Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: INDEX

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

Sunday, September 4, 2022

INDEX - History of Tolkien's Middle-Earth

MIDDLE-EARTH INDEX

~ this page contains spoilers across all ages of Middle-Earth.

Do not read from this point onwards ~

~ Further below will be found complete histories

of Tolkien's Lores and Legendariums after my

observations of Tolkien's processual writing ~

In Tolkien's lore and legendarium one finds all the stories, films, and experiences of the world bound into one. All the lies, all the divisions, all the hatred, the evil for ruin and destruction. Whatever had been planned for peace and beauty and song dissolve into chaos once touched by love turned inward, then outward in bitter distaste, lust, envy, disunity.

Whatever healing is started begins the same in doom and jealousy. The music of the world continually is overcome even as it strives to overcome the darkness of intent and evil. Into this struggle the ages of the world lengthen, groan, give up; strive again, confront, and are found in constant trial and intrigue for the hearts and souls of the earth.

Here then lies the all too familiar worlds of Tolkien. Worlds we cannot escape but can no less endure either. It requires commitment of will; discernment of mind; steadiness of heart; courage of soul; and a deep wisdom gained from the ages of agony and joy.

Each inhabitant, not only of Middle-earth, but across the seas and upon the lands surrounding Middle-earth, must teach and educate, warn and prepare, learn and secure the things which make life precious to the living and dead.

For without commitment to love, to solidarity with one another, to pursuing the welfare of one another, all fellowships can be too easily disbanded and ill-reformed in grievance and trial to the further agony of the present world and all ages beyond.

We stand together because we cannot stand apart. And when standing apart we will surely fall together.

- re slater

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click to enlarge

The Process History of JRR Tolkien

In JRR Tolkien one might find a processual history of Middle-Earth where the many ages of the past morph and tumble from event to event leading up to the popular LOTR's celebratory end where The Fellowship of the Ring had succeeded in its mission at the end of the Third Age of Middle-Earth that it might breathe again the free airs of life and living. This, in contrast to the end of Middle-Earth's Second Age (Prime Video's "The Rings of Power") which carried with it no such happy endings. Lands which were once enjoyed and beheld in their vibrancy of local color and culture had fallen, becoming inflicted with fell darkness, peril, and danger.

Years earlier, a British Mathematician and Philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, had envisioned a reality which tumbled about itself in its many permutations as witnessed in JRR Tolkien's vast lands that time forgot. A history which never stilled, ever adapting and continually interacting with past conditions to present histories (the prehension of past by the present) to its many future, evolving consequences (*processual concresence). A future then, filled with never-ending possibilities for good and evil.

This kind of "quantum entanglement" of the processual cosmic organism with itself necessarily includes all ages past to all ages future. Importantly, Whitehead always sought to emphasize the presentness of the present where neither past nor future could evolve unless first preceded, and then enfolded, throughout its complex into a presentness of "cosmo-ecological" relationships.

*Used here, cosmo-ecological living is meant to cover all cosmic and earthly relationships from the atomic quark to the fellowship of the tree and water with the hill and lifeform. Though one may wish to mythologize these relationships - which is a kind of poetry to the world at large even as the ancients did in their time (sic, Hebrew Myths do not lessen the presentness of God; they simply spoke to people as they presently understood and believed) - it is better to stay within the realms of contemporary science coupled with Whitehead's processual worlds so real-world solutions might evolve in their present struggle when seeking to resolve more peaceful realms of ecological/societal living between nature and mankind working together in healthier forms of relational symbiosis of give and take. - re slater

Unlike the Platonic Age, and later, the Enlightenment's, pre-scientific Age beheld in a mechanistic cosmos (the universe et al) running like a well-oiled clock, a processual evolutionary ecology runs via ceaseless, restless, processes unfolding and enfolding cosmic history releasing its flow of energy and events through processual relational *concrescence apprehending the past to affect/effect the presence of the present.

Importantly, this processual cosmic organism of Whitehead's might be further described as a cosmo-ecological organism both locally, globally and, by extension, including the entirety of the universe. We might understand it then as an evolving universal cosmic "ecology" with its many subtending derivations in suns, and planets, seas and oceans (whether of salty brine or methane seas), cosmic atmospheres of any composition, molten or rocky geological formations, and thereby perhaps resulting in cosmic biological life forms such as evidence here on planet Earth. We, in our present day (non-ecological) societies are beginning to realize seeing ourselves in terms of a greater ecological presence which is both local and universal.

And in an industrial age where today's non-fictional worlds of humanity continues its struggle of societal identity tumbling out from its past regional, geographic, and temporal histories, we might learn to lean into the elvish worlds of living in balance and symmetry with the evolving ages of the Earth. Sometimes grown too cold, or too hot, or too overrun with our careless anthropocene ages of misuse, pollution, war, and devastation.

Whitehead envisaged cosmo-ecological civilizations which could heal the many careworn lives fraught within history's many ecological and societal epochs; which could give birth to the many possible worlds of redeeming archetype; which would strive to emulate love in its highest forms of social justice generating healthy socio-politico-economic relationships between ecological communities of fellowships which could adjust, or adapt, their eco-societies to the many futures of a processually evolving universe.

And to the many futures humanity might envisage itself in, one of our most pressing enterprises must be to think in terms of the quantum sciences of evolution, biology, physics, and science in general such as technology, neurology, psychology, and sociology, as all being a part of Whitehead's larger, more integral equation of an expanding ethno-religious and relational complex of organism leaning into organic vitues of generative living.

To think of the universe as we do the Earth. That the universe's cosmos is an extension of Earth's ecology even as the Earth is a consequence and extension of the cosmos' ecology. In this case, we are expanding our idea of the world to include all possible worlds of all possible dimensions of all possible possibilities. Thus and thus, Whiteheadian Process Thought can be described as a cosmo-centric ecological realm rather than only a cosmos-centric universe. A universe which lives and breathes through its many relational parts of hope and blessing.

As participants in an ever evolving cosmoecological fellowship between humanity and the world and universe we must concede that we live in continually responding and evolving cosmic/ecological societies beheld in constituent processual relationships. Humanity might think upon its many past historical ages as being enfolded around both the Earth and the Universe's Ages/Cycles of birth, life, and death.

Process Thought agrees with this assessment of reality and states that it may positively or negatively affect the CosmoEcological Ages to come for good or for ill. JRR Tolkien spoke to this in his fictional worlds of good and evil, of fellowship and fear, leaving with his readers a healthy understanding of how our actions require wisdom, love, and kinship of spirit. To Whitehead, this is the process of being becoming even as the God of the bible once state, "I AM Who I AM," (Ex 3.14) referring even to God's own Self moving with creation itself as a timeless, eternal Being evolving not in character but in relationality with an evolving ecological cosmos.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

September 4, 2022

~ this page contains spoilers across all ages of Middle-Earth.

Do not read from this point onwards ~

~ Also, further below will be found complete histories

of Tolkien's Lores and Legendariums ~

* * * * * * *