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

Friday, July 16, 2021

How Not To Be Secular (a Reading of Charles Taylor)



A Few Brief Comments

by R.E. Slater

I haven't read James Smith's book on Charles Taylor but did just buy it. I have heard James a few times speak at Mars Hill Bible Church by invite by Rob Bell who was a fan of his. He also teaches at Calvin College where I am active in the CALL curriculum program. So my comments here are more from my point of view than they are criticism of his work and effort.

One of the reasons I have turned rightly from evangelical Christianity is because of its messaging. It seems that the metanarrative of evangelical Christianity has become less Christocentric and far less Love-Centered and much more focused on judgmental hell-and-damnation aerial verbosity. Many segments of "secular" society are being called out by the evangelical church for not respecting church traditions and beliefs not realizing it has become as secular as the society it is condemning.

Adding to this mud pit of self-righteousness is how the church has also fallen headlong into cultural identity politics - sic., Trumpism; which is a radical rightwing  authoritarian movement to remove the bedrock of America's democracy, the Constitution, with the intention of replacing it with the church's dogmas under the banners of Kingdom Now Dominionism.

If the European Protestant v Protestant v Catholic religious wars of the Middle Ages showed anything, they showed that religious faiths should never run governments. Which is why Thomas Paine and John Locke had saved Europe from itself when announcing the separation of Church and State. Thereby raising up the democratic ideal of many voices and views under the banners of a liberal democratic Constitution working together as a team towards equality, liberty, and justice for all.

Further, the website here, Relevancy22, is currently exploring the philosophic theology of Process Thought sometimes referred to as Open and Relational (Process) Theology in order to recenter biblical theology in atoning, redemptive, and sacrificial transformative narrative. It has been a monumental effort these past ten years but seems to be much improved over evangelicalism's secular modernisms built upon eclectic philosophic usage of Platonisms, Neo-everything, smatterings of Scholasticism and such like.

Which is where my critique of the following article comes in... more probably of Charles Taylor but perhaps equally as much, if not more, of James Smith's approach to Taylor from his own West Michigan evangelical perspective. It is with realization too that Whitehead's Process Philosophy is only recently becoming better known and written about in Process Theological articles by a number of scholars and theologians. So to Taylor and Smith's perspectives - as with mine own before stopping, questioning, and trying to work out my past indoctrinations - they, like myself, were not acquainted at the time with these newer developments.

As simple example is the dipolar problem between a natural world (they term immanence) with a "spiritual" world (commonly termed transcendence). Using psychological or sociological/cultural archetypes, the subject is approached commonly utilizing Closed World Views (CWV) and Modern Moral Order (MMO).

However, the problem lies in separating the two ideas of Platonic thought which stately says there are eternal objects out there we describe as immanent or transcendent. In Process Thought all Platonism is rejected... there are no eternal objects "out there" but only as secondary ideas we utilize in language for communication purposes as descriptors.

Further, in Process Thought immanence and transcendence are no longer near and far metaphysical descriptors but resident actualities combined together as one moment of many evolving moments neither eclipsing one another or separating from one another. All of creation is in the God who is hear and not far; whose creation is hear, now, and not in some lived fantasy world we await. Which is where classic theism fails when seen through the eyes of panentheism (I've describe these many times here on this site).

One other observation is the traditional church's need for a metaphysic which only allows enchantment or disenchantment in because of its dipolarism of immanency and transcendency of God and creation. But under Process Thought, all is as mystical as it is concrete. All is wonderous in the sciences and disciplines which had erred in the past of mechanism and reductionism (part of secular modernism).

The idea of panexistentialism says everything is related to everything and there can be nothing that is isolated or alone. The universe doesn't work this way. Hence, the examples of isolation used below cannot stand; they defy the nature of the universe as a relational living "organism". Further, panpsychism will not allow for any one thing to be so infinitely broken down to its zero state as to lose its "living life" emanating from it. The universe we live in, like ourselves, like God, is boundless in its state both in relationship to itself and to its God who gives life to all.

And so, this despair Charles Taylor has proposed to find a way around, cannot be simply had through the crutches of "secularizing" everything and blaming it on this principle alone. No, the despair of the human species comes from its disconnectivity from one another and from this world and from its God. Atheism is an idea that isn't. So too is despair if looked aright when seeing how this world is meant to lift us up and heal us in so many abundantly wondrous ways. Despair is only despair when we allow societies, communities, churches, families, or individuals remove us from life. It is not life which works against us but those entities consuming wholeness and health.

R.E. Slater
July 16, 2021

* * * * * * * * * * *





How To Not Be Secular;
Reading Charles Taylor

by Bill Bilbier
July 30, 2017


I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come.

This is a review of  Smiths sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age"  if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work. 

Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic /  spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend. 

Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ... 

"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. (graveyards of the gods are always highlights of this tour). 

My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it. 




I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if might be a lost transcendence". 

We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and  gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning IS matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist! 

"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named." 

If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.

And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as the most restrictive of ancient religious -- although of course with much different tenets: 

"because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."

What is lacking of course is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle! Thus sayeth the MMO. 

It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape and self-delusion,  the Buffered Self  must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.

Man STILL cannot live by breath alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence -- at least in the context of age, open to the psyche? 

Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old cave man brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists. 

Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The secular owns the world intellectual playing field today -- Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a "waste land" for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..." 

Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into watching Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement. I'm an intellectual slow out of shape fat man climbing into high country of knowledge. 

In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion has sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on facts rather than superstition" -- however, "morality" is more than a "set of rules", and "mature human vision" is a state of perpetual change "toward" an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing it's tail.

We remain LOST so badly we often fail to even detect our lostness -- does my quest for knowledge lead me forward or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss. I KNOW the TRUTH -- this mountain of human knowledge is only like some old guy attacking Everest alone without oxygen -- I know I'll die in the attempt, but I'll die anyway.

 

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