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Noah's Ark in Sumerian, Akkadian,
Assyrian & Babylonian Lore
Part 8 - A Few Process Thoughts
by R.E. Slater
NASB Bible Verses - Genesis 5:32 to 10:1
ESV Bible Verses - Genesis 5:32 to 10:1
RSV Bible Verses - Genesis 5:32 to 10:1
Wikipedia - Noah's Ark
SERIES - "INDEX - Noah & the Genesis Flood"
Introduction
I wish to follow up Part 6 from yesterday to today's Part 7. Very few Christians understand the concept of the evolution of the Earth, let alone the evolution of man, as either a science or how this perspective may positively affect our reading of the bible.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I get it. The conservative evangelical church has a lot of negative things to say about the subject of evolution according to... (i) how it reads the bible 'literally'; and, because (ii) of the church's willful ignorance upon what it considers the obscure science of evolution; as versus (iii) how the science of evolution might meaningfully interact with the bible. As a result, (iv) the church judges, condemns and banishes fellow Christians from any serious consideration of the subject.
I, for one, am one of those church-based excommunicants no longer considered worthy of being listened to, read, or discussed. But of course, I had long ago known my Christian community would react in such a way. They were totally predictable within their defined stereotype. And yet, I had decided when starting this blog/website, to reach out to the "Nones and Dones" of the religious world who have been left along the roadside by conservative Christians uncared and untended.
So when I began sketching out a contemporary Christian faith some dozen years ago at Relevancy22 one of the first subjects I tackled was evolution. And over the years, as I expanded, deconstructed, and explored my conservative (actually, fundamental) Baptist roots, I was able to update my Christian faith in a very positive way.... Which genuinely surprised me even though I was personally expecting this result as I went about my task.
Hence, the 2023 series here on the subject of Noah's Ark and the Genesis Flood is meant to be a help to those Christians willing to cross over the Rubicon of biblical literalism to a positive-based process theology (which yes, can more easily adopt progressive evangelicalism than traditional evangelicalism is able to do on its own). Like Julius Caesar who crossed the sacrosanct Rubicon river into Rome Proper intending to upend the Senators holding his designs back to make Rome a world power, so today popularized Christianity faces it's own demise and destruction should it continue to withdraw from the turbulent world into it's own isolated beliefs about God and the bible.
I.
As it stands, the Bible for Westernized Christians rests upon an eclectic philosophical platform of Platonic Greek Hellenism found from its Patriarchal documents to its ascetically dogmatic Medieval concerns of eons ago. My own fundamental Baptist (Dispensationalism) and Reformed evangelical (Calvinism) tenants rested upon these same creaky platforms as did my later college and seminary education. Hence, it has taken awhile but Relevancy22 has become a composite of what the postmodern Church should be discussing and moving towards today instead of the entrenchment I see all around it's deemed sacred borderlands (...no less helped by Trumpian socio-political attitudes of White nationalism's anti-Constitutional, anti-democracy, jargon believing that equality and justice are unworthy subjects to be implemented into its self-described d-e-a-d Constitutional beliefs).
Surprisingly, the solution I stumbled upon was not a new hermeneutic as I was trained to explore and construct from my many years of exegetical studies of the biblical text but one far deeper and more directionally helpful in many ways:
- Firstly, I sought a new hermeneutic but later "punted" (an American football term) after exploring over 55 contemporary approaches to my own Covenantal and Thematic approaches. I decided upon choosing the simplest and easiest hermeneutical interpretation of the bible to implement across the many church interpretations I was observing. That of placing God's love at the center of theology rather than the ambiguous evangelical interjection of "The BIBLE" ... which was subjectively dependent upon a fellowship's religious opinion. To me, it seemed implicitly implied that people understood how to love even if they wished not to love. Hence, the church must be above all other interpretations a body of people who chose to love one another and the world at large as expressed through Jesus, as God come to earth two thousand years ago. This would be my new hermeneutical center instead of some elaborate schemata.
- Secondly, I stumbled across the most obvious and completely sublevel, unconscious, hidden need shouting at me to find a better philosophic foundation for any biblical Christian theology to construct itself upon. To wit, in my deconstructive studies - and by the Spirit's help - I quickly came to recognize the unhelpfulness of our current westernized forms of isolating, binary/dipolar, formulistic, and inorganic approaches inhabiting the fundamental philosophies of science, literature, social studies, economics, and so on. Nor did the Continental philosophies provide the integral solution I was looking for... although I did find these substantially more helpful that I did the American forms of dissecting language via syllogistic expression, linguistic orthography, or stoic definition to mention a few. All of which left me stale and nonplussed. However, I could at least take the idea of Continental narrative form into the bible to construct theological mega-narratives across the historic and literary pages of the bible.
But after awhile I finally discovered AN Whitehead's 1910s Philosophy of Organism later to become known in the 50s as Process Philosophy. It's religious derivative became known as Process Theology generally (relative to all world religions), and for my own pursuits I then applied it to outmoded traditional and evangelical non-processual Christian thought-and-mechanism to describe a Process Christianity specific to the Christian faith.
As a result, I could leave the secular systems wending their way through traditional and evangelical Christianity and apply process thought from the bible out into the world with immediate and profound application spiritually and pragmatically. It was a windfall I wasn't expecting and one exactly which today's Christian faith must embrace to rescue secularized Christianity from it's own self-imposed restrictions and shortsighted versions of itself.
In the main, we may now expand and deepen any biblical doctrine by way of eisegetical application to state without remit that the bible is no more Spirit-inspired in its day as today's many sermons, commentaries, and church polities are today. Of course with qualification, for not unlike Balaam's ass, there are a lot of bad beliefs spoken in the name of Christ.
>>> Which is also to say that God is Alive and Well and hasn't stopped speaking to us through the Spirit since creation's beginning.
>>> That we haven't been left alone by God since the supposedly "closure, or sealing, of Scripture".
>>> That by the Spirit's inspiration we may responsibly sort through all the bad theology from all the good theology spoken-and-written about God over the eons with a more consistently loving theology which has been compiling itself since Moses' day by the Spirit's interaction with humanity and creation.
Again, to sum up... "What Spirit-based processual theology is that?"
Simply, God is Love and we are commanded to love even as Jesus commanded us to love. And now, via Jesus, we may speak it and act it more forcefully through processual theology as an integral philosophical common ground spanning all of man's beliefs and knowledge in hearty correspondence with the processual creation humanity find's itself within.
II.
Like many others, I have chosen to accept the task of rewriting Christianity on a more positive and contemporary basis than has been done lately in evangelical literature and beliefs. I call it process theology based upon Whitehead's (via Hegel via the ancients) resurrected 1900's philosophy of Processual Organism. That all the cosmos, like the human body, and like nature around us, acts together as one.
Moreover, I and other processual minds, have been updating Whitehead's proposal ever since his student, Bertrand Russell, decided he wouldn't by turning towards his own version of avowed atheism. In my assessment, God had called Bertrand away from the task at hand so that those of us who were the more willing might forge the way ahead.
So then, a long time ago I use to be a big 'B' BIBLE guy and now have become a little 'b' bible guy. Jesus is still my Savior and Lord EVEN AS I continue to preach a gospel based on God's LOVE in a more consistent manner across all bible dogmas and doctrines I had learned as a youth. But the important difference is that I've reset the "BIBLE" away from my interpretation of it as the CENTER of all subjective theology to "GOD'S LOVE as modeled by Christ Jesus who MUST EVER BE THE CENTER OF ALL OUR THEOLOGIES.
Moreover, I find comfort in the fact that a few years ago when reading of a fellow Christian brother in the Lord was similarly moved by the Spirit of God towards this same crucial theological impasse... he was the newly elected Pope of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, who described his theology in this way:
Here is my strawman's list of unhealthy practices of so-called "Biblical" Literalism:
- The literalistic interpretive approach to reading the bible is not helpful when making assertions of God and God's activity amongst us. The practice of literalism prevents cultural narrative and adaptation from helpfully occurring where-and-when it must within today's turbulent societies in lovingly helpful and directive ways.
- Too, literalistic bible dogmas preserve poor, if not oppressive, cultural practices which are not loving, fair, equal, nor justly applied towards others deemed heathen, pagan, or "not of us."
Thus and thus, the AUTHOR of the BIBLE is to be more revered than our own SURMISED beliefs - including the past beliefs and practices of our more ancient brethren narrated in the bible. If God is Love, and Jesus showed to us God's love, than God's followers - especially those who claim the name Christian - must learn to love in all ways.
And if the outcome of our faith is not Love than let us no longer read the Gospel of John, nor the book of I John, nor the book of James - all centered in Love.
And for that matter, let us then continue to practice all the bad theology of God mentioned in the bible so that "God-fearing" Christians might continue to oppress, humiliate, guilt-trip, harm, torture (sic trans-therapies, for instance), and kill (sic, modern day warfare) all those not willing to comply with a God of holy-sternness-and-high-transcendental-unavailability.
And in my assessment, if this is what the Christian faith is, and continues to do, than I want none of it. I want Jesus and not institutionalized fakery.
That said, its time to bring our beliefs about God and God's creation up-to-date so that our Christian witness may have a profoundly deep basis along with a high preachability to our fellowships and to the world at large... that the Christian gospel is centered in a God of love through and through and through.
Amen and Amen,
R.E. Slater
November 2, 2023
edited November 3, 2023