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

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Peter Rollins: The New "Anti-Theists" of the 21st Century

 
anabpatist
 
Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens: The New Theists?
 
posted by Peter Rollins
March 10, 2013

Today the word “sacred” is employed to name a certain realm of life that can be contrasted with the secular. The idea here is that some object, area of life or geographical location can act as a “thin place,” i.e. a site where the transcendent shines through.
 
This approach to the sacred is ubiquitous in the contemporary situation and is borne witness to in the phenomenon of religious music, books and art, in the New Age interest in ley lines, the notion of Christian universities and in the embrace of artefacts believed to contain supernatural power. Here the religious or sacred is taken to be a sphere that can be identified in some way, visited, held or touched.
 
In contrast to this the work of theologian Paul Tillich reveals a different approach. For rather than seeing the sacred as some distinct thing (even the greatest thing), one can see it as the name we give to the affirmation of a depth of dimension that can be found in all things.
 
In this way one does not attempt to place the sacred alongside reason, ethics or aesthetics, but rather sees the sacred affirmed in our heartfelt commitment to these. From this perspective, insofar as we affirm the world as wonderful, we express the sacred. It is as we show loving care and concern for existence, and as we participate fully in life, we proclaim the sacred even if we are not aware of it. This is somewhat similar to the way that everything we see proclaims the existence of light even though we likely have no direct cognisance of the light (for we are focused on what the light illuminates).
 
As such, Tillich argued that a serious rejection of God (rather than a mere lack of interest in the subject) is a deeply sacred act. For when someone rejects the notion of God because of the wars that have been fought over that name, as well as the abuse, the fundamentalism and the ecological destruction that is bound to so much religion, they are demonstrating a profound concern for both people and the planet. As such their attack is directly testifying to a depth dimension in existence. The stronger their attack the more care and concern they are showing. In this very assault they are thus asserting, in a direct and visceral way, a commitment to the protection and promotion of life. The result is a proclamation of the sacred that is birthed from the same mother as the message found on the lips of the various poets and prophets in the Biblical text. To take one example, consider the words of Amos who cries out, in the name of God,
 
I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assembles. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!
 
It is because of this that both the theologian Tillich and the philosopher Heidegger each claimed that there is a form of atheism that is closer to the divine than the standard theism witnessed in the church. For wherever a concern of beauty [is found], [wherever] an embrace of life and a love of liberation are exhibited, the sacred is proclaimed. In this way the passionate critiques of God propounded by the New Atheists can be seen as potent defences of the sacred. Defences that, at their best, are worthy of being called divine.
 
Peter Rollins
 
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 
 
My take-away from Peter's essay is that we are to listen to a-l-l elements of humanity - not just are chosen favorites. Moreover, counter to the idea of atheism is arising an element of men and women committed to religion's deconstruction... who we would not normally deem a theist or theologian, but not necessarily an a/theist or a/theologian either. Rather, they are to be viewed as ones eschewing a Christianity become religious and not spiritually antithetic to its originating Creator and Author. But become more of an institutionalized faith emphasizing all the worst of humanity's passionate elements. As such, perhaps we should deem such men and women as anti-theists, or anti-theologians, sent amongst our midst to point out the illogic of our Christian faith become un-Godlike. Un-image like. Un-natural.
 
Who stand up to tell us that God created by evolution (Darwin). That God does not condone violence, abuse, biogtry, idolatry, injustice (Richard Dawkins). That God says to love, not hate; to serve others, not ourselves (Rob Bell). That Jesus is not religion but a Person; not an institution but a relationship; not what we do but who we are and can become  (Peter Rollins). To each person there is an element of truth that they vibrate passionately for. And rather than seeing such passionates as anti-God or anti-Christianity, we should accept their passion, allow it to sink in, and then become redirected in our hearts and minds to the more subtle things of God we have missed in our religious zeal and fervor.
 
For does not sin even corrupt our faith making of it a religion, a platform, a belief, a life model? To these things God has brought to us contradictory ideas and epistemologies that need sorting out, deconstructing, and reconstructing. Which can give to us, God's people, His light and life into a human faith sped upwards and outwards, inwards and downwards. That illumines and breaks us down, helping to see our Creator God-Redeemer more truly for who He is, and wants, and does. This is the wonderful promise of God to never leave us nor forsake us. But to give to His children at all times the sustaining manna they need from heaven, and His reviving waters from the arid deserts surrounding us. Restoring us. Keeping us. Holding us to Himself, eternally, for all our days.
 
R.E. Slater
March 12, 2013