Excerpts from The God of Becoming and Relationships by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson
God is always co-creating with us and (at our best) we with God.

Instead of thinking of creation as ex nihilo, out of nothing—as if there were nothing existing previous to creation and then, in an instant, everything suddenly existed—as much of dominant Western theology does, Process Theology takes a more developmental view. I think it fair to say that most Process theologians, beginning with Alfred Whitehead (and myself included), understand God as the organizing force of an eternally existing reality. Such a view surprises those who restrict their view of creation to the first and third verses in chapter 1 of the book of Genesis: When God began to create heaven and earth.... God said: “Let there be light”; and there was light. They ignore the second verse—“the earth was unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep; and wind from God sweeping over the water”—and creation images from elsewhere in the Bible,3 Midrash, and Kabbalah.

The dominant view filters Genesis telling through a preexistent ideology of an omnipotent, eternal, impassive Deity, forcing readers to constrain the text within the procrustean confines of an effortless, spontaneous moment that created everything that exists today. Such an approach conflicts with fundamental scientific evidence, such as the age of the planet, the cosmic materials out of which life is constructed, the fact that living things have developed from previous living things, and the several mass extinctions that punctuated life on earth prior to the appearance of today’s species, to mention only a few. Equally significant, such a theological imposition depends on, as mentioned above, ignoring the second verse of Genesis. So much for taking the Bible literally!

A contextual reading of the opening verses of Genesis yields the recognition that the unformed and void darkness (tohu va-vohu) existed when God began creating. That bubbling, irrepressible depth remains the source of self-creativity, potentialities, and resistance to all imposed power. God’s creating is not necessarily one of instantiating ex nihilo from without, but rather a process of mobilizing continuous self-creativity from within: An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of creation.
Two approaches to evil
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If God is not the coercive despot who created all as it is, if God is found in the steady relational love that invites creation into diverse becoming, what then is evil? As we have learned, in the dominant theology, an omnipotent, omniscient God becomes the source of our suffering, either actively, by commission, or passively, by refraining from intervention. In either case, it is easy to feel abandoned, betrayed, or persecuted by such a coercive power. In such a theology, evil is a conceptual conundrum to be rationalized through better reasoning or to be evaded through redefinition.

Process Theology offers two possible understandings of evil, both facing the tragic nature of evil directly and affirming the innocence of those who suffer. One view addresses evil as that aspect of reality not yet touched by God’s lure or that part of creation that ignores God’s lure. Another Process approach to suffering and evil draws on the thought of medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who acknowledges that much of what we term evil or suffering is a matter of perspective. Maimonides, speaking out of the naturalism that Aristotelian thought makes possible, points out how often what we term evil is simply our perspective on a particular event.