1. In chapter one--"Six Common Mistakes about God" of his book Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984) Charles Hartshorne is concerned to answer the question, "what is six common mistakes about God?", or "what went wrong in classical theism?"
2. Hartshorne's answer is that six common mistakes about God are these: the first mistake is "God absolutely perfect and therefore unchangeable"(pp. 6-10)1), the second "omnipotence"(pp. 10-26)2), the third "omniscience"(pp. 26-27)3), the fourth "God's unsympathetic Goodness"(pp. 27-32)4), the fifth "immortality as a career after death"(pp. 32-37)5) , and the sixth "revelation as infallible"(pp. 37-44)6).
3. Hartshorne's method of teaching us six common mistakes about God is by first presenting us these mistakes briefly, and then showing us what went wrong in classical theism, and finally insisting the principle of dual transcendence.
4. Hartshorne maintains that the significance of understanding six common mistakes about God is that we can not only avoid both extreme views of God based on dualism, but also establish the proper theism which let God as God is and a human as a human is
5. My own opinion is this. Classical theists are based not on "shared experience". So they cannot help but having "two devices"(p. 11) in their God-talks. So there can be no cosmology with logical consistency, no contribution to God, and no creativity, history, and responsibility. There only left meaningless prayer and worship, the problem of evil. So classical metaphysics cannot be a proper system "credible to human existence as it has given to us to live and reflect on in the present."7) No proper metaphysics, no proper theology. No proper metaethics, no proper ethics.
1) "There is indeed unsurpassable, unchangeable divine perfection, but ti is only an abstract aspect of deity, which concretely is self-surpassable yet not surpassable by others, and changeable only for the better." p. 38
2) "There is a highest conceivable or supreme power, creative of and controlling the world, but it does not and could not achieve the absurdity of monopolizing decision-making; rather, it is creative of and controls individuals with some decision-making power of their own, some ability to settle details left undetermined by the highest power." p. 38
3) "There is a highest conceivable or divine knowledge, free from error or ignorance; however...God does not already or eternally know what we do tomorrow, for, until we decide, there are no such entities as our tomorrow's decisions." pp. 38-9
4) "God is loving in the sense of feeling, with unique adequacy, the feelings of all others, entirely free from inferior emotions...entirely steadfast in the constancy of the divine care for all, but, in response to the novelties in the creatures, with ever partly new experiences." p. 39
5) "An entire career, with all its concrete values, is an imperishable possession of deity, 'to whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid,' including emotional secrets and hidden beauties of a person's inner life." p. 40
6) "From an infallible God to an infallible book(to an infallible reader of the book?) is a gigantic step." p. 41
7) Schubert M. Ogden, Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation(Nashville, Tennessee: Abandon, 1989)