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, October 13, 2024

Three Shorts: How to Think About the Bible, Civil Democracy, and Our Social Contracts with One Another



How to Think About the Bible

By R.E. Slater

When the Christian faith makes the following paradigm shift, it will make so much more sense than it does now. We will no longer have to defend the many indefensible things found in the Bible. As the great German theologian Karl Barth explained, the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men. It contains the word, it mediates the word.

Or as Peter Enns aptly explains, the Bible is where God allows his children to tell his story, however imperfectly they tell it.

The 16th century Protestant Reformer John Calvin called the Bible ‘the lisping of God.’ It’s God speaking with a speech impediment.

God knew what he was doing to ‘give’ an imperfect book to the church. It has been worshipped as an idol far too often and has become a replacement for God’s own authority at times in the history of the church rather than that which leads us to God and his love.

R.E. Slater
October 13, 2024


On Civil Democracy & Our Social
Contract with One Another

As you will find in the last two posted Facebook articles describing Leonard Leo's influence against America's importantly liberal, and generally revered, founding documents, "The Bill of Rights," "The Declaration of Independence," and "The United States Constitution." That these indignants live among us acting as ruthless oppressors to our nation's founding principles.

Such civil organizations use democracy to suppress democracy; they are complexly operating sources of conservative religious supremacists drawn lately again from Maga-Protestantism and sectarian-Catholicism working to withdraw our national identity we have inherited from our founding fathers to protect and expand their founding documents envisioning a new, less democratic humanity.

I cannot imagine a personal nor social identity uprooted from such vitally necessary human expressions of the human cause. What I can imagine is unchaining my corporate soul from all dehumanizing religious and sectarian groups. That I can, and must now, imagine leaving highly prejudicial and personally dehumanizing forces advocating against the sacred trust we bear for one another. That we are to guard each other from illicit forces seeking to deny our necessary and needful social contracts to one another as an evolving social species dedicated to life, liberty, and justice to the common man.

Who must uncommonly rise up against all dark forces inhabiting our souls, churches, and social/civil contracts by re-committing ourselves to the founding elements held within all cultures and races against the genocidal forces of brother against brother, and man against man.

That we hold within us a superior nobility driven by a greater force we may describe as a "God of love" who is committed against far darker and dread forces belittling our souls as worthless progenies bourned upon a divinely good and loving God who is the Primal Cause ruling over all succeeding secondary causes of death, cruelty, injustness, and oppression.

The great authors to humanity's dignity, worthiness and generators of light and love, have attested to the truths of the human soul and not to its negation.

This then is my primal identity, my purpose, and my aspiration. Committing to nothing less worthy when resisting the ruthless soul forces of indignity, corruption, injustice, and oppression.

R.E. Slater
October 13, 2024


My Journey into Processual Theology
(or, An Evolving Processual Sociology)

The Great Horizon is far enough to seem impossible
yet near enough to fire the imagination.


John Cobb has greatly influenced the direction of Whiteheadian process thought in the sancto-spheres of complexly organized moral, social, civil, scientific, ecological, and religious institutional behaviours held in their jointly organic reconstruction and awakening process activities when renewing processual traditions of human civilization.

Myself, having retiring in my early fifties I thought I might live out a retired life of travel, group ministry, and community involvement. And, in a way I did. But in another way I almost immediately began a deeply psychic reawakening of my spirit towards grander visions unrealized within my older, inherited self.

After nearly a full year of sacramental wilderness journey I found my former self deeply etched and scribed within when applying the worn motto of "learning to live in the realms of doubt and uncertainty." By it's sole force it opened up a new reality to me. A new living-ness. An enlivening-and-becoming reality to which I could apply processual being-ness towards a processual becoming-ness.

Almost immediately I took a heavy interest in what the great literatures and philosophical traditions could teach a society when committed to one another's resurrecting fellowship by applying the processual rubric of ecological civilization with it's vast array of interdependent social-relational interactions within itself and outside itself - described at once as an earthly-and-cosmological soul of present attenuative being/becoming-ness.

How we must enliven nature-around-us by acutely listening to its hoary eons of evolving sociality as it becomes in momentary processual formation truer to its divinely birthed nature and guiding (Holy) Spirit imbuing body and soul.

Hence, the need to address how static classic theism must be absorbed into a living processual theism which at once, as Primal Cause, breathed a processual DNA into the eco-cosmic soul of psychically alive processes requiring a processual cosmo-metaphysic, ontology and enlivening ethos.

I then began a writing campaign using non-processual and process-based poetry and processually alive Christian thought to inform, educate and reconstruct what processual societies in relational, experiential, and religio-cultural formation to one another might look like.

Seventeen years later I have actively published the need for humanity to reconstruct within itself an open, organically alive, beneficial systems of thought and living in social evolutionary context to have been the better path taken. A path that required the publication of my processual journey from then to now in hopes that fellow process travellers might be enriched to inspire humanity towards renewing beneficial fellowships incorporating open, processual and fluid symbolic language built atop an eco-cosmology centered in atoning redemption and compassionate resurrection wherein we each take back control of our destinies built on the simplest of constructions, that of faith, hope and love.

R.E. Slater
October 13, 2024

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