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

Thursday, July 14, 2011

RE Slater - The Lost Sight of Transcendence


Narcissus in the Garden of Malcontent
Too often we get caught up in the machinery of living, of working, of studying, and a thousand other big and small things that would keep us from seeing the beauty of life that God has given us each day we are alive. Each moment we experience. Each breath that we take. There are so many seeming constraints and obstacles, so many problems to solve, so much ugliness that is seen, read, or heard each and every day. Each callously sucking the very breath of God out of the beauty he has placed all around us. Causing us to simply stop looking, or feeling, or even wishing to find, a spiritual transcendency or dimension to the days that blur by, one-after-another, in dizzying finality and array.

 
Narcissus in the Garden of Malcontent
http://www.artprize.org/artists/public-profile/18923
I am reminded of all the things that we have been given and must see again with renewed eyes and hearts and senses that would deeply intoxicate us if we were but to focus on God again. And in so many ways this has become true when discovering God through the Scriptures, through his Son Jesus, even the people and events that God has placed upon our paths that would perhaps cause us to stop and look and feel again.

For when this happens we slowly begin to understand just how much of our world God has renewed for us - as if we are seeing it for the very first time all over again! Whether through prayer and devotions, fellowship with friends, communion with fellow believers. A simple walk down the street or through a park. A small discussion with a stranger. Or an activity we play or work at. In many ways this very web blog is trying to recapture the essence of God through the lives of others who at one time or another had felt that they too had been robbed of the spirituality of life. The essence and provocation of life.

God will do that with us when we let him. He'll give us new eyes to see, new ears to hear, new hearts to feel the things he feels. New senses to more fully participate within his creation so that we are no longer hardened to all the hatreds and harms and cries that we endure each day in a world spinning from morning to evening, day after empty day, like a mad carousel refusing to give up its whirling dervish.

For the Spirit of the Lord has come to anoint us with God's holy oils of redemption, of transformation, of enlightenment and revelation, before the holy days of the divine. Receive these deeply, with thanksgiving. Breath in their elixirs and let them stir our hearts but for a moment or two, so that we may look around again and learn to see God's world as he sees it - with hope and love and faith. And then pass it on in as many ways as it can be passed on to all those around us!

RE Slater
July 14, 2011

More on Corey Van Duinen:
The Lost Sight of Transcendence



"Art does not reproduce the visible,
but makes visible the invisible"




Meadowlands

I had been happy in my ignorance and in my service
But am grown old and no longer happy as I once was
birthed so long ago upon those careless days of froth and wonder.

The burdens of the day have spent me
and have caused my steps to seek again the favor of the sun
that once shone so warm, so brightly, across springtime meadows fair.

Flashing day's dews of a wiser, more carefree youth
amid dreamscapes held fast glistening solitary marvels
nestled snugly within the craggy wildernesses of heaven’s grand peace.

For it was there in the frothy streams of discovery and conscience I wandered
considering man and beast, wind and muse, upon day's hand
knowing not whither purpose or end each was sent by the warming rays.

Then whilst tending to many gardens did the waning day grow long and cold
leaving its earlier peace but a foundling memory warm and alive
somberly promising all paths forever blessed, whither they led, each fulsome soul.

R.E. Slater
December 21, 2011