John Cobb changed my life

Shortly after the passing of John B. Cobb, Jr., Pando’s Founding Chair, Ed Bacon spoke movingly in a sermon about John’s life and legacy, delivered at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, TN. The following was inspired by Ed’s sermon. Ed follows John as Chair of the Pando Populus Board of Directors.

One of the great philosopher-theologians of our time, who will for generations be recognized as a defining intellectual giant of the 20th and 21st centuries, who put science and religion, critical thinking and theology, clear-eyed reason and faithful commitment together, and thereby significantly changed the way contemporary theology, religion, and interreligious dialogue were taught and practiced, was John Cobb. 

John was the most important living architect of a school of theological and philosophical thought known as process theology, and he was a dear friend of mine. He died the day after Christmas at age 99. If he had lived just 6 more weeks, he would have reached 100. The mantle of chairing the board of Pando Populus, one of numerous organizations he had a major role in founding, has fallen to me. My prayer is that I may be worthy of walking in the footsteps of his legacy even as we at Pando Populus now adventure into new opportunities. 

John was the sort of friend who changed lives. To know John was to be changed by him, as I was. John was an intellectual – an intellectual’s intellectual, courageous and adventurous – who as a theologian was an atheist if one defines theism in archaic sky-God categories of long ago, but a committed theist if one thinks of God in terms of constant companion. 

One of his more than 50 books that has had enormous influence on me is also one of his most recent, written in the last decade of his life: Jesus’s Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed. The book describes a God who is not above the world, aloof, or absent from it but incarnate in every person, every creature, every experience we have and loving it into the future. 

John’s book taught me that “Abba,” which is recorded in the New Testament as being Jesus’s name for God, is Aramaic for “Daddy.” It’s fascinating because the language for God that most of us have all grown up with and gotten used to is the language of “God the Father” – formal and distant. But for Jesus, John reminded me in his book, God was “Daddy” – “Abba,” literal baby talk – with all the tenderness and intimacy it implies. It was God-as-Daddy in whom John trusted and in whose arms he fell asleep. 

But however beautiful and poetic such an idea might be, John took theological categories seriously and rigorously. “Faith” for John didn’t mean believing in something that you couldn’t otherwise prove; it meant “faithfulness” to love. 

“There is nothing redemptive,” he once said, “about a religion that requires the sacrifice of the intellect.”  For John, God isn’t “super-natural,” or “above” nature but an integral part of it.  The same gifts of rationality and logic that we apply anywhere in life are ones we can apply seamlessly to the unseen of life’s depth. 

When John did this, and applied logic to theology, the fallacy of thinking of God as “almighty” became clear.  The idea of God as all-powerful has probably created more atheists than anything else – because people expect an “all-powerful” God to solve every problem at every time at the snap of the fingers. If not, then it must be God’s love that’s lacking. An almighty God would be a God who is responsible for anything that happens under divine care, including suffering. 

So John and his intellectual ancestors did something breathtaking but long overdue: they reimagined God’s power as influential power, the attractive and nurturing and alluring power of love, the power of God as Daddy rather than the coercive omnipotence of kings. God in John’s conception is still enormously powerful throughout the universe. But it’s the power of persuasion, pulling all creation in the direction of hope, beauty, and peace. 

I’ve followed John’s lead in this. Rather than think that God is almighty and all-powerful, I believe that God is better understood as being all-loving, all-nurturing, and deeply influential in bringing about the good. John helped me see this – one of many things he helped me see – and what a profound difference he made in my own theology which is about being love-based rather than fear-based.  

But then John changed my life in an even deeper way, and that was ten years ago. At the time, I was Rector of All Saints Church in Pasadena, doing my thing and minding my own business when John Cobb – then 89 years of age – wrote an article for the Pando website called, “One More Thing Before I Go.”

He dedicated it to his great-grandchildren – to those who will live in a different world than the one we’re inhabiting today – and said something like this (I paraphrase): 

We are giving to my great-grandchildren and all of our grandchildren a planet that we have abused. I fear that much of this is because our theology has been all-too-often wrong. We haven’t realized that every leaf, lizard, rock, and bird has divinity within it as does every human being.  All are “subjects,” not simply objects, and all have their own set of inner experiences. And our job is to treat every living thing with this awareness and knowledge intact. 

How do we do that? The problem goes deep, John elaborated. We will not change direction in terms of our relationship to the planet until we change some of our most fundamental habits of thinking – including our habit of seeing nature in categories we’ve carried around with us since the 17th century. 

John then goes on to discuss how the great thinkers of the age adopted a mechanical view of nature as their model for how the world “really worked.” Never before in the history of the world had anyone thought of nature in terms of a machine. Nature before had always been seen as living, breathing, responsive – not a thing of nuts and bolts. But with the dawn of what was called the “modern” age, the most sophisticated thinkers took a famous clock in Strasbourg, with mechanical figures that would dance on the hour, as their model for understanding what living things are and how they worked. The whole of the natural world, it was thought, could be explained in terms of machines and their parts. And the whole mystery and majesty and depth and beauty of the universe came to be reduced to little more than relentless gears grinding away in a cold and dark and forsaken cosmos. 

Now John being John was always clear that this kind of reductionistic thinking had its positive side, because it helped to bring about great scientific advances. But it also came at a great, dehumanizing cost – and even worse, stripped the natural world of any great moral reason not to denude, despoil, rape and pillage the earth if there could be realized a little gain. For how do we talk about meaning, value and purpose in the universe if it is nothing more than a vast, empty machine? How do we talk about love if all that exists at the end of the day is a collection of machine parts? Why be concerned about trees and birds and fish and the strangers in our midst if there’s nothing about any of them that has any real importance?

By contrast, John maintained that if we are to build what he called an “ecological civilization,” by which he meant a way of living that was in balance with all things, we had to change our way of thinking. We have to change the stories about ourselves and about the nature of reality that we tell. He stated (again, paraphrasing): 

If my great grandchildren are to have any reasonable chance, they and the civilization around them must affirm the aliveness of every other living thing, with their own subjectivity and value in and for themselves. 

Realize that everything that is is not only here for itself but part of a community – in fact, a community of communities of communities of communities – and interconnected with every other thing; not just people but every thing that is.

If we do this, we will become different people. We will have a different way of relating. And we will be born again. 

I can tell you, for myself, this is what happened to me.  

John’s mentor, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, defined religion itself as something shocking outside of this context. Religion, he said, is world loyalty – not as so often thought, world escape. John followed Whitehead in this. And the world is worthy of such loyalty and such a definition because the world that religion is loyal to is not a dead machine, but a precious, living place, this planet Earth – our island home. 

Now, as if that weren’t good news enough, John introduced to me an image that pulls together and symbolizes these ideas.  

Some of you have heard me talk about the quaking aspens in southern Utah. They spread over 106 acres and by all appearances look like a massive forest of individual trees. But look closer and you’ll find that this seeming forest is in fact a single tree. There are 47,000 tree trunks here, each with exactly the same DNA as the other. Connected at the roots, they are all one tree. When any part of the organism needs nourishment, the other parts come to its aid. Its name is Pando, which comes from Latin and means “I spread.” Pando turns out to be the largest and among the oldest organisms in the world. Its unity has enabled it to survive radical changes and immense destruction.

If the Strasbourg clock represents a model of the world as mechanism and hyper-individuality, Pando is a model of the world as cooperative, nurturing, and an organic whole. 

Maybe, John concludes (I’m paraphrasing still), if we get people to look at themselves and their world with Pando as the model of reality rather than the Strasbourg clock, we would develop different, better ideas of how to relate to one-another and to the Earth and we’d start acting differently as well. Maybe we can develop different ideas of what is valuable and important. Maybe we can avert our slide to self destruction and maybe, just maybe, we can find reason to hope.

Ten years ago, John wrote that the one thing he really wanted to do before he left us was to try to make clearer than ever before how important this shift in consciousness is to the future of the planet – a shift to Pando consciousness. Over those ten years, he held a major international conference focused on issues of just these kinds, he helped launch Pando and other organizations as well to stir actions that could make a difference, and poured his personal heart and soul and virtually all of his money into this great cause. It was, he said, the one thing he really wanted to do before his next cosmic adventure. And he did it. And he changed my view of reality in the process and set me on a new course of action in my life. 

Now John has gone on. As for me, my adventures remain earthbound for the time being. But I have inherited John’s worldview and so now I, too, have one more thing to do before I go. And that is to teach and preach and act with the sole orientation of loyalty to this extraordinary world. 

I hope in this you’ll join me. There is much to do, but John paved the way. 

Now, there is one more thing for each of us to do before we can feel free to go. Let’s get busy.