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

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