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

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Interview & Vid Links: Stanley Hauerwas, "Cross-Shattered Christ"

“This is, moreover, as Pilate insisted, the King of the Jews. That kingship is not delayed by crucifixion; rahter, crucifixion is the way this king rules. Crucifixion is kingdom come. This is the long-awaited apocalyptic moment. Here the powers of this world are forever subverted. Time is now redeemed through the raising up of Jesus on the cross. A new age has begun. The kingdom is here aborn, a new regime is inaugurated, creating a new way of life for those who worship and follow Jesus.”
- Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ, Stanley Hauerwas, p. 85

'Why Have You Forsaken Me?'

Interview by Laura Sheahen
Senior Religion Editor at Beliefnet.com
March 2005

Stanley Hauerwas on atonement theology, Mel Gibson's 'Passion,'
and the 'chilling' meaning of Christ's last words


Known for afflicting the comfortable, Duke University professor Stanley Hauerwas "has been a thorn in the side of what he takes to be Christian complacency for more than 30 years," according to his fellow theologian Jean Bethke Elshtain. Whether condemning abortion or the war in Iraq, his views challenge believers to see Jesus' message as a radical one. Hauerwas spoke with Beliefnet about his most recent book, "A Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words."

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In this small but powerful book, renowned theologian Stanley Hauerwas offers a moving reflection on Jesus's final words from the cross. Touching in original and surprising ways on subjects such as praying the Psalms and our need to be remembered by Jesus, Hauerwas emphasizes Christ's humanity as well as the sheer "differentness" of God. Ideal for personal devotion during Lent and throughout the church year, this book offers a transformative reading of Jesus's words that goes directly to the heart of the gospel. Now in paperback. - Amazon.com

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You say in beginning of "A Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words" that you don't want to explain Jesus' seven last words. Are you unsatisfied with past explanations?

Yes. There's an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus' psyche, and I think that's a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us. Of course it is analogous to us-he's fully human-but it oftentimes fails to take into account that this is the Son of God. I tried to exegete the seven last words in a way that does justice to their mystery.

You seem to critique the narcissism of today's Christians, saying "sentimentality is the urge to make the gospel conform to our needs, to make Jesus our 'personal' savior." This seems to echo what happened after the movie 'The Passion.' A lot of people were repeating the well-known profession, "Jesus died for me"-but with quite an emphasis on the 'me.'

That Protestant evangelicals would leave Gibson's movie and say "gee, I didn't know he had to suffer so much for my sins"-quite frankly, that's to make yourself more important than you are. It also underwrites satisfaction theories of the atonement, which fail to do justice to the fact that this is the second person of the Trinity who is suffering.

When you say, "someone had to suffer to reconcile me with an angry Father," you forget: it's not an angry Father who has given the Son to receive our violence. The problem with saying "I didn't know he had to suffer that much for my sins" is it fails to do justice to the Trinitarian character of the Christian faith. What is happening in the cross is a cosmic struggle.

Your book says, "any account that suggests God has to satisfy an abstract theory of justice by sacrificing his Son is clearly wrong."

The problem with those kinds of typologies is they separate the person from the work of Christ. They concentrate on the cross, separate from the life. I think it's a deep mistake. It's one of the problems with Mel Gibson's film.

What did you think of the film?

[It was] an extended exercise in showing how much punishment a human body could take. It didn't help us understand why that punishment was correlative with the kind of life Jesus led. It becomes a kind of sadism that it's not wise to be exposed to.

Can't evangelicals still make an argument that we should think of Jesus as our personal savior, and think of the gospel in terms of how it affects individual people?

I really don't like the word 'personal.' It makes it sound like I have a relationship with Jesus that is unmediated by the church. They have the idea that "I have a personal relationship with Jesus that I go to church to have expressed." But the heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.

You quote Bonhoeffer and say Jesus' death and resurrection are not the solution to the problem of death. Many people take it as such.

It's a deep mistake, a pietistic reading of the cross. The idea is that Jesus overcame death through the resurrection. What that does is fail to appreciate the fact that the resurrected Christ is the crucified Christ. It's not like, "Oh, that was just a mistake, now it's over." Jesus continues to suffer from our sins.

I think the assumption is that we all now no longer need to fear death. We no longer need to fear the death that sin perpetrates, but that doesn't mean we're not going to die.

I think some people take the words "Jesus overcame death" to mean they don't have to be afraid of death, as you said.

Well, they certainly have to be afraid of the judgment of God. And that judgment is going to be more frightening than death itself.

Than non-existence would be.

Right.

You also say Jesus' death is not that of a martyr.

A martyr can never cooperate with death, go to death in a way that they're not trying to escape. Jesus obeyed the Father's will to submit himself to the powers and the powers' ability to dominate our lives because of our fear of death. It's important that that kind of struggle be understood as at the very heart of the cross.

One of the most challenging chapters was the one on the words "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" You say the words "shatter our attempts to understand God in human terms."

It shows that Christ does experience the darkness of being completely alienated from the Father.

So one person of the Trinity could feel completely alienated from the other?

Yes. And that means there is a time when we cannot approach God through Christ, because Christ was completely abandoned. That is a chilling, chilling notion: that there is a time when we cannot reach God through Christ. I think that's what that means.

You say it reveals that "our assumption that God must possess the sovereign power to make everything turn out all right for us, at least in the long run," is idolatry.

It's idolatry to think that to be a Christian means this is all going to work out well for me. That's not what God is in the business of being God for. The idea that Jesus' whole project was to make sure my life would be OK is a far too narcissistic account of the crucifixion.

It also touches on the age-old theodicy question: Do you believe God is simultaneously all-powerful and all-good?

I believe that whatever it means for God to be all-powerful and all-good "names" the fact that God could not be other than the Father to the Son, who submits himself entirely to sin. You never start with an abstract notion of omnipotence or all-powerful in a way that those words become self-defining separate from Christology.

So we have to accept God first, and not certain words in the language?

That's right. That was what Karl Barth well understood.

You say we try to explain the "why have you forsaken me?" phrase to "protect God from making a fool out of God." Why do we have such a problem with these words?

Because we want God not to be the God we find in Christ. We want God to be the great all-powerful daddy, who makes sure our lives will not have to be lives of suffering. It's an idolatrous position.

So we shouldn't expect God to do anything about our suffering?

We know God has done something about our suffering-it's called the cross. It gives us the resources to have even our suffering be a service to God and God's kingdom.



Stanley Hauerwas On His Evangelical Audience

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Considering that Evangelicals have produced some of the realities that Dr. Hauerwas has spent a career resisting (pietism, 'personal relationships with Jesus,' church growth, etc.), he discusses his Evangelical audience with Wunderkammer Magazine..
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Nadia Bolz-Weber, "Why I'm Lutheran" (or, "The God who Loves Flawed People Like Me")


"God's grace is freely given - we don't earn it,
we just try to live in response to it."


"God's always coming to us in a series
of death-and-resurrection encounters...
we don't make our way to God,
He makes His way to us."



Wednesday Night Dome Speaker - Nadia Bolz-Weber
The ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans, July 2012

Published on Jul 20, 2012 by
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"Nadia Bolz-Weber has probably done more than any other pastor in recent times to poke therapeutic fun at the misdemeanors and flaws of overly-churched Christianity and Christians. The passion behind her words, however, is as deeply pastoral as it is God-drenched and liberating....thus the affection as well as the respect that attend her and her work wherever she goes."
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- Phylis Tickle author of "The Great Emergence"
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Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber is the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints an ELCA mission church in Denver, Colorado. She's a leading voice in the emerging church movement and her writing can be found in the Lutheran magazine The Christian Century, Jim Wallis' God's Politics blog, and Patheos.com. She is author of "Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television" (Seabury 2008) and blogs at the Sarcastic Lutheran blog as well as at her own blog, nadiabolzweber.com. Nadia lives in Denver with her family of four where she can be found writing bios in the third person and chasing chickens around the backyard with her kids.
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"We are all simultaneously sinner and saint all the time. We have an
enormous capacity for destruction of ourselves and of other people.
But we have an enormous capacity for kindness too."
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"Lutherans were the first people in my life to give
me language  for what I had experienced to be true."
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"When visiting Lutheran churches I had to culturally commute from what
I was to what the church was so that over a period of years I felt a call
to pastor people just like me and started 'The House for All Sinners and Saints.'
Now we have a variety of people from all walks of society and it is
Christ that binds us together."
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"We are flawed people who are loved in all of our flaws by a God who loves flawed people just like me. Who uses imperfect people. And manifested Himself to flawed people. Who ate with all the wrong people. Spoke with all the wrong people. Who did not condemn flawed people but choose to love flawed people. This God never made sense and we don't need to either. Because this God will use us in all of our brokenness. In all of our failures. In all of our feelings. Because God's strength is perfected in our weaknesses. Our brokenness is God's fertile ground to make something new and beautiful!"
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April 23, 2011
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