Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Index

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

Friday, November 22, 2024

Index - Evangelical Politics

When I began my movement out of conservative-evangelicalism I decided to write of my journey from time-to-time.... Here then is the log of that journey since 2009 sharing personal thoughts as-I-went of my resolve to explore my fundamental past of the 1960s through the lens of my contemporary experience as I had matured in the Christian faith.

Firstly, when marrying, I switch to my wife's church after ministring at my own for the first five years of our marriage. Hers was of Reformed background to my own fundamental Baptist heritage and was then in fellowship with the early forms of evangelical Calvinism (initially birthed out of the Billy Graham crusades). My own Baptist heritage stressed dispensational teachings whereas my wife's was covenant reform in structure and one I liked a lot and still do. I was 32 when we switched churches.

After 20 years our interdenomina-tional bible church birthed Mars Hill of Grand Rapids which was led by a young kid by the name of Rob Bell. We waited a month before joining at the urging of our pastor, Ed Dobson. When we did, we little understood the culturally progressive evangelical move-ment we were entering into. This massively public outreach movement was known as the emergent (or emerging) church. This movement began in the late 1990s (Mars started in 1999) and lasted until the 2010s. During this time many faith changes were taking place in West Michigan. Many believers came; many left; and, many things were witnessed as the church blazed forward.

Since our 20 years of worship and ministry at Mars I had aged, our kids had grown up and left, and I was thinking about retirement. During this same time my former evangelicalical faith had become hardened while the newly-borne emergent church movement merged back into progressive denominationalism from whence it came (this also included Catholicism as well).

When finally retiring after 30 years in the tech industry in 2009 I immediately began writing verse until I ran off my 20th century modernal foundations. I sensed I needed a new rugged foundation from which to write when positively exploring postmodernism for the Christian faith. I felt I needed a more expansive outlook which would take several years to find.

At first, I turned from Americanized Western Analytical modernal thought to Continental philosophy searching through it's many components. After several years I fortunately stumbled across Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism and found in it a very broad and deep view of life which could supercede all current forms of neo-Platonic and Aristotelian world views. Moreover, it could easily connect the sciences and academia as well as have close fellowship with any of the world religion's processual elements. A Process worldview became then the ideal form in which to expand my Christian faith in whatever mystical stew post-evangelicalism was already brewing. Process Christianity easily embraced all the processual elements of the ancient Hebraic faith while supercedeing the church's centuries-old Hellenistic and Scholastic Vatican faith forms.

Here then was my turning point after several yerrs of deconstructing and reconstructing my faith it was somewhere around 2014 when my metaphysical and ontologic center felt cosmologically sound and became re-centered in people and love as any good progressive view of life and faith would teach. It was built upon a changeling environment such as seen in processually-orientated evolutionary science and would behave benevolently in it's interior structures organically, sociologically, and spiritually, when preaching a God of love over hate and division.

Naturally this faith displacement would demand removal of the evangelical church's Calvinism which was itself very old and filled with the church's artificial constructs; a displacement requiring a more thoughtful replacement of beliefs towards an agency-runned world that was open in all of its future aspects while also poignantly based in felt relational, experiential and spiritual forms of processual upward lift against all elements which would processually move against it (remember, the world is built of agency-based process, whether good or bad) This is how I would expect God's indefatible spirit to operate in a world filled with divine blessings, intention, fellowship, hope, and love.

What once began with a deep Spirit burden to find a way forward for a Christianity grown old and desperate has now lead out with its best foot forward in momentary success against all which would destroy the Christian faith - including the church itself lost in the heady worlds of imperialism. A success which can affect the world of religion, science, economy, and any willing ecological society or civilization in intrinsically positive ways. Ways which many minds and hearts, faiths and organizations are now attempting in outlook, demeanor, behavior, and organization.