Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: America's Ruptured Christianity

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

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

America's Ruptured Christianity - Bass, McLaren, Fuller

https://www.ncronline.org/news/earthbeat/mutual-responsibility-between-humans-and-nature

1 John 4:7-21 (ESV) - God Is Love

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

This past summer Tripp Fuller with Diana Butler Bass and Brian McLaren presented a six week session on the rupturing of American Christianity over the past 20 years beginning with the 9/11/2001 attack on America by Al-Qaeda through to the 1/6/2021 attack on the Capital by President Trump and the Radical Right Republican Party.

For myself, this rupturing of Christianity had already begun back in the 1990s as Emergent Christianity (later known as Progressive Christianity) asked the deep and relevant questions of the church and its faith, of its people and its beliefs, which should have been asked a long time ago. (Quite honestly I didn't think Wikipedia could give such a clear explanation of Emergence until I looked it up and found it!):

Wikipedia - The emerging church is a Christian Protestant movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that crosses a number of theological boundaries: participants are variously described as Protestant, post-Protestant, evangelical, post-evangelical, liberal, post-liberal, progressive, socially liberal, anabaptist, reformed, charismatic, neocharismatic, and post-charismatic. Emerging churches can be found throughout the globe, predominantly in North America, Brazil, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa.

Proponents believe the movement transcends the "modernist" labels of "conservative" and "liberal," calling the movement a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints, and its commitment to dialogue. Participants seek to live their faith in what they believe to be a "postmodern" society. What those involved in the conversation mostly agree on is their disillusionment with the organized and institutional church and their support for the deconstruction of modern Christian worship, modern evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community. The movement has evolved into progressive Christianity.

With that progression I began writing of my disillusionment with my faith which had become something it hadn't been when I had become a Christian in my youth and later - through my time of service, seminary, and ministry - over the past 40 years. Accordingly, with Christianity's departure from Jesus, I found I must respond when looking around and not seeing anyone else troubled by the Church's present developments away from its root stock in Christ.

https://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2014/08/kintsukuroi-be-ye-jars-of-clay-repaired.html

Now, at this moment, in the aftermath of the Trumpian disaster which has polarized so many Christian brethren towards White Christian Nationalism, now is the Christian church's time to ask "What Would Jesus Do?" in this present day as radicalized Christians look to replace the "everyman society for democracy" for some devolved form of authoritarian anarchy?

For myself, I began a very bleak and hopeless journey ten years ago in the fall of 2011 when looking to deconstruct-and-reconstruct my old line faith back into the image of Jesus - and no longer in the image of the church. It has been a journey of healing and discovery and one which I think all Christians should be asking of themselves decade-by-decade as unChristlike behaviors and beliefs creep into the church like unbounded waters seeping into the cracks and crevices of Christian beliefs, institutions, organizations, socio-economic conditions, pandemics, ecological challenges, and on and on and on.

But by this I don't mean staying with the same old classic doctrines which had brought us to this point of torn secularity. But to the determination of how a spiritually informed faith can evolve like the sciences of our era to look at itself dispassionately. To poke, prod, and imagine, what the beauty of God's great love can mean to a world of religious faiths and beliefs - including that of Christianity. Especially when taking God's love seriously by not diluting it via ontological dipolarity (sic, a God of wrath), misinformation, or political extremism. Or of the denial of the rights and liberties of other human beings wishing to live peacefully and in fellowship with each other and with this good earth regardless of their demeanor.

Thus and thus Relevancy22 was born to wend it's way through the divisive doctrines of the church which have led to so many harms, deaths, cruelties, and whatnot, through the past 2000 years of church history. Borne by Jesus' ministry on this earth and by His atoning death and resurrection. It's time to take God's love more concretely then we have in the church's doctrines and missional outreach.

Which means any portion of Christian polity, doctrines, socio-political alliances, and resulting actions of inhumanity must be retracted and not taught by the church. Especially it's belief in a God of wrath, judgment, and vengeance, upon a freewill creation God had birthed. Sin and evil are judgments enough. These fallen harms brought about by creation's agency do not require God jumping on with more invectives, damnations and promises of hell. A God of wrath and judgment as found in the bible are the imaginations of religious men and women proclaiming "inspiration" when simply they are proclaiming then, as now, of a God who is not anything but LOVE. I, for one, would like to take a different tack in my faith but fully realizing and living by a God who is love through and through and through. I believe the outcome is better for all who believe and wish to follow Jesus, and most certainly a far better outcome for the world torn by unlove and hate.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

October 20, 2021

https://reslater.blogspot.com/2011/10/re-slater-words.html