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 from 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

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Do Christians Exist?

How do we think of ourselves when we think of our Christianity and of ourselves as Christians? What does this thought or label imply to us? Does it fill us with humilty and brokenness? With contradiction and the understanding that it is only in Christ that we find our new identification? That without his filling, his presence, his being we are but unredeemed, sinful, empty vessels of the old humanity we had no desire to leave behind until we met Jesus. That Jesus has become our new humanity, who fills us with his divine essence, his love, mercy, grace, hope and peace. Who would destroy all of our sinful humanity, our hate and jealousies, wickedness and lies, selfishness and lusts. Even death itself. For the divine is now near through the person of the Christ and it is his resurrected life that fills us with newness and hope and re-definition.

skinhead

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http://www.emergentvillage.com/weblog/do-christians-exist

By George Elerick
April 12, 2011

Watch - "Why Christians Don’t Exist" – George Elerick from Bubble Up TV on Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/22002741

cogito, ergo sum’ ubi cogito, ibi non sum – Lacan

once you label me, you negate me – Kierkegaard

There is no such thing as Christian.

Let me explain. Philosopher Rene Descartes once posited the renowned phrase, “I think therefore I am”, and more recently Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reformed this philosophy by adding that "Where I think 'I think, therefore I am', that is where I am not." Whatever is the representation of something else is negation of that very reality. Theology tends to be the fantasy behind our representations of God, so the fantasy claims to be true, all the while is still itself, nothing more than a fantasmagorical spectre of reality.

Essentially what we think isn’t who we are, rather what we think is itself an element of fantasy and our beliefs are framed by this fantasy rather than our beliefs framing the fantasy itself. Some Christians define themselves by certain criteria of belief or doctrinal adherence, but this itself is not a Christian. Lacan takes this notion a step further and proclaims that our alliance to what is represented by our thoughts & definitions are not true about ourselves.

The very claim that we are any type of Christian is the negation of that very claim.

The reality is that the only way to discover Christianity is to dismantle the perverse historical narrative we have adopted as the very framework for our identity. The very idea of ‘Christian’ must itself come to a place ideological atheism to re-discover itself in light of its inherent negation.

Christianity isn’t meant to fulfill us, it’s meant to remind us of our lack, [that] the thing we desire isn’t fullness. There is tendency to define fullness in some sort of heavenly end or utopian socialist ideal where everyone will get along and we will forget the sins behind us.

Christianity is meant to scandalize our very existence. It’s meant to destroy the very presumptious foundations of our identities. This is the very place of discovery we see Jacob come to when he wrestles with the Angel.

The Angel represents God, the transcendental signifier, and it is only when Jacob chooses to wrestle with a representation of the divine that he begins to find who he himself is meant to be. Christianity isn't meant to be a faith of acceptance, but a religion of ideological denial and self-nihilism. When I use the word ‘I’ I am aligning a part of myself with the concept I choose to follow such a claim. For example, when I claim ‘I believe that the sky is blue’ – I am making an objective statement about something I believe in.

‘I’ then am in two places, ‘I’ as a subjective (experiential) person am making a objective truth claim. These are the very things we must wrestle with when encountering a representation of God. We must not merely wrestle with the theology of God, but with the very representations that these theologies claim, and even at times, we must be willing to come to a point of nihilistic optimism, which I claim is the hope that something much more positive will eventually take the place of the theological idea we gave up. Jacob discovers this, when he in a moment of full de-constitution, encounters another reality where Israel is his new identity and Jacob is no more. Being a Christian is this very encounter suspended in infinite animation. The core of Christianity and the representations within must die so resurrection can embody itself with those kernels and allow for new transformation.

It is not we who embody Christ but rather Christ who embodies up.

It is not that we embody truth but rather truth that embodies. It is not that the we exist in the saviour but rather the saviour exists in all. Exampel: Paul and the new humanity: Jacob is attempting to embody something he is not; he is claiming something not true about himself and the divine injunction is to wrestle with this. It is in the grappling that we began to discover the inherent emergence of our identity already present in us. To be a Christian is to allow the Christ element to emerge from a place of nowhere.

Paul expands this dichotomy of embodiment by explaining that the second Adam is Christ (Romans 5:12-6:5). The name Adam is of Hebrew origin which is fundamentally defined as the plural of mankind, or modernised humanity. Paul is doing something revolutionary and inclusive here, he is making the assertion that Christ is embodied in humanity. That the whole of humanity already is embodied with the attributes of Christ. Jesus claims the similar idea when he utters the words, ‘The Kingdom of God is near’, the Hebrew word for near means within or inside. Jesus doesn’t presume that people have to earn this or even attempt to label themselves something else, he simply assumes that the Christ element is already within them. This is why the Christ element is so revolutionary because it is something already true of humanity: past, present and future.

George Elerick is an author and speaker. Find more about him at theloverevolution.org.uk



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