intellectually naive and optimistic as liberalism nor as non-rational and pessimistic as neo-orthodoxy? Cobb’s use of Whitehead in his dissertation laid a foundation for a new theological method. Most of his early books, from Living Options in Protestant Theology (1962) through God and the World (1969), built upon that foundation by using Whitehead as a tool for explicating various traditional problems, including the nature of God, the relationship of Jesus Christ to God, humanity’s relationship to God and Jesus Christ, and theodicy, among other theological concerns.

Of Cobb’s early writings, A Christian Natural Theology is the most important and systematic effort at developing an adequate theology that avoided the pitfalls of traditional liberalism and neo-orthodoxy while incorporating their strengths. In this book, Cobb carefully analyzed several key notions in Whitehead’s philosophy that would help him articulate a Christian theology appropriate for the modern world. Taking seriously the neo-orthodox critique of natural theology (i.e., a theology based upon reason and experience independent of God’s self-disclosure), A Christian Natural Theology is founded on the premise that all theologies (even those that have passed themselves off as natural theologies) presuppose a vision of life or a world view that represents one’s pre-conceptual stance of faith. However, in contrast to neo-orthodoxy, Cobb argues that insofar as faith is actually experienced it is related to other experiences such as the empirical experiences which ground scientific knowledge. The goal then is to employ a cosmology capable of accounting for faith experience and what we commonly call empirical experience in a consistent and coherent way. The choice of Whitehead’s philosophy in providing that cosmology is commended by Cobb not only because it is internally consistent, but also because it is better than other cosmologies at describing the nature of both faith experience and empirical experiences as well as providing a way to see how they are related to each other. Thus, for Cobb, theology is neither grounded on human reason nor barricaded from it as a non-rational endeavor unrelated to all other forms of knowledge.

Cobb turns to Whitehead, then, not as a source for creating a theological system, but as a resource for thinking theologically about what Christians experience qua Christians. Cobb’s use of Whitehead is both appreciative and critical. This is illustrated by the way he deals with the nature of God. Cobb takes over Whitehead’s dipolar view of God as having a primordial nature (which is the principle of limitation) and a consequent nature (by which God prehends or experiences all actual occasions as they come into existence). He argues that Whitehead’s understanding of God is congenial to traditional Christian experience, in part because “Whitehead’s philosophy was […] Christian, in the sense of being deeply affected in its starting point by the Christian vision of reality” (Cobb 1965, 268). For example Whitehead’s philosophical treatment of the consequent nature of God contains “remarkably personalistic language”—God has “purpose, knowledge, vision, wisdom, consciousness, and love” (Cobb 1965, 147)—in other words, language that is coherent with Christian vision of reality.

At the same time, Cobb is initially critical of Whitehead’s view of God as a single actual entity because it does not appear, at first glance, to account for how perpetually perishing occasions of experience (such as those which constitute human beings) could prehend God since God, unlike all other actual occasions, has not reached concrescence. In part, Cobb’s concern has to do with a perceived inconsistency in Whitehead’s cosmology; but just as important for Cobb is the religious conviction that human beings are capable of some level of experience of God. As a result, Cobb proposes, along the lines of Hartshorne’s account of God, that it would be better to understand God as a living person—a “succession of moments of experience with special continuity […] [an] infinite succession of divine occasions of experience” (Cobb 1965, 188). In this way, we can account for how human beings are able to prehend God. Interestingly, in Cobb’s later theology he returned to the view that God is a single actual entity when he encountered the arguments of other process thinkers such as Suchocki (1986) and Oomen (1998), who argue that Whitehead’s view of God as a single actual entity whose concrescence is always determinate and always growing does allow for God to be prehended by the world (see Cobb 2005). That is, once Whitehead’s view was shown to be both internally consistent and coherent with Christian experience, Cobb affirmed the more orthodox interpretation of Whitehead (although he notes that both views are not without their problems, in Cobb 2005).

One of the most innovative uses Cobb has made of Whiteheadian thought is represented by Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975). Prior to this book, Cobb’s view of Jesus was limited to how one historical being was uniquely open to God’s aim for him. While this understanding was amenable to that aspect of Christian experience associated with the synoptic gospels, it did not capture the experience represented by the Gospel of John which depicts Jesus as one in whom the eternal Logos was incarnate. Christ in a Pluralistic Age develops a suggestion by William Beardslee to interpret “Christ” in terms of Whitehead’s notion of a “proposition” (1975, 14). A proposition is a kind of hybrid entity that represents “a connection of some actual occasion or nexus of actual occasions with some ideal possibility for its realization” (1965, 106). Cobb holds that the name “Christ” functions propositionally as an image which unites the concept of deity with the nexus of actual occasions that constitute the world in general, and Jesus in particular. Since Whitehead classifies propositions along with actual occasions and eternal objects, as one the eight categories of existence (PR 22), Cobb can affirm the efficacy of Christ in the world. In traditional theological language, Christ is the Logos incarnate in the world; in Whiteheadian language, Christ designates the process through which God lures the world toward a richer, more inclusive future. That is, Christ is creative transformation. To identify Christ as creative transformation is not only to describe the manner in which the Logos was incarnate in Jesus, but also the way God has always been and continues to be incarnate in the world. Thus, wherever we witness creative transformation, we witness the work of Christ.

Cobb’s critical use of Whitehead has not only provided him a resource for expressing the Christian vision of the world, it has also led him to challenge many convictions about God found in traditional Christian theology, both liberal and neo-orthodox. Three of the most significant convictions that Cobb challenges because of his appropriation of Whitehead are the doctrine of God’s transcendence, God’s immutability, and the meaning of God’s omnipotence.

Although traditional Christian theology verbally affirms that God is both transcendent and immanent, in most theological reflection, transcendence is emphasized at the expense of immanence. This is particularly true of neo-orthodox theology whose emphasis on God as the “wholly other” virtually eliminated any consideration of the immanence of God in creation. Some liberal theologians went to the other extreme, emphasizing the immanence of God to such a degree that their view of God became virtually pantheistic. The tendency for traditional theologies to emphasize one over the other comes about as a result of assuming that the relations among real beings are external relations among substances. If God is wholly transcendent, then the reality of God is maintained, but the immanence of God is eliminated. If God is only immanent in creation, then the reality of God as a separate being is eliminated and God is reduced to the sum of all creatures. Cobb finds in Whitehead’s view of internal relations a way of maintaining both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence. Each occasion of experience is constituted by its relationships to all other beings that make up its past, but at the same time transcends those relationships as a new occasion of experience. God is no exception to this metaphysical scheme—God is constituted in God’s everlasting concrescence by all occasions of experience. At the same time, God, as an actual entity, participates in the concrescence of each new occasion of experience. God transcends the world while being present in it: “It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God” (PR 348). Along with other process thinkers, Cobb calls this “pan-en-theism” (Cobb 1969, 80).

Panentheism also calls into question the traditional theological doctrine of God’s immutability—the view that God is unchanging and is unaffected by creation. For Cobb, because the consequent nature of God represents God’s everlasting and full experiencing of all that comes to pass, we should understand the world as present in God, perpetually changing God’s concrescence. Cobb goes on to assert that not only is God’s concrescence supremely affected by the world, God supremely affects the world by providing each occasion of experience an initial ideal aim toward achieving satisfaction or strength of beauty relevant to each moment of experience. That is, as God is affected by the world that has come to be, God constitutes Godself so as to affect the world that is coming to be. While some Whiteheadians understand the initial aim to derive solely from God’s primordial nature, Cobb points out that God’s consequent nature must also play a role or else Whitehead risks undermining the unity of God as an actual entity (Cobb 1965, 178). He argues that through God’s consequent nature, God adds to the eternal aim of the primordial nature God’s own feeling for each emerging occasion. God then provides both an initial aim and initial data for each actual occasion (Cobb 1965, 182 and 204). Thus, for Cobb, God’s mutability is vital to the way that God changes the world.

One might ask whether immutability is central to the Christian vision of the world, and thus a reason to question the suitability of Whitehead’s cosmology in this respect. Cobb does not believe so. The idea of immutability prevalent in much of traditional theology is grounded more in the philosophical heritage of Plato and Aristotle than in the Biblical witness which depicts God as one who interacts with human beings, as “repenting” of actions that God had threatened, as One who loves God’s people tenderly and steadfastly, and the God who is revealed in Jesus as a parent. Moreover, God’s supreme mutability encourages us to love God’s creatures: “love of God must express itself in love of the creature, for it is by contributing to the creature that we contribute to God” (Cobb 1965, 225, italics added). Interestingly, in his later writings, Cobb develops this notion further as a way of demonstrating that the Christian faith does not inevitably lead to environmental destruction as Lynn White had suggested in his seminal essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (see Cobb 1972). The Whiteheadian interpretation of God’s consequent nature helps articulate a Christian theology that is faithful to its history yet is able to support a profound ecological ethic.

Perhaps the most controversial view of God that emerges out of Cobb’s process theology is the notion of God’s power as persuasive rather than coercive. Traditional theology depicts God’s omnipotence as the ability to make anything happen. In its most extreme form, the traditional view of omnipotence says that everything that happens is a result of God’s control. In less extreme forms, traditional theology states that God is capable of controlling everything, but limits Godself in order to allow for human freedom. In both the extreme and less extreme forms, the theological problem of theodicy arises, namely, is God ultimately the source of evil? In other words, the traditional view of God’s omnipotence raises serious problems for the view that God is all good. Traditional theology usually deals with this question by redefining God’s goodness in terms of God’s gracious self-limitation or arguing that what we view as evil is really not so, provided we could see it from God’s perspective. In Whitehead’s cosmology, however, God’s power, rather than God’s goodness, needs to be redefined. God acts upon the world by providing each occasion of experience an initial aim and initial data. Each occasion of experience is fundamentally free in how it incorporates God’s aim and feeling along with the data provided by all previous occasions that have constituted the world to that point. The freedom inherent in each occasion of experience is not a result of God’s self-limitation; rather the degree of freedom each occasion is capable of exercising is enhanced by God’s “lure” toward novel forms of satisfaction. God is only capable of acting as a persuasive force in the world; but for Cobb this is true power that empowers the world. Even our everyday experience suggests that coercive power is indicative of a loss of power to persuade others in their freedom, such as when a parent physically compels a child to behave in a certain way when the parent’s relations with the child are disintegrating (Cobb 1969, 90). If power is understood as essentially coercive, then Cobb would affirm that God is limited in power. However, if perfect power is understood as persuasive, working with and through the free decision of others, then God’s power is unlimited. Put differently, true omnipotence is equivalent to perfect divine love.

3. Beyond Theology

In addition to re-examining the nature of God, much of Cobb’s early theology developed and reinterpreted traditional Christian doctrines such as the nature of Jesus Christ (Cobb 1966), Christian anthropology (1967), and even life after death (1964) in light of Whitehead’s cosmology. I have argued elsewhere that Cobb’s theology was itself transformed when he was confronted by the magnitude of the ecological crisis in 1969 (Bube 1988, Chapter 3). Not only did Cobb turn to developing an ecological praxis-oriented theology (Cobb 1972 and 1981b), he began to question the disciplinary boundaries presupposed by academic theology (and indeed the disciplinary boundaries presupposed by most academic disciplines). Just as he had in his early theology, Cobb found in Whitehead a resource for expanding theological reflection beyond its traditional disciplinary boundaries to develop interdisciplinary dialogues with an aim at not only better understanding the crises facing the world, but in providing solutions to addressing those crises. Not surprisingly, several of the books Cobb published after 1970 are collaborative projects including books on philosophy and science (1977a), ecology (1981b), theological education (1985b), and economics (1989b and 1994b).

Cobb’s founding of the Center for Process Studies (CPS) has also contributed to the praxis orientation of Cobb’s later work. The CPS seminars, forums, and publications have brought Whiteheadian thought into dialogue with thinkers and activists from around the world in various disciplines, including psychology, physics, biology, economics, education, political theory, gender studies, and Buddhist thought. Cobb has found in Whitehead a way to engage views from a variety of perspectives and incorporate them into a larger vision. Some have wondered whether it would be better to forgo the focus on Whitehead’s daunting vocabulary and complex conceptuality and simply let his central insights “merge into a wider stream of congenial reflection arising out of new developments in our culture” (Cobb 1994a, 1). While acknowledging the virtues of this direction—not the least of which is Whitehead’s own disinterest in having “disciples”—Cobb argues that the crucial ontological questions that underlie these congenial movements still need to be explicitly addressed if these movements are to have staying power. Thus, Cobb remains an indefatigable proponent of Whiteheadian thought and has used his lectures, writings and the work of the Center for Process Studies to interpret and advocate the implications and applications of Whitehead’s thought for a variety of issues and disciplines.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, Cobb’s wide-ranging concerns about the environment, economics, gender, and politics, theology remains important to Cobb, and still constitutes the bulk of his writing. However, his theological writing has shifted away from the academically sophisticated and toward thoughtful lay persons. Books like Praying for Jennifer (1985c), Doubting Thomas (1990a), Can Christ Become Good News Again? (1991b), Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today (1995), and The Process Perspective (2003a), among others, continue the legacy begun in A Christian Natural Theology. Instead of building upon a theological ivory tower, they build bridges of reflection between process theology and everyday persons of faith—hopefully those who are best positioned to make grass-roots changes in their churches.

In summary, throughout the creative developments and transformations of Cobb’s theological career, Whitehead has continued to serve as a resource in his quest to relate the challenges of the modern world to the experience of faith.

Works Cited and Further Readings

Many of John Cobb’s papers are available at The Center for Process Studies, 1325 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711; telephone (909) 621-5330. Their website is http://www.ctr4process.org/. Other papers can be found at http://www.religion-online.org.

1. Selected Publications by John B. Cobb, Jr.

1.1. Books Authored

1960. Varieties of Protestantism (Westminster Press).

1962. Living Options in Protestant Theology: A Survey of Methods (Westminster Press). Republished in 1986 by University Press of America.

1965. Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (Westminster John Knox Press).

1967. The Structure of Christian Existence (Seabury Press). Republished in 1979 by Harper.

1969. God and the World (Westminster John Knox Press).

1972. Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (Bruce Press). Revised edition republished in 1995 by Environmental Ethics Books.

1973. Liberal Christianity at the Crossroads (Westminster Press).

1974. To Pray or Not to Pray (The Upper Room).

1975. Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Westminster Press). Republished in 1999 by Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1999).

1976 (with David Ray Griffin). Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Westminster Press).

1977a. (with David Ray Griffin). 1977a. Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy (University Press of America).

1977b. Theology and Pastoral Care (Fortress Press).

1981. (with Charles Birch). The Liberation of Life: from the Cell to the Community (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Republished in 1990 by Environmental Ethics Books.

1982a. Process Theology as Political Theology (Westminster Press).

1982b. Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Fortress Press).

1983. (with David Tracy). 1983. Talking about God: Doing Theology in the Context of Modern Pluralism (Seabury Press).

1985a. (with Joseph Hough). Christian Identity and Theological Education (Scholars Press).

1985b. Praying for Jennifer (The Upper Room). Republished in 2000 by Wipf & Stock Publishers.

1989a. (with W. Beardslee, D. Lull, R. Pregeant, T. Weeden Sr., and B. Woodbridge ). 1989a. Biblical Preaching on the Death of Jesus (Abingdon Press).

1989b. (with Herman Daly). For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Beacon Press). Revised edition 1994.

1990a. Doubting Thomas: Christology in Story Form (Crossroad Publishing Company).

1990b. (with Helwig, Knitter and Swidler). Death or Dialogue?: From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue (Continuum International Publishing Group).

1991a. Matters of Life and Death (Westminster John Knox Press).

1991b. Can Christ Become Good News Again? (Chalice Press).

1992. Sustainability: Economics, Ecology, and Justice (Orbis Books).

1993. Becoming a Thinking Christian (Abingdon Press).

1994a. (with Clifford Cobb). The Green National Product (University Press of America).

1994b. Lay Theology (Chalice Press).

1994c. Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy (The Pilgrim Press).

1995. Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today (Abingdon Press).

1997. Reclaiming the Church: Where the Mainline Church Went Wrong and What to Do about It (Westminster John Knox Press).

1998. The Earthist Challenge to Economism: A Theological Critique of the World Bank (Palgrave Macmillan).

1999. (with Paul Knitter). Transforming Christianity and the World: A Way Beyond Absolutism and Relativism (Orbis Books).

2001. Postmodernism and Public Policy: Reframing Religion, Culture, Education, Sexuality, Class, Race, Politics, and the Economy (Albany, SUNY Press).

2002. Christian Faith and Religious Diversity: Mobilization for the Human Family (Augsburg Fortress Publishers).

2003a. The Process Perspective: Frequently Asked Questions About Process Theology, edited by Jeanyne B. Slettom (Chalice Press).

2003b. Progressive Christians Speak: A Different Voice on Faith and Politics (Westminster John Knox Press).

1.2. Selected Articles and Chapters

1964. “Whitehead’s Philosophy and a Christian Doctrine of Man,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XXXII, 209-220.

1966. “The Finality of Christ in a Whiteheadian Perspective,” in The Finality of Christ, edited by Dow Kirkpatrick (Abingdon Press), 122-54.

1981a. “A Critical View of Inherited Theology” in Theologians in Transition, edited by J. M. Wall (Crossroad Publishing Company), 74-81.

1.3. Papers

1985a. “Authentic Existence in Christian Whiteheadian Perspective,” paper given at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting.

1990. “Whitehead and Anthropology” at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=40 (accessed 2 January, 2006).

1994a. “The Future of Process Thought,” CPS: Newsletter for the Center of Process Studies 18, 2, 1-3.

2005. “Does God Have a Serial Existence as We Do?” from the FAQ Archive of “Process and Faith,” online at http://www.ctr4process.org/pandf/cobbfaq/June%202005%20.htm (accessed 18 January 2006).

2. Secondary Literature

Bube, Paul Custodio. 1988. Ethics in John Cobb’s Process Theology (Scholars Press).

Griffin, David Ray, and Altizer, Thomas J.J. (eds.). 1977. John Cobb’s Theology in Process (Westminster Press).

Griffin, David Ray, and Hough, Joseph C., Jr. (eds). 1991. Theology and the University: Essays in Honor of John B. Cobb, Jr. (Albany, SUNY Press).

Oomen, Palmyre M. F. 1998. “The Prehensibility of God’s Consequent Nature” Process Studies 27, 1-2, 108-133.

Tracy, David. 1977. “John Cobb’s Theological Method: Interpretation and Reflections,” in John Cobb’s Theology in Process, edited by David Ray Griffin and Thomas J.J. Altizer (Westminster Press).

Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. 1986. God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (Crossroad Publishing Company).

Author Information

Paul Custodio Bube
Religion and Philosophy
Lyon College, Batesville, AR 72501
http://www.lyon.edu
pcbube@lyon.edu

How to Cite this Article

Bube, Paul Custodio, “John B. Cobb, Jr. (1925–)”, last modified 2008, The Whitehead Encyclopedia, Brian G. Henning and Joseph Petek (eds.), originally edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond, URL = <http://encyclopedia.whiteheadresearch.org/entries/bios/scholarly-legacy/john-b-cobb/>.