Introduction
If reality itself is processual, that is, always in motion, relational, and becoming, then the Bible can also be read as a processual text of lively compositions. Instead of viewing biblical narratives as a static deposit of divine facts, we might understand it as a dynamic record of evolving encounters between God, creation, and humanity. Its stories are not frozen mytho-historic relics but living testimonies of growth, struggle, and transformation.
[I use mytho-historic as a cautionary awareness to reading the bible blankly, woodenly, even literally, as it was culled, collected, and composed, to reflect a theo-historic view of God, people, and their socio-religious legacies which must require our contemporary redaction across multiple levels of engagement such as we our doing here in this essay.
This, as opposed to our earlier educations by our denomination or faith group teaching that the bible was a divine deposit consisting of fixed, divine formulae, rather than a growing opus of ancient beliefs and practices evolving over time attempting to explain who God was, is, and is doing presently. - re slater]
This means that the figures of the Bible are not perfect icons but people-in-process, their lives unfolding through doubt, failure, and renewal. The events of the Bible are not single, closed moments but turning points in an ongoing narrative of a people wrestling with their place in the universe. Further, the "becoming God" who is revealed in Scripture is not a distant or unchanging deity in the sense of being unmoved by our circumstances, but is deeply relational-and- responsive to the world as it is affected by human choices. Who is continually engaged in co-creating healing, value, and love, with us across all that we call life.
So then, to read the Bible processually (rather than as closed, unconnected events) is to see it as an unfinished, evolving story. One that continues it's journey through us. That is, God's journey coupled with our journey, in joint collaboration and co-creativity. We are not merely interpreters of Scripture but participants in the same Scriptural process of becoming. What follows is an exploration of how this way of reading the bible - and God's Self in relation to ourselves and the world - might reshape our understanding of past biblical lives, events, and communities which might open fresh pathways for the church's evolution towards a "spiritually enlivening and becoming faith" in today's socio-religious narratives of societal harm, oppression, sin and evil, currently being conducted by the maga-trumpian church upon humanity.
I
1. Creation (Genesis 1-2)
Traditional Reading: God creates a finished, perfect world in six days.
Processual Reading: Creation is not a one-time act but an ongoing process of becoming. The “days” may be symbolized as processual stages of order emerging from a cosmic chaos. This teaches that God is not outside of creation dictating fixed cosmic forms but coaxing novelty and complexity into an ever evolving cosmic existence. The creation story of Genesis then becomes an invitation: that even as creation continues evolving today - currently understood as "climate change" due to a "world-wide ecological collapse" imposed by man's unheeding "anthropocene era" - we are to become ecologically wise co-creators with God in shaping earth's responding future under our applied energies and acts.
2. The Call of Abraham (Genesis 12)
Traditional Reading: Abraham is chosen once-for-all as the father of a nation.
Processual Reading: Abraham’s journey is an illustration of a processual faith in lively stages of becoming. As he doubts, fails, and negotiates with God, Abraham continues to grow in trust and assurance of the God who called him from Ur of the Chaledees into the Land of Canaan. The promise, “I will bless you and make you a blessing”, is an open-ended, unfolding promise not only to himself but to all generations who would trust and follow God's call to love, to forgive, to heal. Abraham models not divine perfection but divine relational growth, showing that God’s call is dynamic and adapts to a myriad of human responses and circumstances.
3. Exodus Liberation (Exodus 1–15)
Traditional Reading: A miraculous liberation of Israel through signs and plagues.
Processual Reading: Exodus reveals a continuous process of event-liberation beginning with Israel’s cries for deliverance, to an evolving series of confrontation with Pharaoh, culminating in their release and harsh wilderness journey towards personal and spiritual freedom. God cannot grant or provide freedom instantly but must work with a willing respondent, Moses, the people of Israel, and even the stubbornness-and-hard-heartedness of Pharaoh. In retrospective, the Exodus of God's people is never finished, in every new, processual struggle for justice will echoe the creational cry for deliverance and liberation.
4. The Exile (2 Kings 24–25; Jeremiah; Isaiah 40–55)
Traditional Reading: A punishment for Israel’s sins.
Processual Reading: Israel's exile is a dynamic story of processual loss and reorientation. In repetitive stories of exile (first Northern Israel, then Southern Israel), the once tribal federation, and later Jewish monarchy, must rethink it's wayward practices and harming acts before God’s healing and restorative presence: once a people tied to land and temple, now a people lost upon foreign lands needing hope and adaptation to their current circumstances. The prophets reinterpreted Israel's suffering as a path toward spiritual renewal, showing how personal and societal catastrophe may become a process of corporate transformation. Exile is not the end of the story but the seedbed of new redemptive visions of covenant and restoration in whatever fashion it may become correspondent to the conditions of the time. As example, today's Palestinian people living in Gaza have experience great injustice and hardship, death and destruction, at the hands of "God's people"... standing in their societal narrative, how might they - and we - respond, repent, and restore the futures of one another toward greater loving harmony and value?
5. The Life of Jesus (Gospels)
Traditional Reading: Jesus’ mission was predetermined: to die for sins.
Processual Reading: Jesus’ life was an evolving process of becoming fully the Christ - growing in wisdom, compassion, and courage as he embodies God’s love. Even his ministry evolves as he listens, responds, heals, teaches, and adapts to people’s needs. In penultimate movement, his life and death upon a Roman cross of humiliation and suffering is not a fixed, one-time, atoning transaction but a timeless, relational series of transactions where divine love suffers with humanity and transforms creational despair into new possibilities of healing and love.
6. Pentecostal Empowerment (Acts 2)
Traditional Reading: The Holy Spirit descends once, marking the birth of the church.
7. Revelation Renewal (Book of Revelation)
Traditional Reading: A literal roadmap to the end of the world.
Processual Reading: Revelation is a process-vision born from a Spirit-community under oppression. It transforms despair into symbolic hope, affirming that God’s love will guide history towards healing. The imagery (doors, thrones, new creation) points not to fixed predictions but to open possibilities: that in every eschatological age, God invites us into new thresholds of justice, beauty, and renewal.
In Summary
A processual reading of biblical narratives does not dismiss the Bible’s life stories or events but refreshes and reframes them as dynamic encounters between the Divine-Human Cooperative in a dynamically evolving and living story. Each moment of Creation, Call, Liberation, Exile, Incarnation, Empowerment, or Resurrection Renewal is significant life-stage of a larger process where God and humanity continually shape one another towards generative becoming.
II
1. The Bible as Process Text
The Bible is not a frozen archive of divine dictation but a living record of evolving encounters with God. Its stories, laws, poems, and visions reflect the process of communities struggling to name, understand, and live in relation to the divine.
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Early traditions portray God as tribal warrior, while later prophets proclaim a universal and merciful God.
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Laws are reinterpreted (Exodus, Deuteronomy, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount), showing adaptation to new contexts.
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Narratives are rewritten (Kings vs. Chronicles; Isaiah in multiple stages), revealing that Scripture itself is a process of reinterpretation.
This means we honor the Bible not for static finality but for its dynamic witness to ongoing becoming.
2. Biblical Lives as Living Processes
Instead of treating biblical figures as unchanging heroes or villains, a processual reading sees them as imperfect yet dynamic participants in God's unfolding purposes:
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Abraham is not simply “the father of faith” but a man who struggled, doubted, and grew into faithfulness across failures and doubts
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David is not simply “a man after God’s own heart,” but a king whose moral failures and spiritual songs shaped his processual becoming towards a capable leader for Israel.. We see David's struggle and successes in his psalms reflecting his spiritual process.
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Peter is not “the Rock” from the start, but a fisherman continually transformed through denial, forgiveness, and yet also, his restoration by God towards his calling to lead the church of Christ.
This approach honors their journeys rather than freezing them in final judgments.
3. Biblical Events as Processual Turning Points
Biblical events are not isolated miracles or timeless decrees but process-events that shape and reshape communities. Across the bible we read of the divine-human relationship as continuous, nested processes rather than as one-time, closed acts:
Creation: Was not a fixed act of God transacted once, but is an ongoing emergence of creational novelty.
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The Exodus is a process of liberation still echoing in every human struggle for justice, not simply a single moment locked in the experiences of a past ancient generation.
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The Exile is not an act of divine punishment but a reorientation of catastrophe birthing prophetic visions of repentance and renewal proving identity, community, and assurance of God's abiding presence.
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Jesus' Life, Death, and Resurrection is not only a transactional moment in history but an unfolding series of ongoing possibilities towards redemptive transformation in the world beginning first with the repenting church.
Each event is part of a larger unfolding of events all moving across open futures that are not sealed or preformed. Today, God's people are those who align with justice, mercy, and love as earthly invitations to continue the divine story of reclamation and renewal.
4. Scripture as Process Testimony
The Bible itself can be read as the record of evolving human encounters with God. Texts do not reveal one fixed picture but show development, conflict, reinterpretation, and creativity:
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Laws shift across eras as communities adapt (compare Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Jesus’ teaching).
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Images of God grow from warrior to shepherd, from lawgiver to suffering servant, from distant king to indwelling Spirit.
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Theology matures as people wrestle with disaster (Lamentations), exile (Isaiah), injustice (Amos), or persecution (Revelation).
This reflects a processual truth: humanity is growing in its vision of God.
5. God in Processual Relationship
- God “repents” or “changes” his heart and mind (as in Genesis 6 or Exodus 32) because divine love is ever and always dynamically engaged with an evolving creation via its suffering and triumphs.
- God’s covenant promises adapt across timeful contexts, whether with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, or Christ, each life event and life force widening the scope of divine fidelity committed to widening responsive creational freedom "to become" in generative value one to the other.
- Jesus' Incarnation embodies the fullest processual revelation of a God-with-us who becomes with humanity and creation in a shared, co-evolving journey of human struggle, opening new paths toward wholeness and healing, rather than succumbing to non-authenticating patterns of stagnancy, regression, or resistance to God's ever-moving Spirit.
6. The Early Church in Communal Processual Becoming
- Pentecost initiates, but the Spirit’s works unfold in adaptation: Jewish to Gentile mission, house churches to networks, diverse gifts to shared mission.
- The church wrestles with conflict and discernment (Acts 15, Paul’s letters), showing that unity emerges through process, not uniformity.
- Communities embody unfinished processes of faith living testing practices of love, justice, inclusion, and resilience under persecution.
- The early church becomes a model for every age: faith as communal becoming, shaped by Spirit, history, and struggle.
7. Revelation: Vision of Open Future
- Doors, thrones, and new creation signal thresholds for renewed becoming, not closed predictions.
- It proclaims that divine love persists amid empire and suffering.
- Its end is not final destruction but renewed creation: thus teaching open horizons of continuing transformation.
- Revelation’s power is not in foretelling an apocalyptic end but in inviting continual hope and faithful endurance.
8. Implications for Faith Today
- Scripture as dialogue: not rulebook but conversation partner in discernment.
- Ethics as adaptive: love must be embodied differently in each context, as Jesus modeled within his own cultural context.
- Hope as unfolding: setbacks and crises can birth new futures, as exile birthed restoration, as crucifixion birthed resurrection.
- Mission as contextual: like the early church, we must reimagine the gospel for our pluralistic world.
Living Process for Today
| Aspect | Traditional Reading | Processual Reading | Implication Today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scripture | Rulebook | Dialogue | Discernment |
| Ethics | Timeless rules | Adaptive love | Contextual justice |
| Hope | Fixed destiny | Ongoing renewal | Resilience |
| Mission | Static formula | Contextual gospel | Pluralistic engagement |
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