Thursday, June 23, 2022

Christianity in Process - Part 3a, Donna Bowman










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June 20, 2022 By Tripp Fuller

I have so much fun talking nerdy with Donna Bowman. I’m so pumped to have her back on the podcast and a part of the Christianity in Process series. Donna Bowman is professor of interdisciplinary studies in the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas.

In this conversation we discussed:

  • how Donna started as a Southern Baptist and found Process thought
  • the nature of an open future
  • Tripp complains about John Calvin being very very unBiblical and sub-Christian 🙂
  • Donna gives a shout-out to her homeboy Karl Barth
  • Should we fear the mystery of God?
  • the problem with Christian Triumphalism
  • what is happening in worship?
  • what is a religious tradition and how does it live?
  • Tripp gives a process reading of the song “Every Move I Make”
  • the nature of ordinary lived theology
  • Donna shares about getting into Blaseball… an online baseball + horror game
  • Tripp gets excited about the upcoming Thor film
  • how Donna moved beyond an impersonal, Ground of Being style, deity


Donna Bowman: Flowing with the Living God
June 20, 2022


I have so much fun talking nerdy with Donna Bowman. I'm so pumped to have her back on the podcast and a part of the Christianity in Process series.  Donna Bowman is professor of interdisciplinary studies in the Norbert O. Schedler Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas.


Previous Podcast visits from Donna Bowman







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COMMENTS BY MAUREEN SMITH
Student of Christianity in Progress
[edits are mine - r.e. slater]


I just listened to the podcast with Tripp interviewing Donna Bowman as part of our class. I never heard of her before and liked her a lot. It was also fun to hear briefly from Tripp’s daughter Cora.

Again with a lot of trepidation, I’m going to tell you some of the highlights that stood out for me. You should definitely listen to the podcast and might want to do that before reading my recap. Anyway, for whatever it’s worth….

I’m going to start where they ended, when Tripp asked Donna “Who is God?” I’m going to put her answer in quotes, even though I couldn’t get it all and there is some paraphrase:

“The God I {Donna Bowman] was able to start reconnecting with had a fatal flaw [in traditional Christianity] —[God was spoken of] not as a person but as a force. That’s why (Karl) Barth became so important to me. He pointed to [a personal God] we know as Jesus. God is a person people met [in the gospels] and were changed by [him].

“I [Donna Bowman] used to put Paul down, but I don’t any more. Paul grabbed onto one thing about Jesus, his death and resurrection. That’s where he saw the story of that person and the living presence of that person. I resonate with that.

“We have that opportunity too. We can resonate with different parts of that person. That was good news to me. Instead of theorizing about God I can encounter God.”

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Back to the beginning. Donna grew up as a Southern Baptist, as Tripp did. She doesn’t think of God the same way then as she does now. She said it’s the difference between a doctrine or a book that we have to align ourselves with and being in the flow of something that’s moving. (The title of the podcast is “Flowing With the Living God.”)

Donna teaches a class, In Search of a Healthy Religion. One of her students latched onto the idea of a living God. Donna said evangelicals often talk about ”the living God,” but that can be more a slogan than a reality.

The name of Donna’s class made me think: God is such a mystery that none of us can really know what God is like. We have to find a theology that makes sense to us and works for us. Process theology works pretty well for me. I understand that it may not work for others.

When Donna was in college she took a logic class from a professor named Will Power (his real name!) who asked a question that changed her thinking. What if knowing the future is a logical impossibility? She came to understand that it doesn’t limit God to say God can’t know the future any more than to say God can’t make a square circle.

Donna loves Karl Barth. She said Barth inherited Calvinism but didn’t go all the way with Calvin. Calvin put God’s sovereignty above God’s love. Barth put God’s love first. Barth took it all the way to universalism, which is something Donna loves about him but she knows not everyone can go there. (I do.)

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  • She said the biggest problem with the Christianity she grew up with was the triumphalism. Tripp said that is linked to patriarchy and white supremacy and abusive power.
  • Donna said creeds and liturgy in worship are important to her because they link her to people all over the globe and across time and put her in touch with a living changing stream. What she means by the words isn’t the same as what others mean, and that’s good. A diversity of interpretation is a strength not a weakness.
  • The flow of worship means that she isn’t looking for God through the roof but in the faces of other people and maybe in knowing that nobody else means the words exactly as she does. [hence, the embrace and enjoyment of difference v. sameness - re slater]
  • Donna decided some years ago that instead of just writing books about how she sees things she should listen to how ordinary people understand their faith. She interviewed a lot of people, mostly women, about what it meant to them when they made prayer shawls, when they made pussy hats, when they made masks for the pandemic. That sounds so great. I wish she’d said more about it.
  • She said that as hellish as the internet and social media can be, God is working there and people are finding community there. I guess we can testify to that.
  • This sort of blew my mind, but she said she is super into something called blaseball, a baseball simulation combined with a horror game. People discover solidarity with each other there. They support each other. They recognize each other.
  • I think it was Tripp who said “The living and life-giving God is going to call every community and if it can’t happen in a church it can happen somewhere else.”
  • Donna said people are breaking out into community, and things look bad on a big scale but she takes hope in the small places people are finding each other. The wind blows where it will.



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