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 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

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation: In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come


"I hear today for the first, the river in the tree." - Poet Emily Dickinson

In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come

I am beginning a new section of inquiry which will be titled loosely under the themes of "pluralism, tolerance, and accommodation" and will intentionally cover the intersections of religious belief as it touches upon personal comportment and sociological behaviors and groupings. Usually this experience has resulted in the death, genocide, and enslavement of major minority people-groups as evidenced by ethnic Jews in Europe and Russia, the American Indians in America, the Russians, Chinese and SE Asian peoples under Communistic rule, ethnic African tribes in despotic African governments, the Indian cultures of Central and South America, and sadly, this list may go on and on in historical review. And yet these are the more recent historical occurrences either witnessed in our lifetimes or recently occurring in the near past resulting in dominating sociological cultures that have organized their societies around their own dominant ethics, laws and self-identities.



Curiously, one of the most recent major cultural clashes we are witnessing is that of Western civilizations adjusting and accommodating non-Western Islamic societies in a series of regional wars and conflicts, legal re-positionings and decrees, cultural adoptions and recognition. Each is separately stubborn in their own beliefs, religions, idealisms, goals and duties, while reluctantly recognizing the pluses and minuses of the other's systems and politics, economies and structures, strengths and weaknesses.

Positively, some assimilation and accommodation has begun to occur but not enough, and most probably never will, because the distinctions between both cultures are so wide and deep. Which presents the perplexing paradox to each culture as to how to co-exist one with the other in a non-interfering, "peaceable" stand-off while attempting to recognize the rights and liberties, or non-rights and non-liberties, of each culture's dominant belief systems. One side professes (however poorly) personal democratic liberties and freedoms, will the other professes (from this Westener's viewpoint, I admit) a more rigorous application of enforced religious law upon its masses creating sociological caste systems, poverty and gender-based personal inequalities under a dominating sectarian body administrating strict sectarian rule.


Consequently we have an uneasy tolerance between one culture with the other with the latter being more easily recognized by socialistic governments than by their democratic counterparts except for the alienating religious overtones that separates Islamic governments from usurping communistic regimes. Previously, Christian liberation theologies have been adopted by unempowered, undeserved, neglected, abused and misused, impoverished minorities to address many of the ills of majority rule, whether black vs. white in America and elsewhere, or ruling South American regimes over their less-empowered Catholic masses. But this biblical theme or principal does not apply to the current conversation between Christian and Islamic groups within their separate religious spheres of influence, each being the dominating and empowering people group within their own societies and from differing religious foundations.

Furthermore, religiously tolerant governments that are built upon the ideals of ethnic, cultural and gender equality (to name a few) can only be at best agnostic in their rulings, laws and ethics, and will require of its citizenry an "agnosticism" on their own part, so that, (i) a dissimilar minority group's religious beliefs and ethics are not denied, and, (ii) the majority group learns to welcome and not to alienate competing (or adoptive, or assimilated) newer religious and ethnic groups into their more tolerant and pluralistic forms of society. Usually these more urbane societies are organized around the centralizing themes of equality, liberty, freedom after being severely suppressed and discriminated against themselves and having experienced poverty, enslavement, loss of freedoms, rights, and hopelessness. Which, in the case of America, was true of many of its adoptive citizenry when immigrating from British colonial Europe (Scotland, Ireland, Wales); the Scandinavian countries; then Italy, Australia, Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe (WW1,2); the SE Asian countries of China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia under communism; the Mid-East Arabic countries from its turmoil and unrest; the Bosnians fleeing the deadly Serbian massacres of their former country in Yugoslavia; the suppressive and oppressive states of Mexico and Central America; and a plethora of displaced African tribes seeking refuge from gross feudalism and rampant tyranny. Each immigrating people group has brought its own tales of horror and woe, and each hunger for peace and freedom from oppression, violence, disharmony, hate and injustices.

In America we call this form of governmental agnosticism the "separation of Church and State" which is a poor descriptor to employ but a necessary and true conveyance of what must be a factual truth. To use the term "agnosticism" is not to imply the denial of our religious heritage so much as to imply that its citizenry expand their understanding of their religious heritage to cover all forms of faiths and beliefs within our Americanized system of juris prudence. Perhaps a better term can be found, but for the purposes of this document it is a good term to use describing the "neutrality" and "abeyance of suppressing indoctrinations" by a ruling majority people group.



And with every reception of a newer people group to the shores of democracy (regardless of country) comes the reciprocating power of dissolution of governance upon that country or fiefdom that is losing its fleeing masses; thus compounding that country's further loss and destabilization of power by want of exodus upon its masses still imprisoned within their own country. This has recently been witnessed in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The results can be seen plain enough in formerly Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan which have necessarily "democratized" their cultural institutions and adopted state policies of tolerance, freedom and liberty. And in the overthrows of dictatorships and unrest in countries without governing principles of democracy like Russia, China and the Middle East.

All this has been said to state that it is my conviction that a democracy cannot thoroughly succeed without having an "enjoined" (accepted, wanted, scrutinized) Christian foundation. And though non-Christian democracies may attempt this form of rule by its masses by copying varying forms of capitalism, it will ultimately fail (just as American governance can fail) should its citizenry no longer continue to assimilate and expand their Christian understanding of life, liberty and freedom gained from the Scriptures and through Christ. Consequently, democracies will always be faced with the fact of spiraling towards some form of socialism or towards dissolution and anarchy should they drift from the centralizing cornerstones found in Christianity. But to the degree that they do accomplish this through mass acceptance and inward social re-structuring then will those people groups succeed in the task of re-discovering, promoting and maintaining liberty for all peoples of all faiths, beliefs, cultures and heritages.

The basis for my assumption is that only in Christ, his cross and his resurrection, can be found the spiritual power for love and understanding, peace and tolerance, that can overrule our wicked and sinful hearts so soon to violence and destruction of others human beings rights and prerogatives. Moreover, it is in the hope and reality of God's coming kingdom and through the power of Christ's resurrection that any of this may be true and possible. And it is uniquely for us as Westernized Christians to learn to disseminate the Gospel of Christ to all the realms and nations of the world in a missiology that does not enforce westernization, nor promote westernizing culture, because the gospel belongs to every man, to every woman, and to every culture as much as it has belong to our own personal heritages. It must be discovered and adopted by another's inasmuch as it must be de-linked from our own cultural experiences. In Carl Raschke's words, "Christianity has no culture [to] itself but belongs to all cultures” (see GloboChrist review further below in this same section).


And though I could despair that this task might overwhelm the Christian church in schisms and fear, it is my hope that in this era of postmodernity - as evidenced by the newly arisen branch of "emergent" Christian churches - that it might be accomplished as we release our prejudices and biases, our hatreds and unloving acts and "steel ourselves" to the task of presenting Christ to the nations, his atonement, his love, his kingdom that will reach beyond all of men's kingdoms, to that of God's itself. Whose kingdom may be found enriched by all the historical diversity and pluralism that is found in man's life-and-death histories on this planet we call earth, which will someday be called a "New Earth" located in a "New Heavens" under God's Trinitarian and Holy rule of love and justice. Thus it can be said that the Kingdom of God is trans-formative, trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-temporal, making it an "eternal" kingdom. That, in Christ himself, has come the Savior of the world to live with us - his lost humanity and creation - to be re-claimed and resurrected by his holy personage, will and love.

It is to this rule that we wish to submit and to non-other as we try to interpolate God's will and holy law of love and re-create an equitable earthly rule for all mankind by whatever democratic or non-democratic governance that is operative. For the kingdoms of man must someday bow all knees, heads and hearts to a grander rulership, a more exquisite lordship, to that of our Creator God, our Sovereign, Our Lord and Savior, Jesus. It is to his reign of love that we must embrace and commit ourselves to with a servant's heart of humility, willful obedience and submission in a selfless, sacrificial service that only God's love can demand.

RE Slater
May 10, 2011