Abstract
Charles Hartshorne’s major philosophical preoccupation has been the problem of articulating a tenable conception of God. The question, as Hartshorne expresses it, “is whether and how God can be conceived without logical absurdity, and as having such a character that an enlightened person may worship and serve him with his whole heart and mind.”1 Hartshorne’s formulation of the problem echoes the first paragraph of the Jewish Shema prayer: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”2 Hartshorne has these words in mind when he defines worship as loving God “with all one’s heart and with all one’s mind and with all one’s soul and with all one’s strength.”3 Hartshorne’s definition of the issue indicates one of the criteria to be utilized in analyzing his concept of God from a Jewish perspective — namely, adequacy to the basic religious insights of Jewish monotheism.
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Notes
Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948 ), P. 1.
Deuteronomy 6:5, incorporated in Weekday Prayer Book (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1974), p. 47.
Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection ( LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1962 ), p. 40.
Santiago Sia, God in Process Thought ( Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985 ), p. 112.
Harry A. Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929 ), pp. 25, 26. For further elaboration of these criteria from a Jewish point of view, see William E Kaufman, Contemporary Jewish Philosophies ( Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 1985 ).
Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1967), pp. 4, 5.
Evelyn Underhill, Worship ( New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957 ), p. 11.
Evelyn Underhill, Worship (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), pp. 196, 197.
Abraham J. Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism, ed. and introduced by Fritz Rothschild (New York: Free Press, 1965 ), p. 141.
Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (New York: The Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, Inc., 1947), p. 76. For further information on Kaplan and Reconstructionism, see my Contemporary Jewish Philosophies,Chapter 9.
Philosophers Speak of God,edited by Charles Hartshorne and William L Reese (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953).
Cited in my paper “The Critique of Divine Omnipotence in Process Philosophy” delivered at the 1986 Conference on Judaism and Process Theology at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.
Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1966), pp. 11, 12.
This is the contrast brought out in my paper “The Critique of Divine Omnipotence in Process Philosophy.”
Charles Hartshorne, “Could There Have Been Nothing? A Reply”, Process Studies I,(Spring, 1971), p. 27.
Charles Hartshorne in Philosophical Interrogations,edited, with an introduction, by Sydney and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), pp. 323, 324, italics added.
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Kaufman, W.E. (1990). A Jewish Perspective on Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God. In: Sia, S. (eds) Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1014-5_12
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