By Lewis Mudge and James Poling. Fortress Press, 1987. In a process view of reality, the fundamental categories are those of becoming and relation rather than substance. There is no room for dualism. God, Self and all Reality are understood as always on the way and always in relation.
Perfection lies in the degree of openness to self-transcendence.
For such a being, one who is totally open and receptive, perfectly responsive and fully open to self-transcendence, the perfection of power will take the form not of control and dominion but of persuasion and enabling. The Providential God is ever in relation to us, pursuing us, encouraging our creativity, sustaining our hope, luring, persuading, enabling us to more. If we begin with the process categories of becoming, dynamic interrelation and power, our understanding of suffering, passion, obedience and agency all shift. If God is the ever self-transcending, fully relational One who acts through persuasion, the lure, desire and whose very being is testimony that the power of force is not absolute, then we can see the passion, suffering and death of Jesus and our own passion, suffering and death in a new light. Given this, the passion of Jesus may, in fact, be located more in the Incarnation than in the death on the cross.