Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Ex-vangelic Topics and Theology: James Grier Website, Audio Sermons & Lectures (updated)

TEACHINGS ON ETHICS AND

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

by Dr. James Grier

from a conservative evangelical viewpoint

Personal Reflections on

Conservative Evangelicalism

by R.E. Slater

The audiocasts here provided are testament to my past education in the Regular Baptist denomination first marked by it's dispensational fundamentalism, and later, by a conservative evangelicalism refined in the fires of Covenantal Reformed teachings rejecting the Baptist plank of Arminianism and replacing it with Calvinism as its pejorative systematic. Dr. Grier was an excellent speaker and capable communicator who reaffirmed this common approach by many my Christian tribe. To know where Christianity stood in the 1970s and 1990s is to listen again to its many reflections on God, Scripture, and Christ's Atonement.

However, I created Relevancy22 as further personal testament to Spirit-led divine inspiration I received years ago urging me to expand my inherited discipleship in the Westernized Christian faith both i) progressively and, ii) as a way to find a biblical hermeneutic which might allow me to do this. After many years I have found that I cannot find a biblical interpretation any better than the "Love of God" as the central theme of Scriptures as shown to us in Jesus, as both divine Son of God and Lord of Lords Immanuel who has come to bring salvation to all.

I have sadly noticed over many years of observation that where the re-engaged biblical center of God's love runs astray is in those sincere or zealous Christians who follow God and translate His divine loving acts for divine wrath, judgment and hell if rejected - such as John Calvin had done in his Dogmatics (c.1536 - 1559). Similarly, when reading the biblical Gospels, Jesus spoke specifically to the religious Jewish leaders of his day as to their human perversion and idolatry of God which they were reinforcing through accumulated ungodly religious laws and sacraments over the centuries.

Hence, if I err as a follower of Jesus, it will be in speaking to God's love through-and-through-and-through all previously held Christian beliefs, dogmas, doctrines, creeds and confessions; and across as wide a range as I can ecologically, civilly, economically, politically, and socially. Like the many Venerable Bedes of our past common centuries who spoke to the Spirit-command of mercy, grace, forgiveness and Christian Humanism; or today, to that same subject of Christian Humanitarianism and Social Justice; so I urge all Jesus followers to speak God's love into all areas of life regardless of the abuses taught by the church into these same areas demanding grace.

And yes, James Grier does reiterate these same centuries-old pervasive church doctrines of sin and judgment as common to the fundamental and evangelic forms of Christianity I was raised in. He will argue these persuasively, regularly, and with vigor. All to which I will disavow, and in the same spirit of alacrity, speak persuasively, with vigor, and in regularity, as testament to God's enriching, infilling, healing love. Thus and thus, Relevancy22's shouts to a new message of God's love and against the sin that overcomes us in our self-righteous and sanctimonious Christian spirits.

An "Eco, Civil, and Socio, Christ-filled Humanitarianism" is far better for the world than any Christian ideologies urging:

i) civilly-exclusionary-dominionism; or,

ii) religiously-reinforcing-kingdom-reconstruction dogmas; or,

iii) any forms of Christian-White-Supremacist-fascist crusades held against civil democracies wishing to expand the legal rights of their polyplural, multiracial, and multicultural communities.

Better, to replace these zealous, agitating, unloving, church beliefs with a Christ-filled, God-filled love, centered in people of all kinds, than to exclude, berate, chastise, and belittle those who live differently to the unChristian ideals none of us can live up to... nor should we. I know of no better Gospel (Good News) of God than love, welcome, embrace, and resistance to both human and religious evil. God is a God of love, not a God of evil.

Friday, January 11, 2013

James Grier Website, Audio Sermons & Lectures (updated)

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