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, May 21, 2023

Radical Christian Process Theology, Part 1 - "The Empire is Making You Sick"


"The Empire is Making You Sick"


Radical Christian Process Theology, Part 1
"The Empire is Making You Sick"

by R.E. Slater

"Faith in the transcendent God of traditional Christian theology is no longer possible for the contemporary man. The theologian can no longer work in the church. His concerns are no longer the classical churchly concerns: liturgy, prayer, otherworldly salvation. He must move out into the world, since, like other contemporary men, his fundamental preoccupation is the struggle to maintain human values in the context of modern secular society. He can no longer speak of a God who has become meaningless to contemporary man but he must still speak of Christ. The Christ of the radical theologian, however, is the purely human Christ who is the man for others. Christ's function in contemporary society is to serve as a supremely inspiring human example, Christ is "a place to be" in the struggle for human values." - Excerpt: Encyclopedia.com


Introduction

The whole premise of Radical theology is the deep feeling that the God of traditional Christianity can no longer be known within the church as it holds onto its religious methodologies and belief structures in such a way as to prohibit uncertainty and doubt and humanitarian values most required in a Christian religion popularly believed to require but the highest of forms of certainty and belief.

That this churchly covenant bound in blind trust and dogmatic legalism between itself, and the God it worships, must come first-and-foremost above all other succeeding commitments and behaviors - even that of humanitarian acts of social justice and equality which are most dearly desired across all areas of human endeavor and civilization. That the church's institutes are to be upheld firstly above all else. To be protected and defended by every means possible. And must always be decrying itself to be in a continual state of victimhood to society at large.

Responses to the Christian Church

This is the nub of argument by the secularized modernistic Christian Church clutching to its secularized spiritual faith to which the faithful postmodern Christian response adamantly declares in opposition that "It doesn't know, and wishes to explore, even through speculation, the realms of the Christian faith beyond its own self-avowed dogmatic words and actions." That uncertainty and doubt are the only good epistemic tools in which to do theology and to be Christian in the Christianly sense.

> Radical Theology

It is also where the postmodernal Protestant and Catholic Christian theology of radical theology begins when declaring the Christian faith bankrupt to it's highest sentiments and beliefs when seeking to re-envision the Christian faith "outside of itself" in order to see itself the more clearly. That this critical theological response might more resemble the approaches of non-Christian, agnostic, or atheistic radical responses than their Christianly antecedents when seeking a more holistic, more benevolent, Christian faith than what could be found in the present haggered religious aspects of modernal Christianity become a mere "empire-like" religion rather than a humbling, penitent, living faith.

> Progressive Christianity

At this same time, diverse theological branches arose from within mainline denominational Protestant and Catholic Churches identified broadly as Progressive Christianity. And when it became embraced by convicted evangelical church structures it took on a new identity known as Emergent Christianity birthed between the 1990s-2010s. Afterwhich the mainline and emergent streams of progressive Christianity merged together to simply be known broadly as Progressive Christians more deeply concerned with the positive-and-proactive Christianly behaviors of humanitarianism, social justice, and equality than they were with ostracizing and other-worldly Christian dogmas and sentiments.

> Process-based Christianity

Yet another obscure group was arising from the 1940s and 50s with the same radical and progressive concerns as their compatriots but with a unique signature which declared Westernized (secular) Christianity to be unhelpful and Continental Christianity too widely dispersed to offer any further corrective insight and faith living beyond its own cultural era. This body of Christians came to be known as Process-based Christians but (i) unlike Radical Christians preferred to stay within the traditional garments of the Church when critiquing its hoary structure while (ii) also sweeping up unto itself the many Progressive concerns of denominational and evangelical communities.

The unique signature of a Process Christian went one step farther than the Radical Christian or Progressive Christian when announcing that the philosophical-theological foundations upon which the traditional Westernized church had built  itself upon over the past 2000 years was inadequate to the postmodernal task lying ahead of itself. That in order to break away from its rising secularism it needed to re-examine its own non-processual philosophic-theologies and declare them anathema to the Westernized Church.

That it's traditional theological underpinnings had absorbed all the wrong elements of human belief about God, humanity and creation. That a more organic, more relational, philosophy focused upon the presence of the Divine-Human-World Cooperative must come to the fore of the Church's theology. That a solidarity between God, man, and creation be perceived and taught unlike the church's traditional theistic dogmas claiming theistic absence and wrathful judgment. And if done, then Christian humanism, social justice, and equality would naturally rise up within Westernized Analytic and Continental forms of theology centered in Love and not in proscript. One which would remove religious fidelity to unnatural church laws and church attitudes which had plagued its theologic structures since the days of Jesus.

> Summary

Consequently, the Christian branches of radical theology, Christian progressivism and Christian process theology found a more natural home with one another including a sympathetic nod to those radical theologians who in later generations have found themselves outside of the church doing the work of religious deconstruction and reconstruction for the purposes of recovering a humanely ethic of loving response, cooperative sharing, peace, and goodwill between all elements of humanity embraced by a plurality of religions and enculturations.

Moreover, process Christians believe that progressive Christians would find a greater fidelity with process theology which naturally underlays their beliefs than they would find with evangelical theologies which steer away from the foundational factors of Love into their own foundations of Christian dogma which hold the idea of love more loosely to their version of a God who sometimes loves but not always.

Modern v Postmodern v Metamodern

With the era of modernism came the era of Empire into the Christian faith. In this way the secularism which the traditional church disavowed became accepted and its modis operandi for doing the work of theology and mission.

Conversely, Radical Christians saw worldly Empire for what it was in light of the German Lutheran Churches embrace of German Nazism and its zenophobic and "white supremacy" responses towards non-Europeans, minorities, and ostracized humans. It became a radicalized form of Bonhoeffer's plea to the Church to not submit itself to evil and horror. Radical Christianity took Bonhoeffer's plea from his dead lips as he hung on the German SS gallows and spread his message in deep distrust of the Church's message and motives. It dissented and proclaimed God's death on the hand of those given to preach God's life in the midst of Empire.

Likewise, the Christian humanism which was active across Victorian England was spreading its way westward into America and southward into Europe. It declared that women had value and must vote; that children should not be working but in school; that the Enlightenment society of Western culture was neither so much enlightened nor helpful in breaking down human oppression and the invisibility of those minorities unwanted and overlooked.

To this history of Christian humanism came the Civil Race Riots of the 1960s under Martin Luther King (MLK) which re-established the urgency which Christian radicals had declared of the Church that it not repeat itself in America as it had in Nazi Germany. And in the 1990s the voices of Emergent Christians began crying out that the Christian humanism of the Westernized Church had been absorbed once again and without its former evocative voice for dissent and breakage to the church's embrace of Empire. That the Civil Reforms of the 1960s had been supplanted by the indolences of religion once again.

It was throughout this time of modernism giving way to its necessary and critical partner postmodernism that Process Christianity began to form in the Ivory towers of Christian and non-Christian universities. That Whiteheadian philosophic-theology offered a roadmap between the modernity-traps of Empire Christianity and the postmodernity criticisms of the Church.

That the Christian God was firstly Loving and secondly Holy and Justice. That if either of the last rose to prominence than the Love which is God would lose out to Church practices overly focused on holiness and judgment as reflected in Catholic monasteries and Protestant attitudes towards civil dominions of its own theocratic rules over Constitutional democracies. Neither of which bore God's Love in its centers.

More recently, as metamodern has strode into today's postmodern Western cultures we are seeing the pendulum swings between one form of modernism to the other of postmodernism with meta- (middle) swinging in between these polar opposites. It is here where a process foundation again finds the more promise.

For one, Process Christianity recovers Divine Love in its Theology of Love (as versus a Theology of holiness or judgment):

  • It keeps with the best traditions of Radical Christianity in critiquing Christianity as to its lusts for Empire and disregard for loving missionalization of God's Love.
  • It picks up Progressive/Emergent theologies wanting humanitarian action, social justice and equality.
  • It can work within all forms of civil governments without necessitating churchly religious dominionism (as opposed to crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fascism, acts of gender + minority oppression, etc).
  • And, it can discourse with all forms of religious cultures prejudiced towards loving cooperation, sharing of resources, and solidarity of cause such as that of building ecological societies balanced in environmental and societal health in ways Capitalism and Communism, neo-Maoism and Apartheidism cannot.

This then is the promise of Process-based global sphere of loving outlook regardless of religion, economy, or political government when refusing the trappings of "empire" and political division, fear of polyplural enculturation and assimilation in world of climatic, ethnic, and resource turmoil.

Conclusion

In summary, Faith in the transcendent innured God of traditional Christian theology is no longer possible for the contemporary man seeking a God of Loving Presence.

Nor can the theologian work any longer in the church if the church cannot allow uncertainty and doubt which challenges it's faith.

For congregations to be simply concerned with liturgy, prayer, and otherworldly salvation in not enough; it must show itself by its teachings of Love and Loving outreach.

The metamodern Christian, like other contemporary elements of society, must find their struggle in the retention of human values against technocratic societies forcing non-relational, non-organic societies of individuals utilizing connective methods without living out those methods.

In a word, we must continually work at re-etabilishing flesh-and-blood fellowships with one another across our communities, businesses, and nature itself. To be a true Athenian who sought to be Wholly-whole without succumbing to the isolating practices of technocratically dominionistic and oppressive forms of religious and societal culture.

That when speaking of God we recognize God's Loving Presence in the daily lives of ourselves, others, and all parts of creation. That a transcendent God is simply another name for a God who has removed himself from his duties of Love which he can never do as promised to Abram in the covanently cut halves of sacrifice (Gen 14) and the work, ministry, life, death, and resurrection of God's Self in Jesus.

To recognize that like Ghandi, Jesus as the God-man had the high hopes of overturning religion gone wrong. But more than Ghandi, Jesus was also the God who sacrificed himself that Love might Win.

"Faith in the transcendent God of traditional Christian theology is no longer possible for the contemporary man. The theologian can no longer work in the church. His concerns are no longer the classical churchly concerns: liturgy, prayer, otherworldly salvation. He must move out into the world, since, like other contemporary men, his fundamental preoccupation is the struggle to maintain human values in the context of modern secular society. He can no longer speak of a God who has become meaningless to contemporary man but he must still speak of Christ. The Christ of the radical theologian, however, is the purely human Christ who is the man for others. Christ's function in contemporary society is to serve as a supremely inspiring human example, Christ is "a place to be" in the struggle for human values." - Encyclopedia.com

R.E. Slater
May 21, 2023
edited May 27, 2023

* * * * * *



RADICAL THEOLOGY

by G. McCool


Radical theology was the name applied in the 1960s to a widely publicized current in American Protestant theology which was fundamentally skeptical about modern man's ability to speak meaningfully about God.

The theologians most prominently identified with the movement were William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren, and Thomas J. J. Altizer. Several other theologians were closely associated with the movement in the popular mind although their works were less radical in character. The British theologian, John A. T. Robinson, and the American theologian, Harvey Cox, shared a good deal of the radical theologians' skepticism and, like the radical theologians, Robinson and Cox advocated a religion of secular involvement rather than a religion of otherworldly salvation. Gabriel Vahanian, although not one of the radical theologians, shared their preoccupation with the challenge of contemporary secularism to Christian faith.

The theological divergencies among the radical theologians were too great for them to form a school. Nevertheless, their works are marked by a number of common convictions:

  • Faith in the transcendent God of traditional Christian theology is no longer possible for the contemporary man.
  • The theologian can no longer work in the church. His concerns are no longer the classical churchly concerns: liturgy, prayer, otherworldly salvation.
  • He must move out into the world, since, like other contemporary men, his fundamental preoccupation is the struggle to maintain human values in the context of modern secular society.
  • He can no longer speak of a God who has become meaningless to contemporary man but he must still speak of Christ.
  • The Christ of the radical theologian, however, is the purely human Christ who is the man for others [beyond the Church's pale or Society's interest. - re slater].
  • Christ's function in contemporary society is to serve as a supremely inspiring human example, Christ is "a place to be" in the struggle for human values.

The shift away from theological activism at the end of the [1950-60s] civil–rights struggle brought a decline of interest in radical theology. As a movement it did not survive the sixties, but the issues which it brought to prominence in America, e.g., the knowability of God, contemporary Christology, eschatology, and social activity, continue to occupy the attention of contemporary theologians.

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See Also: death of god theology.

Bibliography
t. j. j. altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia 1966); ed., Toward a New Christianity: Readings in the Death of God Theology (New York 1967).
t. j. j. altizer and w. hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis 1966).
h. cox, The Secular City (New York 1965).
w. hamilton, The New Essence of Christianity (New York 1961); "The Death of God Theology," Christian Scholar 48: 27–48; "The Shape of Radical Theology," Christian Century 82:1219–22.
j. a.t. robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia 1963); Exploration into God (Palo Alto, Calif. 1967).
g. vahanian, The Death of God (New York 1961); No Other God (New York 1966); ed., The God is Dead Debate (New York 1967).
p. van buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York 1963); Theological Explorations (New York 1968).
l. gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God Language (Indianapolis 1969) 107–145.
v. mehta, The New Theologians (New York 1966).
t. w. ogletree, The Death of God Controversy (Nashville 1966).

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