Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: The Lands, Maps, People and Events of the Bible

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, February 18, 2024

The Lands, Maps, People and Events of the Bible

A Few Words About the Timelines & Maps

by R.E. Slater

I thought these set of timelines and maps might be helpful to those studying the traditional teachings of the bible. Nothing has been changed from the FCM bible site except to add the traditional Major Periods of the Old Testament above which I'm sure they would approve.

Myself, I was raised in 1950s-60s Christian fundamentalism and entered into 1970s evangelicalism before it decided to become conservative (1980s; which then necessarily spawned progressive evangelicalism as they made of God an evil thing which God is not).

About 13-14 years ago, after going through a deep darkness of spirit, it forced me to begin re-thinking everything I had centered my life in, and had lived through, my first fifty years of life. From this divinely appointed wilderness I began to make fundamental changes.

I first needed to deconstruct my current beliefs before reconstructing them. This journey you may read about over the first several years of this website. Anyway, I decided to drop Calvinism and go back to my Baptist roots based in Arminianism. I then updated Arminianism towards and Open and Relational Theology set which I reset together rather than leaving them apart as was currently being done.

All this time I gave preference to Jesus and God's love over that of my learned interpretation of the bible from youth through seminary (sic, a 4 year program resulting in an M.Div. with a Major in NT and minor in pastoral). I next leaned into progressive evangelical Christianity while keeping to Covenant Reformed Theology.

The final thing which the Lord's Spirit burdened my heart with was to look at my faith's philosophical foundations. Which I did. First Westernism. Then European Continentalism till finally stumbling across Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism - later to be known as Process Philosophy.

This I found was flexible enough to mimic nature around me; to incorporate today's sciences and societal-era movements. By it I could release all previous bible creeds, doctrines and dogma from their foundations of Westernized Hellenism (aka Platonism, Scholasticism, Enlightenment, and Modernistic philosophic theologies).

Why? Because I needed to re-center all these (eclectic) synthetic PHILOSOPHICAL structures around Jesus and God's Love. Hence, Open and Relational (Arminian) Theology became Open and Relational Process Theology. The theology I had worked towards required a release from Westernized thinking to a Philosophical Process which could work much better than they could in their past eras and timelines as well as form a better framework for any future eras to come... including postmodernism, metamodernism, and whatever else will come by and by.

Which is also why I write topically many times rather than expositionally. Not that I can't, but my calling of God is to write out of a process context in which to reset the bible and bible-thinking into a more proper processual framework where it has become out-of-focus and misinterpreted centuries ago through past philosophical influences.

By citing these timelines and maps below, I find them helpful for the bible student but will caution that as I have worked through Christian ideas and doctrines over the past years - and hope to continue doing so in the future - I will necessarily be recontextualizing many past and/or popular Christian teachings with processual content, events, ideas, ethics, and science all built around Jesus and God's love.

Meaning, that all of the articles here will be distinctly different than what I once had diligently been taught and learned... and what I suspect will confront many readers here themselves. However, I was forced into this vocation by the Lord. I really didn't have a choice. I had retired to try my hand at poetry (which I did for three years nonstop) to find myself serving on governmental boards and committees, and working in local, regional, or statewide quasi-political environmentalism. I never intended to develop, expand, nor write about process philosophy, cosmology, natural or panpsychic theology.

But we all have to start somewhere so I'll start here creating a website I didn't know how to make or maintain though my technology proficiency helped a lot. Nor did I receive help when asking for it, surrounded by those who refused acknowledging my internal spiritual pain.

So the Lord and I started where I was and went together from there. Along the way I have better channels and contacts than I once did and am glad to have spent my retirement years in these pursuits.... Not unlike AN Whitehead who quit mathematics at age 62 and went on to develop a full-scale, complex, Hegelian-like, philosophy unknown to the world. He finished at age 68, which is where my age sits as well. This makes me laugh a bit when I think of it though I never knew the prestige that Whitehead had, nor want it, frankly. It's easy to write unhindered by people's responses.

Anyway, please enjoy. And as I continue my Garden of Eden series I will ease this series into a series on The Evolution of God, Man and Religion before the bible was written; before Abraham had lived; or before the Jewish faith was even a thing. It will deal with evolutionary human paleontology where I will continue to apply process thought into both the church's language, its bible doctrines and beliefs, as well as into today's quantum sciences et. al.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

February 18, 2024

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HOLY BIBLE

Old Testament / Maps

by JCM

We present to you a detailed description of the geography of the lands of the Holy Bible at the time of its events, where the best international references and manuscripts in both Arabic and English were used.

We carefully pictured the events of the Bible according to the Bible’s chronological order, placed the names of the biblical cities, and wrote titles explaining the content of each map with an assistant index to help our maps to facilitate for Bible enthusiasts studying and searching in the Holy Bible.

These maps are copyright protected for the benefit of FMC world © Copying, photocopying or using them for the interests of buying and selling is liable to legal punishment.

By sharing it through social media, you will become a partner with us in our service to the word of God †

This service was performed by the blessed servants of the LORD: