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, August 25, 2024

What Is Divine Love and How Is Love Holy?


What Is Divine Love
and How Is Love Holy?

Through the years, starting around 2009, I made a decision to move away from evangelicalism's platforms to revere God's holiness and chose to lift up over holiness God's deep and resonous love. That is, to define all divine attributes on the basis of divine love and not holiness. This was no easy task when it came to western biblicism but once begun it became easier and easier to discern the difference and write about affectively.

Why? Because all the doctrines I was taught over the decades had been outcomes of God's holiness including many of the historical Christian creeds. The local church has tried mightily to live, incorporate, and produce, the impossible reconstruction of the human character. A holy perfectness that is fraught by every move and angle of our human being. And as both church and religion did so it found itself leaning deeply into the religious side of our dark nature and made a Jesus faith twice the child of cruelty, brainwashing, and moral sectarianism, if not death itself both while attempting to live out a compromised faith and in fact.

As such, by 2009, I had been reading of God's love on every page of the bible, including those biblical narrations which fell deeply afoul of the divine presence of love when it errantly portrayed human depravity as attributable to God's direction and will. Thus making of a loving God a God of cruelty, war, and oppression. But in Jesus, when reading of human actions in both the Old and New Testament we know these narratives cannot be attributable to God but to the depravity of the human heart.

Furthermore, over the many years of a Semitic Jewish nation struggling between divine holiness (Ezra's stoic Essenes come to mind) vs divine love, Jesus then came along to reright the religious argument for Jewish holiness showing God to be a loving God by Jesus' own words and deeds of how to love one another (more or less, by simply meeting the moment as it came). That by such loving actions and attitudes we followers of Jesus are to do the same for no gain - not even heaven - as we should by love's qualities of selfless service to one another.... Thus, holiness comes by way of a qualitative way of living out one's heart, mind and soul even as it is Jesus' holiness of love that all human actions are loving founded upon the God of Love and result in holiness in its production or outcome.

Lastly, the doctrines of holiness demand rather a controlling God of dictate, fiat, and enactment BUT doctrines of grace, mercy, and peace do not advocate such for such a determinative Creator nor divine partner who isn't a controlling theocrat, ruler or presence but an uncontrolling Gid with all things good and decent. This is where freewill comes in against the church idea of a controlling, all-determinative divinity (known as Calvinism vs Jacobus Arminian's position of freewill and love).

In Jacobus' theology a God of love doesn't require control of creation or the future but has lovingly birthed God's Self, God's Essence or Image, into creation that a loving freewilled agency may exercise itself to its own conflicted being... loving freewill is, by nature, conflicted. It may choose love or unlove, else love wouldn't be part of our freewill agency. Hence, we live in a world which is conflicted towards generosity and goodness or evil and depravity. It is not one thing or another but all things. And in a God of love the amazement is God's own story of loving freewill presence who birthed the universe for a loving future. A future which blossoms in fidelity with God's own Spirit of soulful repentance, purposeful redemption, minded renewal, non-oppressive reconstruction, spiritual reform, constitutional recreation, and atoning resurrection.

So then, Love is the only sufficient answer to any church or religion against it's own doctrines of hypocrisy, legalism, pride, and manmade (stoic) holiness in religious attempts to control a depraved religious nature seemingly always bent to the wrong thing, the wrong God, and wrong actions. Here, is where soulful repentance must begin at our own design to propitiate=atone ourselves by our own ragged works. Known as the profuse act of pride, man would be his own pious savior should we turn to this direction. But love is self-giving and even in the last instance it must always turn to another for true relational propitiation and never to oneself (sic, process theology).

These bespeak divine actions of restitution, expiation, reparation, salvation, regeneration, and redemption. And though the human soul yearns for these qualities it cannot do so on its own. It requires an atoning God to effect these qualities into our star-crossed heart by the divine act of covenanted restitution upon God's own self. Even as this was the basis of the Abrahamic Covenant when walking between the sacrificed carcasses; or Moses' lifted Rod against viperous bites; or David's please for divine mercy; or the prophet's cry for atoning help. So too was Gidcraised upon a cross between sacrificed brutes by viperous religionists crying Abba Father as lasting sacrifice. This is divine love.



Thus and thus, I left evangelicalism's "holy control mindset" and became a mix of progressive, loving ex-vangelical, and post-evangelical in my soul's associations, rewriting all the theologies I was taught using a process-based philosophical theology centered in love. Over the years I've written thousands of articles on what this means across a breadth of human activity and disciplines. It took awhile to find that the simplest energy on earth is that of love,... but once found, I've applied it over and over and over again to humanity's histories, sciences, churches, socio-economic politics, ecologies, and religions.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
August 25, 2024

*A personal note.

I have been struggling with surgical infections for nearly ten years. This past spring a final, determinative act was made to return me to full health. Over the recent months I have been adjusting to a new reality which has caused some reciprocating actions in my activities. Consequently, I have ceased activity across a plethora of volunteer community duties over the past 17 years of retirement. I also have lately assumed the caretake of raising very small grandchildren. I am also experiencing a general weariness of soul, if not a general slowing down by age. I kindly then ask prayer for strength, energy, vision, discernment, and endurance for the days and years ahead, Lord willing.

I've given these many years of retirement to Christian testimony how any faith, and especially a Christian faith, may be, become, and remain steadfast through the dessimination of a variety of resources mentioned throughout "Relevancy22's" digital pages. Use them to help sort through faith issues and to build awareness in the many ways one may minister by labor, calling, direction, or witness.

Thank you for this service to you by the God who loves and uses even the small voices of this world to speak out for loving embrace, equity, fairness, and compassion in all matters of living which we do every, single day of opportunity. Peace. - res