Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Mar 3, 2025

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

Monday, March 3, 2025

Matt Segall - Process Studies, Imagination, Whitehead, and the Panpsychic Quality of Feeling

Matt Segall's Process Lectures on

Imagination, Whitehead, and the Panpsychic

Quality of Feeling

58:26Now playing

Spotlights, 3.14, Process Studies and Imagination, with Matthew Segall

1:21:56Now playing

Philosophy in the Spotlight: Dr. Matthew Segall: Whitehead and Process

21:37Now playing

Physics Within the Limits of Feeling Alone | Matthew David Segall

Index - Process PanPsychic Panentheism

Three Views of Panentheism: View 1

Three Views of Panentheism: View 2

Three Views of Panentheism: View 3

Index - Process PanPsychic Panentheism

Philosophic Explorations into the following Constructs or Categories
Process Philosophy, Theology & Science as described by Alfred North Whitehead; originally known as Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, wherein the cosmos is viewed organically rather than materially.
Panpsychism - Is the immaterial aspect of any philosophic cosmology. Examples: cosmological holograms, psychic consciousness, the science of time, an aethereal descriptors of feeling, beauty, love, etc.
Panentheism - God is beheld as the Primary Process of all succeeding processes; this God then is viewed as the Creator, Organizer, and Originating Process to all things. God is also viewed as separate from creation but intrinsically embedded within, or present with, all evolving creational processes.

Centered in an Ethic of Love - Whitehead's process philosophy is centered in the Christian concept of Love. Divine Love. Godly Love. The Love of God for the world. To wit, I have made Christ as the center of God's Love Gift to the world and have situated all doctrines and dogmas around love... not holiness, not sinlessness, not legalistic rites and rituals. This then follows Christ's Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, and Israel's prayer for Shema to love God, Deut 6.4-6 including Christ's addition to it, to love one's neighbor, in Leviticus 19.18b.

Put together, we then are exploring what it means to inhabit a loving faith, religion, or cosmos which is driven organically by processual forces that are: i) panrelational, 2) panexperiential, and 3) panpsychic, in an arrangement that is theologically described as panentheistic in divine cosmological structure.
This form of philosophic structure can be true of many religions but here, at this website, it is being rigorously applied to the Christian faith, it's doctrines and dogmas, which were traditionally set in earlier eras that were pre-scientific, proto-religious institutions, and utilizing an eclectic mix of earlier influencing philosophies.
Examples of culturally-embedded philosophies that drove personal, communal, societal or spiritual outlooks of God, life, creation, etc, have been Semetic in early origin (Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian, etc), and later, Greek-based Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism intermixing with Semetic/Hebraic culture come to be known as Hellenism. The bible is set within Semetic (Old Testament) + Hellenic (New Testament) cultures.
In the church age, under the influence of the first millennial Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Origin, Augustine, etc, came additional philosophic and cultural influences which later were swept up under the enculturating outlooks of Medievalism, Catholic Scholasticism (Aquinas), Classic scientific Enlightenment, or lately, a Western Modernistic emphasis upon God, life, and societal outlook.
It is here proclaimed that to bring the theology of the bible up to date a more all-encompassing and natural philosophic foundation is required. That traditional Christianity has isolated itself to the folkloric, mythic and authoritarian realms of its faith and requires another philosophic foundation than its current structure.
It is proposed that Whitehead's organically-based process philosophy can be applied as a philosophic-theological foundation that is both progressively contemporary and scientific. That its integrating and integral philosophic space can serve as a primary philosophical approach to God, life, and the cosmos including its integral relatability to all academic disciplines whether ecological, scientific, economic, political, psycho-sociological, or religious.
Thus and thus, Process Philosophy is here explored as the umbrella under which all else might be beheld until replaced by another more pervasive speculation describing God, life, and world. It can also serve as a natural common construct between nations (capitalist or communist), religions (as an interfaith dialogic foundation), politics (hopefully, eco-politics), and diverse economies - even as China is presently doing utilizing Whitehead within it's national structures.
R.E. Slater
March 3, 2025

LISTINGS

These listing are not intended to be complete but a sampling as I can locate and specify them; however, it would be unsurprising to find these topics listed in other areas of this website.