The world still needs God: An understanding of the biblical God as love from the perspective of process thought and its application to ministry in sermons

This project attempts to explain God as represented in the Bible to modern people in tune with modern mentality. To accomplish this, the project needs to satisfy three requirements from the perspective of process thought. These are logical consistency, empirical applicability and adequateness, and relatedness with Christian identity.; The methodology and the theoretical basis for this project are based on the analysis of human experience, the evolution of human consciousness, and the authenticity of intuitions contained in the Bible. The basic idea for this project is the contrast between the past and the present consciousness of human beings from an evolutionary perspective. The differences between the past and the present involve both the immediacy of experience and their descriptive forms. The experiences of the past are more immediate but their descriptive forms are more ambiguous because these descriptive forms were at that time less developed. The experiences of the present, by contrast, are less immediate but their expressions are clearer due to highly developed linguistic forms. Therefore, the present can analyze the past by using its sophisticated forms and, thereby, discover the true intuitions in the immediate experiences of the past. In the center of the religious experiences expressed in the Bible, there is God.; To consistently understand God in the Bible, the Natures of God are introduced as forms suggested by process metaphysics: the Primordial, the Consequent.; The biblical intuitions have implied that the ultimate ground of all-living things and the value and meaning of the world are based solely upon God. In the historical process, God's actions have been understood more and more clearly as caused by love and, at last, God himself, or herself, comes to be definitely identified with love itself in the New Testament; “God is love.” In the Bible, God's love causes God to create, sustain, and redeem the world. Therefore, the existence of human beings and the world is necessarily based on God's love.; Two sermons are prepared as examples to apply this understanding of process theology to God in the Bible.