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

Sunday, September 1, 2013

The Impracticality of Thinking that Tradition and Conservatism Must Never Change


I was sent this article over the weekend by a friend, and after reading it, thought that it promoted the kind of intellectual environment that we have been promoting here at Relevancy22 these past several years. Not many articles ago this past month (August 2013) I was saying these same things and more. And so, I wish to add Dennis Bratcher's voice with mine own to let the reader know that within the ivory towers of conservative Christianity there must be space made for present-era dialogue lest error and lost proceed apace to the church's harm.

R.E. Slater
September 1, 2013


"But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you
leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it
to a torrent of change."  - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (chpt 7)


"I think a lack of courage among many leaders to address these issues in the past is one
of the factors in the consequences we are reaping today in the militant conservatism
seen in some organized groups...."  - Dennis Bratcher


* * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Change and Conservatism

by Dennis Bratcher
March 26, 2013

In many areas of the American religious scene, there are increasing conflicts between younger idealistic post-moderns who advocate changes in the Church and traditionalists (of any age) who want little or nothing in the Church to change. While the roots of this conflict are complex, related to shifts in culture, fresh ways of thinking, and changing technology, it is not especially a new problem. Even Jesus ran into opposition from traditionalists who tried desperately to hold onto traditions while he advocated reforms to both ways of thinking and practice.

One difference today is that new communication technologies accelerate the agitation for immediate changes to institutional structures and established ways of doing things, inconsistencies between theological ideals and practice, or even traditional ways of thinking. And that creates an impatience with the rate of change. The danger this produces within the Church when combined with postmodern ways of thinking is a risk of destructive fragmentation as younger church people give up on the traditionalists as outdated and irrelevant, and the traditionalists give up on the younger people as abandoning the Faith.

In many cases, both traditionalists who want the status quo, and advocates of change, have the best of motives. Many traditionalists see changes as threatening the truth of God, and understand that the stability of that truth within the Church is threatened by change. Yet, I have talked to many twenty-something and thirty-something Church people and pastors who sincerely desire changes in order to better express the Faith in a culture that has significantly shifted how it views the world and life in the past twenty years. So the problem is not just a "right" and a "wrong" side. The issue is how do we live together as people of God without continually fragmenting into groups dominated by self-interest rather than united as the Body of Christ.

Some say that we just need to trust the grace of God, that he will work it all out. And yet others rightly note that historically change has not come to the People of God without intentional effort. Certainly, God's grace can change anyone. But there is a truth in Andy Warhol's comment, "They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

I am totally convinced that a large part of the task, even the calling, of ministers and church leaders today, especially in more conservative/traditionalist contexts, is to facilitate change in a constructive, positive way. It is not change for the sake of change but more a matter of relating Faith to a changing world. Otherwise, the way we express our Faith will be rooted in the traditionalist structures associated with an earlier time and place, and be more a testimony to our own past than a witness to other people in the present and future.

In some sense, that was a major part of the teachings and ministry of Jesus, as he called people to move out of the security created and protected by their traditionalism, and embrace a newness that was really the heart of who they had always been beyond their self-imposed insulation (for example, John 13:34, 1 John 2:7-8, 2 John 1:4; the story of Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof is a good example of such tensions). It is risky, as Jesus well illustrates. And it takes time and patience. But that is the reality of the Church in which we live and minister today.
G. K. Chesterton wrote:
But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. [Orthodoxy, chapter 7]
In other words, if we do not openly and lovingly address the problems inherent in unbridled and unexamined religious conservatism/traditionalism in a rapidly changing world, we leave people to the mercy of cultural and historical changes without adequate intellectual and spiritual resources to deal with them. Rather than preserving the Faith, such conservatism will inherently deteriorate the Faith.

For example, I think a lack of courage among many leaders to address these issues in the past is one of the factors in the consequences we are reaping today in the militant conservatism seen in some organized groups (see Neo-fundamentalism). Some of these groups try to purge educational institutions and churches of any who suggest or advocate any kind of changes to ethical standards (such as suggesting that total abstinence from alcohol is an ethical choice not a law of God), who offer any alternatives to traditionalist interpretation of Scripture (such as supporting women in ministry), or who suggest that science and religion can be compatible (the old creation versus evolution debates).

That does not mean that we must be militant in return. But it does mean that we must have the courage, and the patience, to speak the truth, to teach faithfully and lovingly, to nurture people both intellectually and spiritually, to be openly honest about who we are and who we are not, and allow God to work. We must trust God that "means of grace" includes our ministry, that God can use our commitment to people and the Church as the Body of Christ (not just an institution) to transform not only individual lives but also the corporate community.

In other words, we need both the grace of God and the commitment of people who work hard at constructive positive change while they trust that grace. Zechariah was right when he gave this word to the people concerning re-building the Jerusalem temple after it was destroyed by the Babylonians:

He said to me, "This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: Not by might,
nor by power, but by my spirit, says the LORD of hosts." - Zech 4:6

But then Haggai was also right when he admonished the people that there were practical things to be done to accomplish the same project.

Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house... - Hag 1:8

Sometimes, we must work hard to facilitate the building of the Church and the Kingdom of God.  Yet it is not all dependent on our efforts.  Our primary responsibility is to live faithfully as the people of God. Part of that may be to point out the follies of the Church, as well as to recognize our own limitations and need for spiritual growth. Part of that may even to be a prophetic voice calling for change and reform, and working as best we can to accomplish those changes without destroying or damaging what we are trying to change.

But finally, we are not responsible for the change. We can cut down the trees. But it is God who builds his temple and brings about his Kingdom (see Divine-Human Synergism in Ministry). If we do not recognize that, as either traditionalists or reformers, whatever we manage to preserve or change will not be about God but about us.


Thinking about God Makes Me Just Want to Keep My Mouth Shut


expanding universe for dummies diagram

And at the other end of the spectrum we have subatomic particles–as if atoms weren’t small enough–and string theory.

If there is a God….a higher power, a supreme being, who is behind all this, I feel we should just stop talking for a minute and…well…just stop talking for a minute.

What kind of a God is this, who is capable of these sorts of things? What claim can we have to speak for him, to think his thoughts are our thoughts? Who do we think we are, anyway?

Here’s another thing that unsettles me into silence. According to the Christian tradition, this God who does literally incomprehensible things, is also willing to get very small–to line up next to us, to know us, even love us (as the Bible says again and again).

If there really is a God like this–a God who understands and controls things so big my calculator has to use a letter to get it across, who is also a God who walked among a tiny tribe of ancient people called Israelites, who allowed them to write about him in their tiny ancient ways, and who subjected himself to suffering and death (what we work so hard to avoid), well…

I think we’re talking mystery here, people.

A God who does both. There are no words for this sort of thing. Yeah, King David in the Psalms talked about praising God because of the wonders of the heavens (Ps 19), and wondered out loud how a God who put the moon and stars in their place could be bothered by puny people (Psalm 8). But David had a limited, quaint, view of “up there.” He did not, and could not, think of “heavens” as we now have to, what with our telescopes and such.

One God responsible for the unfathomably large, who is also near us. If there is such a God….