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

-----

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

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

America's New Evangelicals


What's New Is Old: 'America's New Evangelicals'
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/october/review-americas-new-evangelicals.html

Today's politically liberal evangelicals may not be as different as some imagine.

Review by Matthew Lee Anderson | posted 10/14/2011 09:07AM
book link

The 2008 election of Barack Obama reinvigorated an ongoing discussion within evangelicalism about the nature of its relationship to the political order. It is a discussion that will almost certainly receive a new infusion of energy during the 2012 election cycle. But analyses of evangelical captivity to politics and purported generational shifts in ideology have come close to reaching a saturation point, bringing evangelical introspection to the edge of exhaustion. Of the writing about evangelicals and politics, there is apparently no end.

Marcia Pally's America's New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good (Eerdmans) is one of the latest attempts to understand the direction of evangelicalism's political priorities. For Pally, the emergence of the "new evangelicals"—figures like Tony Campolo, Shane Claiborne, and David Gushee—reveals important shifts, in both substantive beliefs and habits of engagement. She sees this movement as "new" because its members embrace "beliefs and practices that have advanced religion, liberal democracy, and just economic distribution." She contrasts the new with the "old evangelicals" (though Pally does not call them that), whose political engagement she believes has been sullied by allegedly "prototheocratic yearnings" and an attachment to free-market capitalism. The new evangelicals, she argues, allow religious convictions to shape their political vision, but nevertheless "support pluralism, economic justice, and liberal democratic government." Whether the new evangelicals are championing ideals wholly different from their forebears, or simply imbuing them with different meanings, is not always clear. Pally's presumption, for instance, that "economic justice" is antithetical to free-market economics is astonishing, given the enormous debate over the question.

While Pally presents the "new evangelicals" as an antidote to perceived evangelical vices, her narrative is occasionally given to overstatement.

Take, for instance, those supposedly "prototheocratic yearnings." True, Pally's stance later softens into suggesting that evangelicals have "at times" attempted to "use the state to impose religious views on the nation." But even this skirts the boundaries of hyperbole. Unless Pally thinks that evangelical opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage are exclusively theological in nature—a highly debatable contention—she is left only with school prayer as an example of such attempts. Evangelical activism may have sectarian underpinnings, but evangelicals have shown a remarkable willingness to abide by the rules of liberal democracy in working—through legislatures, courts, and grassroots initiatives—to "impose" their views.

Not So New

Pally makes no attempt at any statistical survey, instead approaching her subject through blogs, newsletters, sermons, and other expressions of the "new evangelicalism." Transcripts of interviews with prominent figures like Richard Cizik and Joel Hunter punctuate her commentary, lending the reader a firsthand familiarity that is both interesting and illuminating.

Yet whether the new evangelicals are really new depends upon our understanding of what came before them. And unfortunately, Pally's understanding makes it difficult to discern what's actually new about the movement. For instance, she argues that the new evangelicals practice a "third way" of political engagement, avoiding the twin traps of theocratic ambition and privatized piety. They do this through "voluntarist associations" that "advocate for their positions through public education, lobbying, coalition building, and negotiation."

This "civil society activism" is a commendable approach, but couldn't Pally apply the same description to the Religious Right? Historically, this movement was propelled by a cluster of voluntary parachurch organizations—many of them avowedly non-sectarian in their approach—that worked to influence society by means of lobbying and public persuasion. Moreover, and somewhat ironically, traditional approaches to limited government have often been justified precisely because they leave room for the mediating institutions of civil society, rather than relying upon the coercive powers of the state. Because Pally conflates conservatism with what amounts to libertarian economics, she overlooks the possibility of a mutually reinforcing relationship between "civil society activism" and limited government principles.

What's more, Pally passes over any discussion of "compassionate conservatism," the more activist school of thought espoused by George W. Bush and cheered on by many fellow evangelicals. (Conservative commentator Fred Barnes famously re-labeled it "big government conservatism.") The advent of compassionate conservatism suggests that evangelicals, in their association with the Republican Party, have not, for good or ill, hewed inflexibly to a libertarian orthodoxy. Widespread evangelical support for the 2008 campaign of Mike Huckabee, who was (perhaps unfairly) spurned by mainstream Republicans for being too comfortable with government involvement, confirms this point.

Evangelical activism may have sectarian underpinnings, but evangelicals have shown a remarkable willingness to abide by the rules of liberal democracy.

Closer to the heart of the book, though, is Pally's suggestion that the new evangelicals are distinguished by their endorsement of "church-state separation and constitutionally based law." Here again Pally's lack of substantive argument about the "old evangelicals" makes it hard to discern where the differences actually lie. With respect to "church-state separation," Jon A. Shields demonstrates in The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right (2009) the great pains to which evangelicals have gone to present their views on abortion in non-sectarian terms. And as for endorsing the principle of "constitutionally based law," this does not preclude working, through constitutionally legitimate channels, to reform or undo laws deemed unjust. In this regard, evangelicals' abortion and same-sex marriage, both in the courtroom and at the ballot box, seem to exemplify the highest respect for constitutionally based law.

Keeping Vigilant

Pally's chapter on the new evangelicals' underlying beliefs departs noticeably from her generally dispassionate, scholarly approach. She quotes virtually no new evangelical activists or theologians, and instead develops Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder's concept of "revolutionary subordination," analyzing how Scripture understands Jesus as a political actor. It is an odd moment of normative political theology in the middle of a book that presents itself as examining the beliefs of others.

Strangeness aside, the chapter is excellent and very well balanced. Pally suggests that Christian political engagement should obey "positive law in all but extreme circumstances, defend its country under the extreme condition of invasion, and [spend] most of its time serving those within the church, the stranger, and the enemy." This is wise counsel, so far as it goes, but ought we simply to infer that new evangelicals would endorse Pally's principles?

The answer isn't clear. On the one hand, in presenting their underlying beliefs, Pally comes close to describing a consistent, unified framework out of which policy decisions might be made. But in presenting this belief system in her own voice, she leaves it unclear whether the new evangelicals understand and abide by their own framework. After all, Pally repeatedly underscores the issue-by-issue approach that often characterizes young evangelical politics. It can be difficult to discern whether new evangelical activism arises from a unified moral philosophy, or whether its piecemeal approach reflects a more pragmatic spirit.

Pally makes clear, though, why evangelicals will and must continue reflecting on their relationship with state authority. In a liberal society, marked by a crowded and contentious public square, an impulse toward introspection helps preserve a proper ordering of religious faith and political power. The new evangelicals certainly understand that such vigilance is a price worth paying for liberty. But so too, I suspect, do their counterparts of "old."


Matthew Lee Anderson is the author of Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (Bethany House). He blogs at MereOrtho doxy.com.

Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.




No comments:

Post a Comment