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[German Version] I. Fundamental Theology Process theology is a school within North American theology (North America, Theology in: III) whose essential stimuli came from the process metaphysics (Process philosophy) of A.N. Whitehead. The early center of this movement was the University of Chicago, where from the mid-1920s Whitehead’s thought came to influence theology through the work of H.N. Wieman (and later his students Bernard M. Loomer and Bernard E. Meland) and Charles Hartshorne. The appeal to…

[German Version] (Gk “all-animating”) goes back to Francesco Patrizzi’s Panpsychia (1591), and denotes the idea of a vital world-soul ( anima mundi) penetrating everything that is, as encountered in the philosophy of the Renaissance (G. Bruno, B. de Spinoza), the Enlightenment (G.W. Leibniz), and Romanticism (F.W.J. Schelling, J.G. Herder, H. Heine). Closely related to pantheism and pansophism, panpsychism opposes the mechanistic worldview of I. Newton, which reduces God to the role of artificer, who eventually hand…

[German Version] The term fatality can be defined in two ways. First, it approximates the content of the Greek understanding of “fate” (Heraclitus, Stoics). Accordingly, the human being is part of a determined course of events (Determinism) expressed in the natural laws of the world and the social order. These natural laws, which the Stoics primarily understood causally as heimarmene, an “uninterrupted series of causes,” to which human understanding is also subject. Human fatality consists in finding oneself to be part of a largely determined world, the…

[German Version] Protology, as a part of Christian theology, deals with the question of the conditions of a valid life before God. It focuses on the “first things,” but not solely on account of their historical role as the starting point of time (“primordial time”), the process to which all creaturely reality is subject. It is also concerned in a comprehensive sense with God as Creator (Creation), his activity that sets opportunities and limits to the self-development of the created world. The bib…

[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Fundamental Theology – III. Applications I. Philosophy The concept of effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte) takes on philosophical significance in the hermeneutics of H.G. Gadamer, where it represents the attempt to clarify the fundamental requirement for understanding texts and make this understanding transparent in its own historically conditioned context. …