God and the Consequent Nature

God's primordial nature is the eternal envisagement of all possible forms of value — the full range of what might be that exists as an ordered totality in the divine experience. This is not a decision but a primordial act of vision: God holds open the space of possibility so that actual occasions can have options from which to select. In this sense, God is the condition for any novelty at all, the source of the "initial aim" that each occasion receives as its first orientation toward value.

But God is not only primordial. The consequent nature is God as genuinely affected by the world — as the living recipient of every actual occasion's experience. Everything that happens in the world is taken up into God's consequent nature and held there in an everlasting integration. God grows with the world, is enriched by it, and in this enrichment gives it a kind of objective immortality beyond the ordinary perishing of occasions. The world matters to God; it changes God.

The most distinctive feature of Whitehead's theology is that God does not compel. The initial aim God offers to each occasion is a lure — an invitation toward the best available realisation of value — not a command. Actual occasions are free to deviate from this aim, to settle for less, to choose conflict over harmony. God cannot prevent evil; God can only continue to offer, in every new occasion, the possibility of something better. This is divine power reimagined as persuasive love rather than sovereign force.

God's dipolar nature is developed in Part V of Process and Reality ("Final Interpretation"). The idea that God is both affected by and responsive to the world represents a significant departure from classical theism and became the foundational text for the school of process theology developed by Charles Hartshorne and others.