Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Book Review: "How God Became King," by N.T. Wright


As further help-and-insight into NT Wright's latest book, I might suggest Rob Bell's excellent series on the Sermon on the Mount found in the digital archives at Mars Hill Church, Grandville, Michigan (there is a small donation requested for each sermon). These were produced between 2009 and 2010, and when listening to Rob's Kingdom-series I knew immediately that he was purposely heading towards the re-envisioning of a very "earth-bound, heavenly kingdom," in content, speech, and practice.

Statedly, "The bible is a book about earth, and not heaven." To have changed Jesus' message to one of good-works-for-heavenly-reward is a stark misreading of the Gospel narratives. Strikingly, the Gospels are very earth-bound in their mission-and-ministry import. But more than this, they are Kingdom-bound in spiritual matters of morals and ethics, politics and taxation, business and economy (feeding the poor, taking care of the sick, helping the homeless and impoverished, etc). And by these sublime observations one can quickly deduce how Jesus' earthly Kingdom message changes everything we thought we knew about His gospel of heaven. That it immediately gives eternal purpose and presence to our present-day lives and ministries, our work and worship, NOW and not later.

Hence, what kingdom-actions we take here-and-now have a very earth-bound meaning when shifting the concept of heaven to include not only the idea of  the Kingdom of God coming down to earth at some later time, but being here - right NOW in our midst - through Christ's inaugural death and resurrection. For in Christ has the Kingdom of God come today to forcibly break through the staying realms of man. The Kingdom of God doesn't simply await Jesus' return (parousia). But it awaits the Church's enactment of Jesus' empowerment by realizing the Kingdom of God as already having come.

This then makes a big difference in how we live in the world today, when realizing that heaven isn't a place somewhere "up there with God that we await come death's door." But "has come specifically here amongst our daily regimented lives, having gloriously descended down to earth through Jesus' death and resurrection." Truly God's Kingdom has invaded the kingdoms of this world when believers understand what Jesus meant by this day has God's Kingdom come both within us, and amongst our midst.

And if this be so, than heaven is a place that we take part in now as it breaks into our present day worlds, little-by-little, beginning with personal faith in Christ as a transformative/spiritual inner event that becomes a transformative/spiritual outer event affecting those around us, our community, the world, and even the earth's ecological care take (wasn't Adam charged by God to "tend to the garden" around him in Genesis?). As such, the Church is creating heaven in the here-and-now. Even as Jesus' followers are restoring shalom (order, life) when properly imaging God entering into this wicked world. So that by becoming Kingdom-bearers we are at once re-creating and restoring God's Kingdom presence into these mortal lives that we live.

A mortal life that transforms into eternal life lived within the transformative Kingdom of God. A kingdom which the book of Revelation tells us is borne fully upon this earth, as a New Heavens and New Earth-kind-of-Kingdom. And it can only be new if it becomes reclaimed towards renewal and rebirth. But though we are promised a new heavens and new earth awaits, it must be a further joy-and-delight to know that we can bring God's very kingdom into the here-and-now of today by living as Christ did in the Gospels (love, mercy, forgiveness, etc). Consequently, one doesn't have to "wait" to go to heaven... how sad when we do... but one may live heaven out now.

How is this done? By transforming this old world that abounds every-which-way-around-us by our own personal touch of renewal by heart and soul, mind and imagination, and personal relationships, into something godly and good, pure and holy, revived and reclaimed. By being good Samaritans to those in need. Helping feed the poor and hungry. Bringing [clean] water to those that thirst. Binding the wounds of the lame and blind. Providing our talents and trades to areas of humanity requiring the touch of the Kingdom of God in their lives. This is how to read the Gospels. By living the Gospels out each day of our renewed lives.

R.E. Slater
April 11, 2012

9“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.[a]
10 Your kingdom come,
your will be done,[b]
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread,[c]
12 and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.[d]

For yours is the kingdom and
the power and the glory, forever. Amen

Matthew 6.9-13


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Tom Wright on How (not) to Read the Gospels

by Scot McKnight
April 11, 2012

Tom Wright’s new book, How God Became King, complains that too many Christians have developed bad habits in how to read the Gospels. The essential complaint is this one: what we need to get from the Gospels we can often find; if that is how we use the Gospels then that is also why they were written.
Question for the day: How would most folks in your congregation answer this question: Why do we have the Gospels? Or, What is the intent of the Gospels? What do they do? What do you think of Tom’s six strategies? Anything to add?

Do you think the church has wandered away from a good, accurate reading of the Gospels? Do you think Tom’s overdoing the misreading?
Wright captures these in six general reading strategies. I will add a seventh.

1. They teach how to go to heaven. Wright, who has famously argued against this whole idea in his Resurrection of the Son of God and then more accessibly in Surprised by Hope, argues that neither “kingdom of heaven” nor “eternal life” are about going to heaven when we die but about God’s rule being established on earth. I agree with what he’s arguing but I want to press this point again: the kingdom that comes to earth is eternal, and if we can now say “heaven” is “kingdom come to earth” or “God’s establishing of his kingdom on earth,” then this whole idea of going to heaven is not as wacky as it sometimes is made out to be. In other words, I ask this: if the kingdom is eternal in the sense of our final destiny, and if that is what many people mean by heaven, and even if we are now seriously adjusting heaven to much more earthy, is there that big of a difference?

But, Tom’s got this right: many do get going to heaven out the gospels because that is what they think the Bible is on about. Tom’s got a zinger in this section: “It is as though you were to get a letter from the president of the United States inviting himself to stay at your home, and in your excitement you misread it and assumed that he was inviting you to stay at the White House” (44). Clever.

2. They teach us about Jesus’ ethical teachings. Again, this is partly right; we do get his moral vision. But this is a thin veneer of what the Gospels are doing: they are announcing far more than that Jesus was a great teacher.

3. They teach us about Jesus as the great moral exemplar: once again, there’s something true here, but it simply is too thin. “What a [great or godly] man!” is not the proper response to the Gospels; and thinking this way doesn’t make it any easier to follow Jesus.

4. They teach us that Jesus is the perfect sacrifice: here atonement theology reshapes what the Gospels are about. He had to be sinless and actively obedient, so he took on the Law and beat the thing by doing it all perfectly. Reformed theology, and Tom picks on it here, has emphasized the active obedience (and the passive obedience) and that theology sometimes works its way into how folks read the Gospels — again, not good enough Tom says.

5. They teach us how to live by giving us characters with whom we can identify: we “use” the stories by placing ourselves in them so we can hear a word from the Lord and be transformed. Again, not enough.

6. They teach us that Jesus is divine. Tom weighs in on later creeds, which set christology into the divine-human union. Good enough, but the Gospels are read improperly if this is all we are getting from them. There’s so much more.

I add a 7th, and perhaps you’ve got some to add yourself:

7. The Gospels don’t matter (because nothing happened until Romans or Paul). I tell a story in The King Jesus Gospel of a pastor who said almost this to me, but I have over the years met many who have told me they grew up in a church that preached Paul and never preached the Gospels — except at Christmas and Easter. Otherwise, it was all theology of Paul and Paul’s letters, with some wandering into Hebrews and Peter and the Johannines.

Do I think Tom’s overdoing this? In part, but only because of this: Theologians have read the Gospels well in church history, or at least some of them have. They have not figured as prominently from some as they have for others. For instance, why was Calvin’s last commentary — I may be mistaken — his commentary on the Synoptics?

But, I would want to reframe this a bit: it seems to me that pastors need to do a better job at teaching people how to read the Gospels. I’m confident many of them can read them well, but is that being passed on well? I think not. Augustine read the Gospels well; Calvin did too; I was a bit surprised at the fewness of sermons preached by Edwards on the Gospels when I checked out the database site. But the emphasis on Paul, with Paul’s theology shaping so much of evangelicalism and Protestantism, the Gospels often get shut out and if not shut out their categories get transformed into theological categories drawn from elsewhere.


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Select Comments
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/04/11/tom-wright-on-how-not-to-read-the-gospels/#comments


Jamie says:
April 11, 2012 at 9:39 am
Point 1) Does this change anything? Well, speaking for myself – yes. In my genre of Christianity, this life, this earthly existence is counted as nothing, as unimportant. (That’s what we SAY, that’s not how we LIVE….we live very tied to this earth and our things….) Frankly, I think that along with shifting our view of *where* heaven is, Wright is addressing the preceding dispensational eschatology. “This world is gonna burn, so heaven can’t be “here.”

To shift the concept to heaven coming here, changes everything. What I do here, and now, has purpose. Wright is saying that maybe we don’t understand the how and why right now – but someday we will see how vocation and even everyday actions, how holy living (and yeah, there’s some adherence to moral teaching involved there, but holy living is more than that – it’s wanting to model our life after Jesus not follow rules because we’ll go to hell if we don’t.)

You all know this, too, but it doesn’t allow the laissez faire approach to earth and creation. If heaven is here and not ethereally “out there, somewhere, a spiritual place,” it reminds us of the physicality of heaven. That’s something that a lot of your fundamentalist churches don’t teach well. If heaven will be here, and is inaugurated “now,” then we can’t disregard this place under the misunderstanding that it is temporal and bound to extinction, anyway.

I get the sense that much of Wright’s writing is directed toward the American church, toward the “low church” specifically in this slice, at least. (He directs some of his “holiness talk” such as in “After You Believe” toward more of the high church, the mainline, or the more liberal church. I cringe to use the labels….but they do help categorize…) If you’ve grown up fundamentalist or dispensationalist, or if you don’t have a clue theologically and have inadvertently fallen into the cliches which abound in common religious lore – you understand the difference that Wright’s shift makes. You recognize yourself... and really, this view has teh potential to change everything.


Jon G says:
April 11, 2012 at 10:11 am
Scot said: “if the kingdom is eternal in the sense of our final destiny, and if that is what many people mean by heaven, and even if we are now seriously adjusting heaven to much more earthy, is there that big of a difference?”

I would say the difference is in how we see the World now. That is, Heaven is not a place we go LATER, so we have little justification for tending to this world NOW, but a place that we take a part in shaping everyday – We are CREATING Heaven. We are restoring shalom. Properly imaging God into this world creates the heavenly status.

So, Heaven being a far off place or right here and now has huge implications for me as to how I live today.


Jon G says:
April 11, 2012 at 10:19 am
Also, in dealing with this Heaven question, I’ve found a great analogy via Matt Chandler (Village Church, Dallas, TX). I don’t agree with him nearly as much as I used to but I think he nails this one. He says that making Heaven our goal instead of God is like marrying a woman for her money. How glorifying to the woman can that be? No, we follow God to get God, and Heaven is just icing on the cake.

I would add, Heaven is not what we get from God…it is GETTING God, and therefore we can enjoy Heaven now. The location is of little importance other than it’s implications for how we live life on this Earth.


Dana Ames says:
April 11, 2012 at 12:59 pm
I agree with Holly @7.

Cliff, there is some debate about the best translation of that 2Pet passage. Lately people are thinking it is not a picture of destruction, but rather of everything being opened up to the “fire” of God’s scrutiny and judgment at his presence; that is the sense of being “laid bare”, not the sense of being destroyed.

Scot, to answer the question you posed at #1: YES, there is that big of a difference. I first encountered the idea that “heaven” is not some “place” far away, totally unconnected to this terrestrial ball, in [Dallas] Willard. It blew the roof off my theological house. If creation is so spoiled that God has to destroy it, then the devil wins, plain and simple. But if the “Christ Event” of manifesting the Kingdom truly reaches to everything, then the plan for renewal rather than destruction of creation makes God far *greater* than any sort of plan to whisk us away to a destination beyond the stars.

It was this dawning on me that gave me hope that there was actually some sort of good news to “the Gospel.”

I see where you are going with your line of thought here. It’s very nuanced. Most either can’t or won’t consider things that way; for them, “going to Heaven (as a separate place) when you die” is much easier to deal with than considering all that “Kingdom” carries with it.


Steve Burger says:
April 11, 2012 at 5:05 pm
The gospel, and in fact all of God’s Word, is more than a story, more than a teaching, more than a plan. It is first and foremost a relationship with God. If we truly believe that the word is God breathed then we must dwell in the breath, in the Spirit, since it is God who gives life to the word.

As difficult as it is, I go to the word to dwell with God. When I do otherwise, the word is shaped by my character. Jesus spoke often to the Pharisee’s about this very thing. All the [seven] points above appear to have this common thread; a word shaped by self and culture.

I have found the gospels to be a wonderful place to dwell with God. Often I am left with more questions than answers, but seldom do I leave without the joy of having rested and wrestled with God.
How great is God that God should provide such accessibility through Son and Spirit. How gracious is God that God should provide us with each other to wrestle with our understanding of the Word. Could it be that God designed the word to create struggle thereby compelling us into community? A relationship with God and each other as we journey though the word? May the Spirit who is present in the gospel and the church guide and direct our deliberations.


Philip Donald says:
April 23, 2012 at 3:12 am
I think that Wright does not overstate his case for the majority of people. The problem is that, as you point out, many people exposed to the history of the Church and Biblical Scholarship are exposed to good reading of the Gospels. In general, laity are not, and they approach the Gospels in one of the seven manners you describe. Wright is writing for laity, not academia. We need to place writings in their context (as we learn in Hermeneutics). As C.S. Lewis said in argument with a Bishop in the Church of England, “If you were doing your job properly, I wouldn’t have to write the books I’m writing.” We should praise God that we now have a Bishop (unfortunately and fortunately lost to academia) taking his job seriously and doing it well.



3 comments:

  1. Is this a related effect: At our Easter Sunday Service at our Reformed Church there was not a single mention, either in the songs or the message, of our resurrection here on a restored earth. I did a survey of name preachers: Driscol, Piper, Keller, etc. Same thing. much about Christ's physical re-embodimnent - not a word about ours. What references there were all directed me to a bodiless, eternal, immaterial heaven - 'up there'. Is this another effect of the empty cloak? The de-Judaized, de-historicized, systematic, individualized, dualistic, Platonic post-Enlightment worldview saturating even conservative Evangelicals?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Probably. But I cannot say for certain not being fully versed as a historical theologian. However, it has become common vernacular amongst evangelical Christians to speak of heaven "up there" and not "down here." When NT Wright wrote his book he was commenting on the same perception amongst Christians as you have realised. Jesus' heavenly kingdom was very earthy in that He wasn't denying a heaven in the evangelic sense, but saying to the Jews and Samaritans of his day that the awaited Kingdom of God began now with Him and through Him as the gateway door (or the Temple entrance door) into that kingdom. Why? Because He came as the Immanuel God Messiah of their prayes and desires. Here was the Incarnate God come to deliver His people from their sins. And when they did He brought the realised Kingdom of God down to earth through their obedience and ministration as their Messiah. The early church (and Paul) responded by the same but as the centuries rolled by this understanding became lost in the church's many creeds and theologies. Thus there is a renewed emphasis on regaining Paul's lost perspective, known as the "New Perspective of Paul" (NPP) which can be found here along the sidebars for further referencing. Thank you for your comments. As further resource check out this small article by Shayne Hipps -
    http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-does-resurrected-jesus-say-about.html
    and another by Scot McKnight -
    http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/05/misunderstanding-kingdom.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. For further reading:

    1.
    "Review: Matt Chandler's "Explicit Gospel" misses on many fronts..." by Scot McKnight
    http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/05/review-matt-chandlers-explicit-gospel.html

    2.
    "Do We Have the Gospel Wrong?" by Rachel Evans re Scot McKnight
    http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/09/do-we-have-gospel-wrong.html

    3.
    "What does the resurrected Jesus say about the after-life?" by Shayne Hipps
    http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-does-resurrected-jesus-say-about.html

    4.
    Misunderstanding "Kingdom" by Scot McKnight
    http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/05/misunderstanding-kingdom.html

    ReplyDelete