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

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The Future of Evangelicalism

The Great Emergence (of) Christianity: Changing the World
http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/The-Great-Emergence-of-Christianity-Changing-the-World.html

By Phyllis Tickle
posted on August 09, 2010
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Phyllis Tickle is a renowned author, editor, and lecturer. Once the academic dean for the Memphis College of Art, she became a trailblazer in the fields of Christian publishing and ministry, as a founding member of the Canterbury Roundtable and the founder of the Religion Department for Publishers Weekly. Winner of several of the most prestigious awards in the publishing world, and holder of two honorary doctorates, she has authored over two dozen books in American religion and spirituality, including a series on fixed-hour prayer and her recent book, The Great Emergence, documents the appearance and development of emerging forms of Christianity in the postmodern context.

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“Emergence Christianity” is changing the way we see politics, obedience, the kingdom of God, and even the Trinity. The Age of the Spirit has dawned.

No short piece of commentary can hope to speak with either credibility or utility about the future of Christianity globally. Even to speak of the future of Western Christianity in so attenuated a fashion as this is suspect; but at least one has a somewhat increased hope, if not of hitting the mark, then of coming a bit nearer to it.

Whether one chooses to speak of Western culture or first-world culture or, more accurately, of those parts of the world that practice Latin or Latinized Christianity, the truth is that the cultures and societies that are so denoted pass, about every half a millennium, through times of major upheaval. Every aspect of their common life, be it economic, political, intellectual, or sociological, undergoes massive re-structuring; and that storm of pervasive change always involves, as well, a re-structuring of the forms of religion(s) that hold hegemony at the time of shift. We are in such a time now.

Is There One Evangelicalism? (C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism, Part 3 On the Dire Need for the Imitation of Christ)

The upheaval or tsunami we are passing through in the 21st century is the Great Emergence; and just as the Great Reformation of 500 years ago gave us the rise of the nation-state, the birth of capitalism, the growth of the middle-class and, oh! by the way, Protestant Christianity, so the Great Emergence is giving us Thomas Friedman's flat world and the globalization of its cultures, the ‘mergonomics' of the world's economies, the non-nuclear and/or extended family as a norm, the ascendancy of information and technology as the basis of barter, and, oh! by the way, Emergence Christianity (not to mention emergence Judaism as well).

Like its most immediate sibling of Protestantism, Emergence Christianity is composed of many member parts. If Protestantism presents in real life as Baptists and Presbyterians and Lutherans and Methodists and Evangelicals, etc., so Emergence presents in real life as Emergings, Emergents, Missionals, Neo-monastics, Hyphenateds, Fresh Expressions, etc. And as was the case with Protestantism, so it is with Emergence. All the member-parts may be distinguishable one from another, but they all are held together and seen as belonging together, because they all share with one another a basic set of sensibilities, a similar world view or context, and a common mode or timbre of conversation. They all are (and know themselves to be) kindred member-parts of a new form of Christianity that is birthing now and here in the same way that Protestantism birthed from within Roman Catholicism 500 years ago.

Institutional Skepticism – Political, Social, Religious

When we set out, then, to discuss so opaque and laden an issue as the future of even just Western Christianity, we first must take care to engage without prejudice all the member-parts of the ecclesial and doctrinal mix. Given that, and because the Western Christianity of the right-here and the right-now is in the midst of so major a re-configuration, perhaps all we can responsibly do is name as predictive some two or three of the more deeply embedded characteristics of Emergence Christianity as it assumes its place beside Orthodoxy, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant Christianity and begins to react to, and interact with, them. [I think of emergent Christianity as a flavor or a character of these mainline denominations and not as its own denomination or sect – skinhead].

1. Whether one speaks of Emergence Christianity or of one of its member-parts, one is still referring to an entity that has been born out of the pervasive and abiding fear in our times of any institution, regardless of whether that institution is social or political or religious.

1a. When Dietrich Bonheoffer spoke, decades ago, about religion-less Christianity, he may have intended, as can be argued, something other than what is forming among us now, but that does not make him any the less prescient or his term any less applicable. Emergence Christianity, like every other part of Great Emergence society, is deeply persuaded that the institution -- any institution -- by its very nature must strive to preserve and further itself. It therefore follows that the institution -- any institution -- will always argue passionately and often monomaniacally that the greater good is best served by its own continuation at all costs.

1b. Emergence Christians, because they are dwellers in Emergence times, will argue, on the other hand, that it is the community that takes precedence, the gathered community out of which direction and order must come, the community in concert as the source of authority, except . . .

2.  . . . except that, even while sharing that general fear of institutions, some Emergence Christians fear as well (and will continue to fear) the tyranny of the group, the risk of error inherent in unfettered immediacy, the lack of economy patent in having constantly to re-invent all the courses of life.

3. Those who share these reservations and who wish to find some common ground between the suspect, self-perpetuating emphases of institutions and the vitality of the autonomous community will, by definition, be hybrids. As such, they can reasonably be expected to exert a considerable and perhaps aggressive influence on the question of just where authority does lie and/or is going to lie in the church of the next half-millennium. In scripture?

4. Then what is the nature of that authority? What are its exercises and what is the existential nature of its being? With the passing of Christendom, how far into political and civil affairs does that authority verge? And how far, even, into ecclesial ones? These are the questions that will occupy the next half-to-whole century of Latinized Christianity and that will, by the way, bring it into direct conflict with its non-Latin siblings.

Strong Focus on the Trinity, Especially the Holy Spirit

If one of the principal hallmarks of Emergence in general is a chariness about institutions, then just as surely an increasingly more Orthodox or eastern understanding of the Trinity is likewise a principal hallmark of Emergence Christianity in particular. That is to say that Emergence Christianity is far nearer to the position of a co-eternal, co-equal triune, indivisible Godhead than, in all probability, has been any other form of Western Christianity in a thousand or more years; and that shift will have enormous repercussions for the Church, including its validation of an increasing Pentecostal and charismatic form of praxis and belief. The Age of the Spirit has come, just as many of the mystics had promised it would. Authority will rest not only in scripture, as Luther and Protestantism had argued, but also in the intentions of the Spirit as they are revealed to, and discerned by, the devout in prayer and in congress with one another. It is a shift of historic proportions.

Living in the Tension of the Kingdom of Christ (the Church) As Here, But Not Fully

Perhaps the most dramatic change, however, is in the conceptualizations of "kingdom" that have entered the conversation with the coming of Emergence, changes in how "kingdom" itself is to be understood or envisioned. If God is a perichoresis that dances in us human beings and through us and with us, then the dance is not about us. It is about the Whole, about some mystery that is palpable but not subject to dissection or even to naming. It is not about any particular one of us as separate from, or independent of, any of the rest of us. It is all of us in aggregate, for none of us is in any other way than in aggregate. It is the dance, and we are both the dancers and the music.

Within this understanding, then, only radical obedience, like radical Trinitarianism, makes sense. To not lose all for the sake of this perichoresis is to be unworthy of it, just as we were told by Him 2,000 years ago. Nor is the kingdom some kind of top-down, political structure. Such, Emergence Christianity says, is indeed the false imaging that has strangled the faith and the faithful for long enough. No, the kingdom is a lacework of inter-connected and equi-connected nodes or pods, like a spider's web that vibrates when any one of its strands is touched . . . like the internet when any one of its sites makes contact with millions of other nodes, and reality is changed thereby. The kingdom is horizontal, not hierarchal. It is here, and it is now. Most certainly, it is not over there and later.

The Arising Formation of a New Christian Anthropology

Such a re-definition of the kingdom is a direct challenge to the established definitions of many Western Christians and communions. Moreover, because it is a self-aware and well-argued challenge, it will also be a provoking one that demands engagement from older communions within the larger body. Inevitably, of course, each one of those older communions will be changed to some greater or lesser extent by the very engagement itself. More to the point, however, at least in terms of the Latinized Church's near future, is the fact that shifts in understanding or belief about the Trinity and about the Kingdom both rest upon, and demand, a new anthropology. One of the ironies of Emergence, both civil and sacred, is that we have come into a time when we no longer know what a human being is. We can neither describe consciousness or its etiology nor even justify its ancient claim to being imago dei.

Descartes' famous Cogito ergo sum may have consoled 400 years of our recent cultural and religious history, but it is now jestingly referred to as "René's Folly" or the "Cartesian Error" for good reason. And knowing not who we are or how constructed, nor by what means organized, makes us more like unto Adam in the Garden wearing a fig leaf out of new-found modesty than Christians have been for many a century. It ultimately may be, then, this questing for a new anthropology that history will later say of us was our greatest burden and our greatest gift as the Church marches into yet another new millennium.

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