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

Friday, July 1, 2011

Deconstructing the Church

paul’s dislocated mirror

by george elerick (theloverevolution)
posted June 13, 2011

you’re are many members, but one body. – Paul

(soma) – body (which casts a shadow as distinguished from the shadow itself )

(heis) – but one (universal)

(melos) – parts, members (neutered)

In Lacan’s presentation of the mirror stage, the infant experiences his or her body as uncoordinated, vulnerable, and insufficient. This sense of frustration with physical limitations propels the infant toward identification with the (apparently) unified and stable imago of the mirror reflection or of the caregiver.

“The propositional exactitude of a certain absence”
the whole notion of church predominantly stems from the notion that we all have a participatory role to play. we each have something to both give and gain. something to leave and something to take. in the west, the idea of church is quite heavily driven by identity. for example, some go to charismatic gatherings because this expression seems to fit for them ideologically. others visit in small houses with candles and guitars because they crave intimacy with the divine.

neither one excludes the other, although the manner in which we guard and defend each expression would make others think so. we defend our understanding and ideas over that which might be beneficial to each other as whole. we would rather demonstrate our allegiance to the belief in something that projects itself to be a community at the risk of the greater community.

the jungian notion of the shadow claims that “the shadow or “shadow aspect” is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts.”* by over-asserting our individualism not only do we deny the idea of what it means to be the body of christ, we deny the very weaknesses we are meant to claim about ourselves. we hide our weaknesses when we seek the ‘perfect’ church. but why do we seek the perfect church if it does not exist? what drives us to seek out the whole self when in reality we are disjointed? we are plural. i think it is in the mis-recongnition of wholeness where the church has been lost for centuries.

wholeness is plurality.

wholeness is disjointed. it is not that one is different from the other or even that one needs the other. the ancient sage wisdom of the ying and the yang does not stand in true form here because individuality is not the opposite of the body, individuality is the very body itself. but when we embrace one over the other we become the ‘body’ we were never meant to be. notice the word paul uses for body and how it is defined. it is a shadow created by something that is not itself. the shadow is the other. the shadow is the defining factor, or in the case lacan’s mirror.
Kat1the body is the issue here. the body is the problem not the goal. the body isn’t represented by wholeness, the body hides the reality of dislocation. the body creates another shadow that is not the true nature of what we now call church. the body, remember, is not wholeness it is the facade of wholeness. it is the promise of something that can never come, not because it is impossible, but because as we earlier discovered it is in our disjointedness that we are already whole.

also notice that paul uses a neutered term here when he refers to parts or members. neutered. no gender. christ is a genderless entity. jesus was male. its important to remember in the ancient world that the term christ was used quite widely and wasn't as scarce as we would like to think. many would have used it. jesus’ last name was not christ. it was a title. a description. but the description does not define the gender of the title. christ the title held itself as a genderless descriptor.

this notion flies in the very face of fundamentalist paradigms that claim certain rules either about gender or sexuality. those that spend their time searching through libraries creating perverse theology centered around injunctions seek to engender more meaning to the christ descriptor than itself claims to be aligned with. to be a part of the genderless community is to claim freedom for all of those who might lie within the undefined cracks. i am very hesistant to use the postmodern term ‘other’ here because that would assume that this other resides outside of this disjointed body we claim as whole. and if it is ‘whole’ then it also includes everybody.

notice the next term paul uses here. the word for one. it’s universal. not specific. not tribal. it applies to the whole of not just the audience who would have heard/read this letter, but because of the circulated nature of such a letter it would have included a variegated number of listeners. this ‘specific universality’ i claim is a microcosm for the world in its entirety. to be the church is to include responsibility for each other, including ecosystems, animals, economies, beliefs and etc. but this goes beyond taking care of the poor and other social justice practices, sometimes these practices are the very things keeping us from fully embracing every one that we might not be comfortable with.

i think the redemption of the church lies in: (1) eradicating its current master signifiers and (2) redefining them. for most there are certain ideas that define the church, or communities and what it is centered around and what makes them tick. i think these are all the wrong questions. we need to push them beyond them all and began looking at other possibilities – in the end, the full eradication of any master-signifier (the word/idea that gives ultimate (whole) meaning to ideas) – (ex: the church is meant to be ‘perfect’) should be the goal. for me this is why the death and resurrection is so important. it is the cycle/direction that the church, ideology and even life is meant to take.

the church cannot be self-referential. otherwise it becomes valued only through itself. it must point to a reality beyond itself. this is the ultimate weakness of any master-signifier it can only end in and of itself. the church for centuries has only led to itself. this is why there is an aggressive exclusive kernel that still remains yet attractive even within the rhetoric of the new movements within. because those within it have become institutionalized no matter how much structure they might kick against. to redeem the church is to redeem the world. i think this is why jesus spent so much time talking/critiquing/praying for the church because once it got itself sorted out, the world (which according to paul is the church) would by relationship itself be sorted out.


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