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, May 2, 2011

Theology & Church After Google 6/6

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2011/04/19/theology-the-church-after-google/

by Tripp Fuller
Apr 19th, 2011

Conclusions for the People of the Way

Theology after Google is guided by our present context: situation, audience, and social and cultural environment. It cares about the process, the effects, and the usefulness of theology. It is about Jesus, whom we call the Christ, but it is also irreducibly autobiographical. The new theologians write theology for the needs of the church today. For us this means: we write theology not just for the comfortable insiders within the churches, but for those who are slowly drifting away—and for those who have moved so far away that it’s hard for them to imagine being part of the traditional churches any longer at all. We write with their needs and concerns in mind; we write in language they can understand; and we compose arguments that pay attention to their plausibility structures, not just our own.

If we were to write a Wiki manifesto for theology after Google, it might read something like this (edits requested!): We find ourselves here, somehow, as followers of Jesus. That part seems to stick and to deepen the longer we live.

We’re not sure exactly how we got here; it’s almost like it happened to us. We call it grace. We find others around us who follow the same Teacher and who therefore struggle with many of the same questions and issues that we face. They help us understand ourselves and to remain faithful to our Guide. We call them church.

But what exactly do we believe? What must we say, and what should we not say (and do)? The quest to know is open-ended. It’s filled with uncertainties and indecisions, and it’s constantly evolving. That quest just is theology. It’s everything we think about and do. It’s reading the New York Times headlines online each morning when we awake. It’s the philosophy text that we read in a classroom or the intriguing idea about christology that we talk about with friends over a beer. It’s the ethical questions we struggle with. It’s our attempts to be involved in authentic forms of ministry and Christian community, and the questions we ask about whether those attempts are really faithful and how to make them better. It’s that recurring question, “What should I do with my life?”

I can already hear the question from the learned theologian who reads the Princeton Theological Review: "So is this approach evangelical or conservative?" Well, clearly it is a method that would work well for evangelicals, or at least for question-asking evangelicals, because it keeps attention focused on the classic Christian questions, which it calls the “core” questions. It also works well in mainline and progressive communities, because it allows people to voice their questions and concerns and to take a hand in formulating the answers to which they themselves are drawn.

But what I really want to answer is: That’s the wrong question! The native inhabitants of the Google age, Gen-Xers and Millennials, just aren’t so interested in the labels that defined the discourse for the previous generations. Your “-isms” simply don’t define the social and cultural spaces that they inhabit. Identities today are more complex, shifting, and uncertain. The implicit essentialism of “isms”-based thinking is foreign to them. So to insist that we define our theological frameworks in terms of preexisting sets of categories—say, exclusively in liberal/evangelical terms (which we know has been the sacred cow of American Christianity for decades), is both misleading and unproductive.

I noted earlier that theology after Google is intrinsically autobiographical. So here is my own take: I believe that the message of Jesus is as relevant and as urgent for today’s world as it has ever been. I also find that this message is more accessible in today’s context than it was, say, in the comfortable years of the Eisenhower era—years of growth, comfort, and clear self-identities. This is an age of uncertainly, complexity, and unprecedented change. Jesus was not a provider of comfortable answers. He was not a teacher of easy black-and-white distinctions. He was not a prophet who asked his followers to identify with their friends and to vilify the others.

In each of these regards, and in many more, the inhabitants of the Google age may be more attuned to Jesus’ message, way of thinking, and way of living, than were many previous ages. In a world increasingly dominated by scientism, capitalism, religious intolerance, and a sense of meaninglessness, this profound message of the kingdom of God is more powerful than ever before. Theology after Google is far more than merely a new church-growth movement, a new way to package and disseminate the old-style theology. It is instead a radically new way of doing theology, one which (we believe) opens up the power of Jesus’ message to today’s world in new and exciting ways.


Theology & Church After Google 5/6

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2011/04/19/theology-the-church-after-google/

by Tripp Fuller
April 19th, 2011

Theologians, Pastors, and Church Leaders in The Google Age

I first really grasped the idea of pastors as hosts in a conversation with Spencer Burke, and it has turned my understanding of Christian leadership upside down. Today, the leaders who influence our faith and action are those who convene (or moderate or enable) the conversations that change our life—or the activities that transform our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our God. It could be an older Christian who convenes discussions at a church, a house, or a pub. It could be Shane Claiborne leading an activity at The Simple Way on Potter Street in Philadelphia—perhaps gardening in the communal garden—that gives you a sense of community that you’ve rarely had but always longed for. It could be a website or a blogger that you frequently go to, where you read others’ responses and add your own thoughts. Christian leadership is about enabling significant community around the name of Jesus, wherever two or more are gathered in his name.

The new models of emerging leadership in emerging communities deserve a whole article just for themselves. These new leaders are those who discern; they see, state, and honor the spirituality within those they meet – both inside and outside the church. They are “cultural creatives,” able to hear and interpret the pulse of our age. They are scouts for discovering existing communities and hosts for the emergence of new communities. There are the bridgers of conversations. They are lovers of what the church has been and welcomers of what she is becoming.

Above all else, though, they remind me of a great hostess. She makes the guests comfortable; she anticipates their needs. She matches folks up and gets the conversations started, though she doesn’t need to place herself in the middle of each one. She leads by example, often by establishing an atmosphere or an ethos that fosters deep sharing. And, at her best, she transforms the lives of those whom she hosts. I cannot think of a better model for leadership in the church after Google.

Note that a whole new set of spiritual disciplines is implied by (and required for!) this new model of Christian leadership, including the spiritual disciplines of coming alongside (cf. Parcletos, the name for the Holy Spirit in John 14), listening, sitting with hard questions, and thinking (and living) “in the gray.”11 It is, in short, the spiritual discipline of Hermes: translating the language that nurtured us into the language of those around us. Note also that Hermes did his “ministry” not on Mt. Olympus but in the “secular” spaces of this world, far from the sacred halls.

Although many authors, especially in the emerging church movement, have developed the notion of pastor as host, almost no one has explored what it would mean for theologians to understand themselves as hosts. Here’s the idea: Traditionally, the theologian was the “keeper of the faith.” He (I use the pronoun advisedly) was responsible for doctrinal purity; it was his task to make sure that what folks got in sermons and Christian books was “the faith once given.” Of course, there were some interpretive issues that had to be worked out, and the faith had to be applied to the specific challenges of one’s own day and age. Yet this task was held primarily as the trust for a professional class within the church, the pastors and theologians.12

The theologian who wants to participate in and contribute to discussions about faith today has a very different set of job requirements. She certainly is not the lecturer who conveys traditional answers and then sends people off to the examination room. But nor is she expected first to listen patiently as the group does its exploring, and then to close the discussion with her pronouncements on what people should actually think about these questions. (Note, however, that this second role is a vast improvement on the first; would that we had more theologians even willing to go this far!) Instead, her most effective role is as a convener of and participant in the discussions.

It obviously requires some significant humbling to take up this new role and to carry it out with enthusiasm, with grace, and in an edifying way. I happen to think that that sort of humbling should lie at the very center of a Christ-shaped ministry. Call it the kenotic theological method, one shaped by and around the self-emptying Christological picture of Phil. 2:5-8. Note that many of us who pursue the kenotic theological method today, often with fear and trembling, do so not because we think all previous theologies were misguided and because we hope to remake Christianity in our own image. To the contrary! Many of us are convinced that the only way to rekindle interest in core theological questions, to enable the sort of discourse that will help people work their way to something like a Christian world view, is to foster the kind of open discourse that allows them to explore the questions themselves. As the old saying goes, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours; if it doesn’t, it never was.”

But don’t underestimate the human ability for self-deception! We often think that we are being fantastic listeners and open to the flow of the discussion, when in fact we are dominating the airwaves and holding the reins of the outcome tightly in our hands. It is essential to solicit regular, honest feedback about the role that one is actually playing. It is frequently humbling to experience what that feedback actually says. Yet the few times that one succeeds are immensely encouraging.13

In the book that Tripp Fuller and I just published, Transforming Christian Theology, we argue that theology is about attempting to answer the Seven Core Christian Questions. These questions have impressive-sounding names: the doctrine of God (theology proper), anthropology, soteriology, christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Theologians will recognize the source of these “core questions” in the first systematic theology of the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes theologici (1521). But they are really just the simple, recurring questions that every Christian wonders about as he or she struggles to be a Jesus disciple: Who is God? What are human beings? How are we separated from God, and how can that separation be overcome? Who is Jesus Christ? What or Who is the Spirit? What is the church, and what should it be doing? And what is our hope for the final future of the cosmos and humanity?

These questions do not have to be discussed in esoteric debates sprinkled liberally with Greek and German technical terms. The most humble attempts to answer these questions, in word and action, are as authentically theology as are the rarified debates within the Ivy Tower—indeed, they may be more authentic than what academic theologians do. Call it the Theology of the Widow’s Mite. What matters is that the broadest possible range of people is given the opportunity to reflect on, debate, and make up their minds about the questions that are fundamental to Christian self-understanding.

Some people who read the book will come down to the “left” of where I am as a theologian, others to the “right” of me. But those theologians after Google who follow the kenotic methodology don’t see it as their primary job description to make sure that everyone lands at precisely the same point of the theological spectrum that the theologian herself inhabits. The ongoing formation of Christian identity in a complex, multi-faceted world—and the individual’s decision about that identity—is for us the primary calling.

Can you pursue this kenotic methodology also in your written work? It is fairly obvious that popular books, articles, and especially blog posts can utilize this kenotic approach. (In fact, books and articles that do so are generally far more effective and far more widely read than those that follow the old model.) But even in academic writing it is possible to make one’s suggestions and proposals in a manner that is guided by the questions, rather than conveying only the certainty that one possesses the answers. I suspect that a survey of publications in theology over the last ten years would show that the most interesting and effective publications were those that worked out of intense and urgent questions rather than out of the guiding framework of a specific set of answers.

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Endnotes:

11 Still classically formulated by Paul Tillich in Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1957).

12 It still surprises me to see how little interest there is today in the classic creeds and their traditional interpretations. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that more liberal mainline churchgoers would not consider themselves bound by the past conclusions. But one finds less and less interest even among evangelical pastors and church members today. To teach the doctrinal loci with the expectation that the members of one’s class will simply write them down, memorize them, and begin believing them is unrealistic. (Not even seminary students are willing to do this!) But one does find an amazing number of people, many of them outside seminaries and churches, who are interested in the questions that the creeds addressed. They want to explore the traditional questions in the context of today’s issues, and they want to do it with the freedom to explore, question, reject, and reconstruct.

13 I remember once bumping into one of fourteen students in such an experimental group about a year after our class met. Her words were perhaps the most gratifying I have ever heard from a student: “Oh, weren’t you in my class last year?” The fact that she remembered me as a participant and not as the controlling agent was exactly the outcome we were hoping for.