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

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A Good Question that Biblical Inerrancy Can't Answer





WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A Good Question that Biblical Inerrancy Can't Answer
http://www.peteenns.com/what-is-the-bible-a-good-question-that-biblical-inerrancy-cant-answer/

February 22, 2017

I deeply respect Scripture, but I am not an inerrantist. I have several reasons for this, but it comes down to two things:

  • The Bible as a whole (rather than a prooftext or two) doesn’t support inerrancy.
  • The history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible doesn’t support inerrancy.

I write quite a bit about the first point (see some blog posts here). Some might say “too much” but you’re not the boss of me. Jesus is and just this morning he told me personally that I need to keep writing about it.

The bottom line here is that the Bible is too diverse and contradictory for “inerrancy” to hold any explanatory power. To “hold on” to the term would mean either (1) ignoring the the biblical data, or (2) qualifying the term “inerrancy” beyond recognition.

Neither posture contributes to spiritual growth, but stifles it.

Some choose to take one or both of these approaches, thinking that too much is at stake if we “let go” of inerrancy. My response is that wishing it to be a central doctrine doesn’t make it so, if in fact the Bible you are protecting doesn’t support the theory.

On the second point, the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible is so diverse, that to expect to mine through all that and find beneath all the chaos an inerrant Bible seems rather nonsensical to me—unless one’s version of Christianity entails the belief that your tradition has gotten the Bible entirely right and others that disagree are wrong and need to be corrected. This leads to religious wars or at least rumbles at church softball games.

Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible evinces diachronic and synchronic diversity, meaning diversity through time and diversity at any one time.

The presence of these diversities is simply a fact. You can look it up.

A deep problem with inerrancy is that it presumes (or works best with) the notion that the Bible “properly” understood will yield one and only one authoritative meaning.

But the Bible is famously fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that are part of the character of Scripture, and the result of either intentional internal debates by the authors or the natural by-product of diverse authors writing at diverse times under diverse circumstances and for diverse reasons. Add to that the great distance between a book whose beginnings go back about 3000 years—as far removed back in time for us as the year 5000 is from us ahead.

Simply put, the phenomenon of a Scripture that is diverse and the inevitably diverse history of interpretation of such a diverse text do not sit well with the insistence that God would only produce an inerrant text.

What Is the Bible?

The question remains, then, “What is the Bible?”

Good question, but I don’t always like the way it’s posed: “Well, Enns, now that you’ve taken inerrancy away form us, what are we supposed to think of the Bible now, huh? HUH?!”

That way of phrasing things assumes the normalcy of an inerrantist paradigm.

Another bad way of asking the question is, “So, I suppose that makes you an ‘errantist.’”

No, no, and no. That too presumes the normalcy of inerrancy—that discussions of the nature of the Bible center on whether or not there are errors, and everyone falls on one side of the divide or the other.

There are many other ways of thinking about the Bible. What is needed here is to broaden one’s field of vision.

My own answer to “What is the Bible?,” at least at this moment in my life, includes but is not limited to the following:

In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. . . . All of us on a journey of faith encounter God from our point of view. . . we meet God as people defined by our moment in the human drama, products of who, where, and when we are. We ask our questions of God and encounter God in our time and place in language and ideas familiar to us, just like the ancient pilgrims of faith who gave us the Bible. . . . This Bible, which preserves ancient journeys of faith, models for us our own journeys. We recognize something of ourselves in the struggles, joys, triumphs, confusions, and despairs expressed by the biblical writers. ~ The Bible Tells Me So, pp. 23-24

No answer will be perfect, and I think it is wise to be willing to hold our definitions loosely (as I try to). But my point here is simple that an “inerrantist model” of the Bible creates unnecessary conflict with with how the Bible behaves and how it has been read for a very, very long time.

And there are other, faithful, ways of answering the question, “What is the Bible?”




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