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 off 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, April 4, 2013

Thinking Biblically - Its Misuses and Abuses

 

Beware of Thinking Biblically
http://redemptionpictures.com/2013/03/05/thinking-biblically/

Micah J Murray
March 5, 2013

If you took all the Bibles in American homes and made one big stack, your tower of Bibles would dwarf Mount Everest a thousand times over. That would be a pretty cool stack, for sure, but it would make it pretty hard to actually read the Bibles. Sometimes we make small stacks of Bibles and then swear in Presidents. But that’s not what this is about.
 
Obama 2013 inauguration
 
If you took all the Google results for “thinking Biblically” and made a stack, you’d have nearly a million web pages but not a very big stack because web pages don’t occupy physical space. That doesn’t discount the importance of “thinking Biblically” today. We talk of “Biblical Manhood” and “Biblical Womanhood”. We talk of “Biblical Marriage” and “Biblical Science” and “Biblical Politics.” I’m pretty sure I took more than one class in college all about developing “a Biblical Worldview”.
 
thinking biblically
 
But the problem with words is that they mean things, and so we use them and misuse them until they’ve nearly lost their meaning, and still we cling to them. Words are important. And “thinking Biblically” is very important.
 
But all my life I’ve been told lies carefully footnoted with stacks of Bible verses, mistakes and opinions and dangerous words all cloaked in the sacred garb of “Biblical thinking”. And now I find myself recalling these words one by one and carefully examining them, deconstructing my religion brick by brick until all that’s left is Jesus.
 
And so I’m very cautious about that phrase, about “thinking Biblically”.
 
Not of thinking Biblically, but of using that phrase to legitimatize teachings and opinions that are sometimes terribly wrong. In the Scriptures, the Apostle Paul writes about those who pervert the Gospel, who twist and mangle the beautiful truth of Jesus and bring bondage and fear and confusion and shame into the Church. These people weren’t trying to add secular ideas to the Gospel. They weren’t denying the authority of Scripture. They were applying Biblical ideas found all throughout the Scriptures, but they were completely missing the point.
 
It didn’t end in the first century.
 
Our Christian heritage, while beautiful and deep and full of hope, is also marred with “Biblical thinking” that is thouroughly, absolutely broken. Looking back through history we see over and over again those who loved God sincerely, followed Him faithfully, studied the Bible diligently, and arrived at terrible conclusions:
 
Thinking “Biblically” about science:
“People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens … This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.” -Martin Luther
 
“Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” -Abraham Calovius, Lutheran Theologian (c. 1650)
Thinking “Biblically” about genocide:
“Sometimes Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings…” -American Colonist, speaking of the slaughter of Native American tribes
Thinking “Biblically” about slavery:
“The evidence that there were both slaves and masters of slaves in the churches founded and directed by the apostles, cannot be got rid of without resorting to methods of interpretation which will get rid of everything”…. [the well-intentioned souls who] “torture the Scriptures into saying that which the anti-slavery theory requires them to say” [do great damage to the Scriptures themselves.] - Leonard Bacon, Congregationalist Pastor (1846)
Thinking “Biblically” about race issues:
“The university had a policy, based on its understanding of the Bible, that forbade interracial dating and marriage among its students. In order to make that policy easier to enforce, the university did not admit blacks… [We hold] the doctrine that interracial marriage is contrary to principles set forth in God’s Word. … Our right to be Bible-believing is the issue. This is religious freedom in a nutshell….” -Bob Jones University (1983)
Some people have made a hobby of criticizing the Church, through history and today. Please understand that this is not my goal. I love the Church more and more every day, but the more I love her the more I hate seeing her pulpit used as a platform for lies. I’ve heard a lot of lies in my life. We all have. And now we’re all struggling to break free from those lies, slowly and painfully and bravely, whispering desperate words of hope to one another along the way.
 
In the early days of the Church, its enemies were not liberals, pagans, secularists, or atheists. The antagonists in the New Testament storyline are those who knew the Scriptures inside and out, who had studied and memorized and dedicated themselves to the applications of its teachings.
 
But they failed, terribly, because they missed the point.
 
These were the people who attempted to execute a woman caught in adultery, which was “Biblical”.
 
These were the people who taught that Christians must be circumcised and keep the whole law, which was “Biblical”.
 
These were the people who condemned Jesus for breaking the Sabbath, which was “Biblical”.
 
These were the people who Jesus was talking about when he said, “You search the Scriptures, because you think they give you eternal life. But they are all testifying of me!”
 
This is what’s so radical about Jesus.
 
He is “the Word made flesh“. Jesus IS the Scripture – alive with blood and skin and breath and tears. And when we see him for the first time, we realize that we’ve been reading the Holy Words wrong all along. We MUST allow all of our reading of the Bible to begin and end with the words and life of Jesus. Otherwise we will most certainly get it wrong and miss the point completely.
 

chp_bible
(Image: Daniel Iggers.)
 
The Bible is God’s word to us; it is true and trustworthy and beautiful and full of life. The Bible is never, ever wrong. But all too often, we are very, very wrong about it. We must never underestimate our own ability to think Biblically to terrible conclusions.
 
So do we give up on “thinking Biblically” altogether? Certainly not. But we must approach our own conversations with the constant awareness that we might be wrong. That we don’t have all the answers. That someday, five hundred or a hundred or thirty years from now our brothers and sisters may look back and wonder how we could have missed the point. We must be open minded, willing to read its pages over and over again and change our minds as our hearts are opened to the truth.
 
And always, always, we must cling to Jesus.
 
Let us read the Gospels a dozen times, until their words echo in our heads no matter where we wander in the pages of Scripture. Let us speak to Jesus every day, and quietly wait until he speaks to us. Let us search the Scriptures, hoping that in them we will find life, knowing that we’ll only find life more abundantly when we find Jesus.