Claim. SMM teaches — guardedly — that God Himself had to “develop” through creating and relating to His object partners; the developmental language is consistent enough across CSG to resist being dismissed as accommodation, but is so theologically distinctive that SMM withholds full elaboration.
Elaboration. The seed statement in Ch 1 is unusually hedged: “God Himself also had to develop. There are many other things, but I have not discussed them because if I did, you would talk about them carelessly and cause problems” (4.2. God is the closest person to you, 218-263, 1991.8.19). The hedge itself is data — SMM signals that the claim is doctrinally heavy and not casual rhetoric.
Ch 4 makes the developmental picture concrete. God “lost His position as parent” through the Fall (csg-god-lost-parent-position-through-fall), conducted a six-thousand-year search “under continuous grief” (csg-six-thousand-year-search-under-grief), and was “miserable throughout history” (csg-god-miserable-throughout-history). These are not mere relational changes — they describe God moving through experiential states.
Three distinctions matter. (1) Not Process Theism: SMM does not claim God is metaphysically incomplete or dependent for being on the world; God remains “all-knowing and almighty.” (2) Not classical impassibility: SMM rejects the picture of an unmoved God. (3) Not mere accommodation language: the developmental claim recurs with conceptual weight, not just rhetorical color.
The thread this material wants is not in Ch 1 alone; it spans Ch 1 → Ch 4 → DP’s account of God’s heart, and engages process theology’s strongest reading without endorsing it.
See also. csg-god-cannot-love-without-a-partner, csg-god-miserable-throughout-history