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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