Towards a Metamodern Theology: The DEPTH Model

Generally speaking, traditional theism has stressed God’s immutability as an aspect of his transcendent reality. By contrast, modern and postmodern thought foreground the highly mutable nature of the divine across time and place, reckoning God as just a subjective concept immanent in human minds without any objective referent. Here I outline a new kind of metamodern theology that would synthesize elements from these different paradigms, suggesting a God both mutable and immanent but also ontologically real in his own right. I call this a developmental, emergent, participatory theology of harmonization—or the DEPTH model for short. After unpacking the meaning of each of these elements individually, I show how they hang together as a coherent, naturalistic theological framework with promising new interpretative possibilities and suggest directions for future work.