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

Thursday, October 13, 2011

A Leap of Truth, Part 8: Requiring Certainty

 
August 31, 2011

This week we feature the next clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

As Christians, we live by faith. Faith isn’t fanciful or ungrounded; rather the Bible describes it as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb 11:1). The purpose of today’s film clip is not to call into question our confidence in the revelation of Scripture, but to remind us of the importance of recognizing our biases and limitations. We need not live in fear that the Gospel will erode or we will slide into faithless liberalism if we ask questions. Nor should we hang our faith on the Bible somehow being scientifically validated.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.


A Leap of Truth - Requiring Certainty


Click link above to view video


Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “In our contemporary society, people want black and white answers. They want absolute certainty about things. Fundamentalisms, whether the fundamentalism of atheism or fundamentalism of creationism, does offer you the prospect—I think it is a false prospect—of certainty on those terms.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “And you don’t handle ambiguity very well; you need crystal clarity on things. That invites a hyper-literalist mentality that I think has been sort of a partner of Protestant Christianity, particularly in the west in America.

Rabbi Steve Cohen: “The impulse to try to reduce the Scripture to a single meaning comes out of a discomfort with complexity.”

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “Boiling complexity down to something we can hold on to—we by default, I think, do this unconsciously. We can’t just have everything being chaotic and complex. We have to generalize and bring things down, and I think sometimes that what we fail to recognize is that we have done that…we have generalized from the complex to get something that we can then hold on to, and then we think that that is an absolute —‘it is that way; it has to be that way’—not recognizing that we have generalized to bring it down to that way.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “We want this sense of coherence where our lives make some sense and we are all after that in different kinds of ways, and we use our faith sometimes to make those things happen.”

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “It leads to the assumptions that everyone thinks this way, and there are these simple answers to things, and we have always thought this way, and any thought that might move away or question some of those things, you know, we can tag it as liberal or tag it as atheistic. It kind of sets up a culture of warfare, if you will.”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “That sort of fundamentalism is a very brittle position—the slightest crack and the whole thing shatters."

Dr. Ard Louis: “Really what happens is that people have fear. They are afraid that if they let go of this really tight way of looking at things, then the only alternative is going to be irrationality and lack of control, but that is not true. I think that actually you can let go of this really tight hold, and step forward into richer things, and think about things, and the alternative isn’t just quicksand where you disappear.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Christian gospel does want to give us a sense of confidence in the truth, and that is a very legitimate yearning and desire. But, the earliest Christian writers have always linked that with the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is ultimately a faith statement—it is a truth bound to belief, believing that Jesus rose from the dead—rather than from a scientific description of a certain reality that we can objectify. Then, that becomes not a matter of faith and commitment in truth, but of certainty.”

Rabbi Steve Cohen: “Certainty is where we end up when we lose faith because we are too scared of what we think we know being wrong, and to me, that is the ultimate, that is death. The people here get sick of me saying this, but you haven’t heard me say it so I will say it again, but I say over and over again that I will always prefer a good question to a good answer because a good answer stops the conversation, but a good question gets us talking— that, to me, is a stance of faith.”






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