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, April 9, 2012

R.E. Slater - Resurrection: Becoming Overwhelmed by God, Part 1

I am always moved by the simply video below of a young woman's first reactions to hearing sound for the first time. First in hearing her voice. Then her cries. And then her laughter. Helplessly I want to cry with her, then laugh with her, as tears of joy wash over her as she realizes she can hear and begins to move through the barrier of deafness that once had been her daily companion. But no longer. As she recognizes the strange noise that we know as sound for the first time in her life.

And I cannot help but think how we have experienced the same strong reactions when discovering God's love for us for the first time. When understanding the meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection - what we call the atonement of God - for our sins. When learning that death had been our daily companion until Jesus came and removed its presence from us. Now death can no longer cling to us nor keep us in its continual broken estate separated from God our Maker who has become our glorious Redeemer.

For in our brokenness, and by our sins, has the mystery of God's love become powerfully present in us to reveal His eternal love and purposes for our lives. Purposes that would lead us to realize for the first time that God is there. That He has always loved us. Always been present. Always moved in our lives to bring us back to Himself. That we have always eternally mattered to Him. That He has moved heaven and earth to make us one with Himself. To redeem us. To make us sons and daughters of His new creation. No matter the sin. No matter the wrongs committed in this life. No matter the crimes. All may be redeemed from brokenness and sin.

And in those first, early experiences (or embraces) of God to our minds and hearts and soul, this very powerful revelation of God's presence at work in our lives overwhelms us with a sublimity no less different than we see here present with this young woman hearing sound for the first time. Our only response can be one of thanksgiving. Relief. Gratitude. And in this case, repentance, from our former selves, wrongs and harms, that we have committed against God's grace and mercy.

But these early experiences are never the first, nor the last experiences, we will have of God. God's presence is a continual reality for every human. A presence presaging the call to repentance and salvation for those who have stubbornly refused God in their lives to their harm and destruction. Who cling to sin and death and die every day to those forces of eternal lament and woe. But for those who obey God's call to salvation, the continuing presence of God portends the daily reality of what it means to become participants in God's renewal of the earth, of society, and of even ourselves. In a lifetime of revelatory awakenings (or awareness) we, as the children of God, are renewed by the Spirit of God in ways that will make our faith real. Living. Different. "How so?" you may ask.... Your faith will be different each day. Different each Easter season. Different each Christmas season. Each Sunday worship our faith in God will grow and change us into His image. Each fellowship gathering it will move us. Each work of service, or ministry, or mission for God, will see our faith redeem us. Recreate us. Renew us. Through every act of kindness. Every act of thoughtfulness. Forgiveness. Mercy.

This living faith in God will be present in every family event, in every friendship, re-creating solidarity, restoration, renewal in us, through us, and into everyone around us. In every way God will recreate our lives as receptors - and transmitters - of His love, and mercy, and grace. We who have found forgiveness now will bear forgiveness to all around us. We who are in the depths of depression and guilt, through God's Spirit, will have His presence to help us in our very personal states of despair and purgatory. We can find dreams restored. Hopes and passions renewed. Anger, meanness, unkindness - even hate! - no longer to have the place in our hearts that it once did. And if they do, we will find our lust for them will not be like it once had been. Those sins of our spirit will become distasteful to us. Harmful. Agonizing our souls. Which will wound us by our sin. And will need the mighty transformation of the Spirit to disengage us from our wounds. From our personal toxicities displayed to another's venom in our lives. Revenge leaves us. Enmity leaves us. In every way, in every place, with every person, we are challenged by the death and resurrection of Christ working its redemption in our lives. Into our very beings like a mustard seed growing into a mighty tree of faith through practice and hope. We will find ourselves in the process of becoming by the Spirit of God.

For God has come. And He has come to stay in our lives. And is making "all things new within, and without, our lives." On seldom occassions will we behold immediate and true reform that completely conquers the sins and lust of the flesh that use to hold us so tightly with an ease not thought possible, or could be true of us in Christ, once held in the grip of our former wickedness and death. At other times this spiritual reform, or redemption, will come so slowly as to pain us over its stubbornness to leave us in our earthly selves, in our flesh and addictions, from our formerly corrupt hearts fearing to change. Resisting change. Defeating us with our every breath and act through this life. For even in our state of reform we will seem to deceive ourselves and simply carry over our old habits into our new way of life, in the church, in ministry and with others. And yet God is not done with us for we are held by His grace and mercy until the end of our lives when all will be new and redeemed. We are ever in a relationship of becoming overwhelmed by our Savior God.

R.E. Slater
April 10, 2012



This is the reaction of a young woman hearing for the first time…


Uploaded by on Sep 26, 2011


I was born deaf and 8 weeks ago I received a hearing implant.
This is the video of them turning it on and me hearing myself
for the first time. :)

Edit: For those of you who have asked the implant I received
was the Esteem model offered by Envoy Medical.