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

Monday, April 18, 2011

We Believe in the Holy Spirit... Right?

By Kyle Roberts
April 11, 2011

The Holy Spirit is not an amorphous abstraction. He is active and embodied
in our efforts to transform ourselves and transform the world.

This was a long Minnesota winter. My snow-bound friends and I bemoaned the stubborn cold and the elusive thaw. We collectively longed for spring and for the warmth, the growth, and the new life it brings.

The renewal of life associated with spring reminds me of the activity of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is known in scripture and theological tradition as the life-giver, healer, and Perfector of creation. One of the "two hands of God" (Irenaeus), the Spirit draws, awakens, and breathes new life into creation and humanity.

In its original form, the Nicene Creed (325 A.D.) simply asserted, "we believe in the Holy Spirit." In 381 A.D., more was added: the Spirit is "the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father; who with the Father and Son together is worshipped and glorified." The Holy Spirit was understood to be fully divine, an equal "hypostasis" (person) with the Father and to the Son. Why did it take so long for the Church to articulate clearly and emphatically that the Spirit is fully divine and equally worthy of worship, prayer, and praise as the Father and the Son?

The reasons are several. The Father and the Son had "faces" (the Father figuratively, the Son literally in his incarnation), while the Spirit seemed faceless. Amorphous. It blows where it pleases. It refers and defers. It is effective but elusive. Its particularity as a person seemed difficult to grasp. And the biblical witness for the full divinity of the Spirit seemed less clear or emphatic than for the Father and Son. An influential Christian sect, known as the "Pneumatomachoi," or "spirit-fighters," argued just this point in their assertion that the Spirit is not fully God. This position did not carry the day; the prevailing, orthodox position was that the Bible manifests a progression of revelation, and that the Spirit's full divinity and personhood is a burgeoning idea—even in the New Testament. So on what basis were early Christians justified in articulating the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity?

Together with the biblical witness, it was partly the collective experience of the early Christians that fortified the belief in the divinity of the Spirit. The Spirit was experienced as Savior, healer, guide to truth, bringer of new life, restorer of harmony, and facilitator of unity. Wherever Christ and the Father were known in the Church, the Holy Spirit too was there, bringing the love and grace of God to bear on communal, liturgical, and individual life. Converts were consistently baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Conviction about the Spirit arose from a palpable sense that the Spirit, while instrumental in the creation of the universe and in the original animation of human life, continues to be active in its preservation and redemption. The Spirit brings life and salvation as human beings encounter and participate in the energeia, the divine energies of God.

Eventually, and with consensus, the Church determined that the Spirit, too, is a divine person (hypostasis). The Spirit brings new birth (Jn. 3:3-8); the Spirit empowers us to witness (Acts 1:8); the Spirit intercedes for us in prayer (Rom. 8:26); the Spirit can be grieved (Eph. 4:30); the Spirit guides us into truth (Jn. 16:13); and the Spirit will bring righteousness and justice to the "needy" and "poor of the earth" (Is. 11:4). Gregory of Nazianzus asserts, "it is the Spirit in whom we worship and in whom we pray." Our experience of the Spirit is our experience of God: Father, Son, and Spirit in economic union.

Although interest in the Holy Spirit has revived recently in churches and in academic theology, it may still be true that the Holy Spirit is the most neglected of the three persons of Trinity. This has been my experience in the evangelical Baptist tradition. Just as it took the early generations of the church some time to acknowledge the full divinity of the Spirit, so today there is a gap in our appreciation for and acknowledgement of the Spirit and its significance for Christian communities and individuals. This is not because we are not experiencing the Spirit. It's because, when it comes to the working of the Spirit, we may not know what to look for or how to recognize it. When we assume a dichotomy between the workings of the Spirit and the embodiment of concrete practices, we end up looking for the Spirit in all the wrong places.

For the most part, the early Christians' experience of the Spirit was a concrete, embodied experience that coincided with practices of the church and discipleship. Experience of the Spirit was eminently bodily, practical, and not only life-transforming but world-transforming as well. As David H. Jenson writes, the Spirit "claims our bodies and our prayers and makes them participants in the life given for the world" (The Lord and Giver of Life, pg 11). The Spirit grounds and renews concrete visions of hope in and among embodied life and in broken communities. The Spirit proclaimed by the prophets and encountered at Pentecost calls forth justice for the oppressed, salvation for the hopeless, and unity in the Church.

If the activity of the Spirit is not "spiritual" (in the Gnostic sense of invisible, immaterial, and disembodied), then we are experiencing the Spirit whenever we are working along with God and seeking his Kingdom and righteousness. The work of the Spirit is everywhere present: in soup kitchens, hospitals, schools, community centers, mission and social work and, of course, in the Church itself.

The Spirit creates a unity in diversity, a presence of the new and different, a transformation of our selves in community, a re-direction of mission and conviction. The fruits of the Spirit include love, joy, peace, and faithfulness, but they also result in communities of people and coalitions of churches who are satisfied with nothing less than righteousness and justice and who prophetically advocate for the oppressed and for the "least of these." In short, the work of the Spirit leads to God-intoxicated, kingdom-inspired people.

Trinitarian theology tells us that where any one of the three persons is working, they all are. So where the Spirit is, there is Jesus, and where Jesus is, there is the Father. There are good reasons to enrich our God-language and to long for, in a focused way, the purifying, healing, and reconciling power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, our churches, and our work on behalf of the world. If we are not experiencing the Spirit in manifest and transformational ways, neither are we are experiencing the transforming presence of Jesus, the Father, or of that which Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

Winter is over. Spring has come. May we also, and with far greater significance, witness a fresh work of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

We proclaim in our creed, "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life . . ." And we should ask ourselves: Do we really?

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Lead Faculty of Christian Thought, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN). He researches and writes on issues related to the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture.

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