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

Friday, April 1, 2011

McKnight - A Critique of Love Wins 1

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/04/01/exploring-love-wins-1/

Exploring Love Wins 1
Scot McKnight
April 1, 2011
Filed under: Universalism

I will begin this series on Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, with a prayer. I am asking that you pause quietly and slow down enough to pray this prayer as the way to approach this entire series:

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing:
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift,
which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue,
without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.
Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever. Amen.†

Our goal is not to win; our goal is not to classify Rob Bell; our goal is not see who is the most faithful; our goal is not to say who has the best review; our goal is not to debate other reviews. Our goal is to explore together the Bible’s teaching and the themes of this book by using Rob Bell’s book — and as we explore these themes to come to reasonable conclusions about what we are to believe. [If you'd like to spread the word about this conversation, please tweet it or FB share it above.]

Universalism and pluralism are perhaps the biggest challenges to the church’s traditional theology today. I did not say universalism and pluralism are “threats,” though one could say it that way. I say “challenges” because I am convinced many in our churches are at the least easy-going inclusivists and many are somehow confident universalists (or almost that). If you are not hearing this issue in your church it is probably because the environment is not safe enough to probe the question in public. Rob Bell is hearing this message loud and clear. I’m glad he’s provoking people to think about it.

We will meet this challenge to the historic, orthodox belief of the church, not by pounding the pulpit of exclusivism, which will confirm the convinced but mute the voices of those who really do have questions. We can rise to the challenge by entering into the reality of the problems and by proposing fresh, creative, biblical and theological resolutions that compel the church to think clearly about the magnitude of its claims — that salvation is found in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ alone. What C.S. Lewis did in his generation with The Problem of Pain, and then later with A Grief Observed, as well as with The Great Divorce, needs to be done in our generation. I’m neither suggesting that Rob Bell is on par with Lewis nor that Love Wins is that book. What I am saying is that the issues emerging from this universalistic challenge to the church are vital because there is no book that meets the challenge. Love Wins puts the question on the table.

Are you willing to open up to the questions he will ask in this book? Are his questions, some of them that broach universalism and second chances and God’s expansive love, viable and safe in your church?

This series will explore what Rob Bell says in his book, and it will riff off of what Rob says. Don’t expect blow by blow arguments. In some ways I want to take up the challenge myself. In other cases I will probe into Rob’s arguments and disagree with them. Sometimes I will agree with him.

First, Rob Bell says Jesus’s story “is first and foremost about the love of God for every single one of us” (vii). This God-loves-us story has been hijacked, he says, by a “growing number of us” and he says there are “millions of us.” The hijacked version of the story is that a “select few Christians will spend forever in … heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better” (viii). This hijacked story says it is a “central truth” and Bell says this story is “misguided and toxic.”

Serious questions: In your church’s teaching, will be most people be saved? many? some? few? Is your church one in which most or some or few will be saved? Or is your church one that is agnostic about this question? These are the questions that haunt this book and these are the questions that many are asking, or want to ask but are afraid to ask. I am asking you to weigh in on this one.

I can put it this way: In light of how the gospel is preached in your church, and assuming 95% [I don't of course know but let's say that number is right] North Koreans have never heard the gospel, what percent of North Koreans will spend forever with God? Maybe this kind of question makes you feel uncomfortable, but it’s one we have to face. That is one of the deepest concerns in Rob Bell’s book. It’s time to be honest about what we think. The gospel claim is that salvation is found in Christ alone (Acts 4:12). What about those who have not heard? Where do you stand?

Do you ever ask what kind of image of God is conveyed if most humans will be excluded from the good presence of God?

Second, Rob says lots of people have questions about the Jesus-ness [my word] of this hijacked story. And they want to come to Jesus and to the Bible and to the Christian tradition and ask questions about that hijacked story. “There is no question,” Rob claims, “that Jesus cannot handle, no discussion too volatile, no issue too dangerous” (x).

Third, in order to be complete in my sketch, Rob says what he teaches in this book … that “nothing in this book hasn’t been taught, suggested, or celebrated by many before me” and he connects his own approach as part of “the historic, orthodox Christian faith.”

I’ve got questions here because I don’t know who is defining “orthodox” … there’s an entire history about the questions about the afterlife — who will be there, how to get in and what keeps you out — that involves complex theological problems and to say what Rob says requires some careful nuancing of that history and those issues. But notice his words: “taught, suggested, or celebrated.” That word “suggested” is loose enough that I’d say what he teaches in this book has been suggested, but that’s not the same as the “historic, orthodox Christian faith.” Suggestions and faith are not the same.

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