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

-----

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

Monday, August 12, 2013

Scot McKnight: "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly about Reading Genesis 1-2" (A Review of Todd Beall's book)

 
 
 
by Scot McKnight
Aug 12, 2013
 
Among evangelicals one can find a number of views on how to read Genesis 1-2 the literary approach and the literal approach are two typical approaches, though behind them all is one simple question: Historical or not? And then this one: In what senses is it historical or non-historical? The big problem here is that one’s conclusions enter into the polemics of evangelicalism where some think anything less than “historical all the way down” (including light before the sun) throws "evangelicalism under the bus" while others think there’s plenty of room for other considerations (and honestly hold to evangelical convictions in all other regards).
 
For me a problem enters when one view contends [that] it alone is faithful while the others have caved in; and it is even more problematic when the principal evidence and scientific discussions are ignored or denied. This is the case with Todd Bealls’ contribution to J. Daryl Charles, Reading Genesis 1-2: An Evangelical Conversation. After we read a perfectly reasonable sketch of how to read Genesis 1-2 in a literary reading with clear historical referentialism at work by Richard Averbeck, Bealls chooses to do polemics against everyone else’s readings but his [own] “literal” (more below) reading. A big disappointment because I’d like to read an honest sketch of his reading — all the polemics dropped — of Genesis 1-2; but my disappointment was shared by the responses by the other authors in this multi-view volume. Some [of my] observations - and these are more or less found as well in the respondents - though I jotted these down before I read their responses:
 
1. He opens playing the Elijah, or victim, game. Like Elijah in wilderness Beall claims his view alone is faithful and the rest are caving in and that he’s persecuted for it. Skip his first two paragraphs and go to his first question.
 
2. He asks if one should have two different hermeneutics for Genesis 1-11(or 1-2, or just chp 1) than for Gen 12-50. He says they are the same, the hermeneutic should be the same, that it should be literal. He’s got some good points here; I’m not sure it as water tight as he’d like and most readers of Genesis 1-2 don’t agree with him. Yes, these chps are narrative prose; but how does one know when “narrative” is “historical referentiality” vs. the non-historical and literary? (Point 5 below touches on this.)
 
3. Which raises for me an observation. Beall has a colossal hermeneutical blunder: he equates a “literal” reading with “historical referentiality” without a shred of evidence or defense. The fact is that a literal reading can be fully literal and the text itself not at all be concerned with historical referentiality (John Collins’ response points this out too). Here’s an example. Luke 10:30 has Jesus responding to the man’s question about who is my neighbor: Jesus says, “In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead….” I know of almost no one who thinks this isn’t a parable yet most think it is a parable. There’s no indication it is a parable — it doesn’t say “And then Jesus told this parable…” It just says “A man…” and if one takes it as a parable, it could be pure fiction; if it is not a parable, it could refer to a historical referent. My point is this: Most think it is a parable because it comes off that way though there’s not a shred of evidence in the text that is a parable or an imagined story. In Beall’s logic we’d have to take this as a historical referent story and not a parable. This is the problem for Beall’s logic: How do we know when a narrative is historical or fictional? He doesn’t spell it out and for me it ruins this chp.
 
4. Another question he addresses: is Genesis 1 from an ANE worldview? This, by the way, is one way to answer the historical referentiality question but Beall gets too polemical here. Because the text is from God it doesn’t have to be — or isn’t — an ANE worldview. “Why would God have used ANE myths to reveal truth to Moses…?” (52). One could ask “Why not?” He says instead it is polemics against the ANE worldview, which is almost a way of saying it partakes in the ANE worldview. I could go on: the point I’d make is that this text emerged in the ANE, it was for people who lived in the ANE, it has parallels and differences from the ANE, and all texts emerge from and speak into and against their cultures. Denying a text’s cultural embedness is a colossal hermeneutical blunder. Every text reflects its culture. Historical conditionedness is part of the human condition so when God chose to speak he did so in space and time, and that space and that time is not the same as ours today.
 
5. How do NT authors approach these texts? This is a more fruitful approach for someone who wants to deny the importance of the ANE context. Yes, I would agree that the NT writers assume the text of Genesis 1-2(and beyond) when they speak: Jesus, Paul, et al.. But I’d like to see him address one question: Does the authority of a biblical worldview rest on that worldview being historical? Let us say that Jesus is saying “the two, as the Bible says, became one [(sic, Adam and Eve)].” Is his view based on the fact that his worldview is rooted in that worldview or because the text of Gen 1-2 is historical? In this section I think Beall assumes that “literally” can only be “authoritative” if “literal” means “historical.” Is that compelling?
 
6. He then says those who are opting for literary readings of Genesis 1-2 are accommodating themselves to theistic evolution. Maybe, but I’d rather not question the motive of Tremper Longman and Pete Enns and John Walton and believe that they really do think Genesis 1-2 needs to be read in a more historically nuanced way so that it is more in tune with ANE culture, something that is simply not characteristic of the tradition that developed leading to the view Beall now defends. As we have become both more aware of science and the ANE texts we need to listen and learn.
 
He then sees this all as a slippery slope, his terms. This is a scare tactic and not logic. Slippery slope logic is unworthy of intellectual rigor.