John V. Taylor and Process Theology

Abstract John V. Taylor was reluctant to acknowledge process theology flourishing in the 1960s; however, in reading a book by Norman Pittenger, God in Process , during a train ride, he had a ‘light bulb’ experience, triggering the writing of The Go-Between God in 1972. Though Taylor may not have studied the technicalities of the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, he drew upon their characteristic understanding of God. By contrast with Classical Theism’s contention that God is absolute in all respects, they vigorously argued that God is relative to the natural universe and revealed in and through its creative processes. Taylor was also influenced by the Australian biologist Charles Birch, a proponent of process theology. The shape of the train-ride religious experience, which Taylor unpacks in The Go-Between God , bears a remarkable family likeness to the kind of religious experience articulated at length by Whitehead in response to the atheism of Bertrand Russell and the logical positivism of A. J. Ayer, in his book Modes of Thought . This was published in 1938, the year of Taylor’s admission to Holy Orders. It may be that Taylor was unwittingly much more of a process theologian than he himself was aware.