Evolution of Worship and Religion: Part V - A Processual Summation (12)

The Evolution of Worship and Religion:

From Cosmic Awe to Processual Faith

A Metamodern Journey through the History of the Sacred

A PROCESSUAL SUMMATION

OF WORSHIP AND RELIGION

PART V - ESSAY  12

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

In the beginning, there was wonder.

And wonder is where worship began.

To be in the Sacred is living wonder.

To follow ancient longings

is tradition enough.

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Essay 12

A Processual Summation

of Worship and Religion

Long before ancient temples, creeds, or rites,

the evolving, sacred world, was listening -

to fire, to breath, or by wondering eyes.

Faith first began with attention to nature,

it never has finished resolving, becoming,

ceaseless in its flow, alluring as life.

Truth had never descended complete.

It grew. It broke. It evolved. It suffered.

And through the ages it learned to heal.

What endured of Truth is not certainty,

but Sacred love anchoring time to place,

and mankind to one another.

Humanity never inherited final answers,
as attested by our human experience,

a broken mess that we carry with us.

Yet paths worn in mercy, love, and hope,

testify to a God who is always becoming

in mankind's breast and locus of the world.

The reality of God is in God's becoming,

as the world becomes, as man becomes,

as Love becomes reaching, filling, healing -

this is the Sacred, the holy, found in love.

R.E. Slater

December 22, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

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Author’s Note

I began this series with a simple question: how did worship and religion first arise? How did ancient hominins come to sense the Sacred - in the world around them, in one another, and within themselves?

Long before doctrines or creeds or sacred rites, meaning was felt in fire and song, in trembling breasts before storm and lightning, in grief over death, and in wonder at life’s fragile persistence. As language formed and communities gathered, the Sacred moved with-and-within them... gradually shaping clans, breaking and reforming bonds, and widening human belonging within tribes, villages, and civilizations.

Over time, what emerged was not a single religious story but a long, interwoven landscape of seeking. This series has asked whether Christianity, as a world religion, can learn to see itself not as supreme or isolated, but as deeply embedded within that greater human pilgrimage. Christians have named Jesus divine; yet whether Jesus is God or is not, the Gospels in the bible portray him as one who lived in profound alignment with the Sacred and taught its directionality toward love, healing, justice, and restored relationship, even as has been shown that humanity itself has searched for meaning, identity, and purpose beyond-and-before Israel's earthly borders.

Christianity need not stand apart from the world’s religions, but alongside each - as a sacred participant in a shared, cosmic search for God and meaning. To follow Jesus, then, may be less about defending the faith, or religious control, or sacred dominion, as was done in times past, but more about flowing in harmony with one another in the best sacred traditions mankind has discovered: in affirming a loving God, a generative and relational cosmos, and a life-giving metaphysic expressed through compassion, kindness, self-giving, and care for one another and the earth itself.

To release the need for mastery - over others, over nature, including over God - and to learn, instead, the discipline and quality of loving attentiveness to one another. This, to me, is the deepest purpose and guiding teleology of worship and religion over-and-beyond one's creedal formulas and doctrinal teachings. This, to me, are the essentials of a Christian faith and religious mindset at all times of the year across all borders and boundaries.

Merry Christmas,

R.E. Slater

December 22, 2205

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What We Have Covered:

A Processual Retrospective: Essays 1–11

PART I - THE BIRTH OF THE SACRED

Essay 1 - Deep Time & Emergent Consciousness (c. 2.6 million - 45,000 BCE)

Human religious awareness begins not with doctrine but with survival, perception, and proto-meaning as early hominins develop symbolic cognition, social bonding, and reverence for forces larger than themselves within an animate, always evolving = becoming, world.

Essay 2 - Animism, Ritual, and the Living World (c. 45,000 - 10,000 BCE)

Early ritual life emerges as humans experience nature as alive, responsive, and relational, giving rise to animistic practices where spirit, matter, and meaning are inseparably one.

PART II - THE AGE OF GODS

Essay 3 - Neolithic Revolution & Sacred Order (c. 10,000–3,000 BCE)

With agriculture and settlement, religion becomes spatially organized: sacred sites, seasonal cycles, fertility rites, and cosmic order mirror humanity’s new relationship to land, time, and continuity.

Essay 4 - Polytheism and the Rise of High Gods (c. 3,300–1,200 BCE)

As civilizations grow, gods specialize and hierarchize, reflecting political centralization, while divine power is increasingly associated with kingship, empire, and cosmic stability.

Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism (c. 2,000–1,000 BCE)

Distinct peoples elevate particular deities without denying others, revealing an evolving theological focus shaped by covenantal loyalty, national identity, and moral responsibility.

PART III - AXIAL AWAKENINGS

Essay 6 - The Prophetic Revolutions of Israel & Persia (c. 1,000–300 BCE)

Prophets redirect religion away from ritual control and toward justice, compassion, and ethical transformation, asserting that divine presence is measured by communal faithfulness to love one another - rather than by cultic precision of rite and ritual.

Essays 7+8 - Sacred Revolutions of India & Greece (c. 900–200 BCE)

Across Israel, India, China, and Greece, thinkers turn inward and outward simultaneously, discovering transcendence through wisdom, compassion, non-attachment, and harmony with the Sacred, or the Way, of reality itself.

PART IV - THE SACRED MADE UNIVERSAL

Essay 9A - Second Temple Judaism & Apocalyptic Hope (c. 300 BCE–70 CE)

Under imperial pressure, Jewish theology diversifies, producing apocalyptic visions, messianic expectations, and renewed emphasis on divine faithfulness within history’s unresolved suffering. This faithfulness found hope in agony and displacement.

Essay 9B - Jesus as Historical and Theological Event (c. 30 CE)

Jesus emerges within this ferment as a prophetic, wisdom-shaped figure whose life embodies radical trust in divine nearness (immanency), nonviolent love and forgiveness, and the possibility of renewed communal healing and becoming within lands of bondage.

Essay 9C - Paul, the Early Church, and Doctrinal Formation (c. 50–160 CE)

As Jesus’ meaning is interpreted across cultures, Greek metaphysics gradually reframes a relational gospel into ontological claims about the Sacred or sacred way, stabilizing belief while narrowing earlier claimed pluralities.

Essay 10 - Canon, Creed, and the Freezing of Process (c. 300–1600 CE)

Sacred texts and doctrines are fixed to preserve unity, yet this stabilization often suppresses the dynamic, evolving nature of faith, setting the stage for later conflicts with science, pluralism, and modern consciousness.

Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred (c. 1600 CE to the Present)

In the wake of the Enlightenment, modernity fractured the medieval synthesis of God, nature, and meaning. Scientific rationalism disenchanted the cosmos, relegating God to the realms of the transcendent - or dismissing divinity altogether. Yet this eclipse of the sacred did not mark its end. From the 19th century forward, new currents emerged that sought to reunite scientific insight with spiritual depth. Religious philosophic thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin reimagined reality itself as dynamic, relational, and unfinished - an evolving cosmos suffused with creativity, consciousness, and value. In process philosophy and evolutionary theology, God is no longer the distant architect of a completed world, but the intimate lure within an unfinished world/cosmos: persuading, suffering, and co-creating with creation toward greater beauty, complexity, and relational harmony. The sacred, once displaced by modernity, is thus reborn not through supernatural control, but through participatory becoming within an open, evolving universe.

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Processual Interpretation of Essays 1-11:

Human religion does not begin with belief but with becoming.

Around 2.6 million years ago, early hominins emerged within a living world experienced as active, dangerous, and mysteriously responsive. Survival, perception, and proto-meaning slowly braided together as cognition expanded, social bonds deepened, and the earliest intuitions of reverence arose - not yet as gods, but as awareness that life was more than mere mechanism.

By 200,000–45,000 BCE, ritual behavior appeared alongside symbolic language and burial practices. The world was no longer inert; it was alive, relational, and communicative. Animism did not imagine spirit imposed upon matter - it recognized spirit within matter. Religion, at this stage, was not doctrine but participation.

With the Neolithic Revolution (c. 10,000–3,000 BCE), humanity’s relationship to time, land, and continuity shifted. Agriculture, settlement, and seasonal cycles gave rise to sacred spaces, fertility rites, and cosmic rhythms. Order itself became holy, mirroring humanity’s new dependence on patterned stability.

As civilizations formed (c. 3,300–1,200 BCE), polytheistic pantheons emerged. Gods specialized, hierarchized, and increasingly reflected political power structures. Divine agency was associated with kingship, empire, and cosmic maintenance - religion stabilizing society as much as society shaped religion.

Between 2,000–1,000 BCE, many cultures moved toward henotheism, elevating particular deities without denying others. In Israel, covenantal loyalty to Yahweh developed within a broader divine ecology, emphasizing moral obligation, communal identity, and historical relationship rather than abstract ontology.

The prophetic revolutions (c. 1000–300 BCE) marked a decisive turn. Prophets challenged ritualism, rejected divine manipulation, and insisted that justice, compassion, and care for the vulnerable were the true measures of faithfulness. God was encountered not in control but in ethical demand (today: Calvinism:Control vs. Open & Relational Theology:Loving Participation)

During the Axial Age (c. 900–200 BCE), wisdom traditions across Israel, India, China, and Greece converged on a profound insight: transcendence is discovered not through domination but through alignment - through compassion, harmony, restraint, and attentiveness to the Sacred Way of reality itself.

Under imperial domination, Second Temple Judaism (c. 300 BCE–70 CE) diversified dramatically. Apocalyptic hopes, messianic expectations, wisdom reflection, and covenantal endurance all coexisted, expressing a faith struggling to reconcile divine faithfulness with historical suffering (sic, the subject of "theodicy")

It is within this plural, fermenting landscape that Jesus of Nazareth (c. 30 CE) enters world history - not as a theological abstraction, but as a historical, prophetic, wisdom-shaped figure whose life embodied radical trust in divine nearness, nonviolent love, and communal restoration.

As Jesus’ meaning spread beyond its Jewish matrix (c. 50–160 CE), Paul and the early church translated a relational, participatory gospel into Hellenistic conceptual worlds. Greek metaphysics gradually reframed lived faith into ontological claims, stabilizing belief even as earlier pluralities narrowed.

By late antiquity and into the medieval period (c. 300–1600 CE), the Christian canon and creed solidified. These structures preserved continuity but often froze process, suppressing the evolving, dialogical nature of religion and sets the stage for later tensions with science, pluralism, and modern consciousness.

In our contemporary moment (c. 1600 CE to the Present), the sacred re-emerges not to a return to premodern certainty, but through a renewed awareness of process, relationality, and interdependence. Advances in cosmology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and relational ecology have revealed a universe that is unfinished, participatory, and deeply entangled - undermining both rigid supernaturalism and reductive materialism.

Within this modernal-context, religion is increasingly interpreted not as a system of fixed beliefs, but as a living practice of meaning-making within an evolving world. Processual interpretations of faith draw together the insights of deep time, prophetic ethics, wisdom traditions, and cruciform love, inviting humanity to rediscover the sacred as that which calls toward creativity, responsibility, compassion, and shared becoming.

To summarize - the rebirth of the sacred today is neither i) a revival of old gods nor ii) the triumph of secular reason, but iii) a fragile, hopeful reorientation toward a cosmos - and a humanity - that is still in the making, evolving, forming, and shaping.

This is the inheritance with which we now stand. And it is why process thought might be the more reflective when asking the followers of God - or of the sacred way - to underlay all foundational beliefs with the phrase, "Let us be led by the Spirit via doubt and uncertainty, rather than by rigid certainty and dogmatic formulations." When we do, we have become the more willing to shape our faith in participatory alignment with all the world's faith - whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Confucius, to mention a few. That we are willing to risk being open, questioning, and relational rather than settle into dogmatic perceptions of people, societies, history, or science.

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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Reframing the Question That Has Dominated Christianity

Whether Jesus is or is not God has long functioned as the fulcrum upon which Christian theology turns. Entire systems of orthodoxy, heresy, inclusion, and exclusion have been constructed around this question. Yet history suggests that this framing, however earnest, may not be the most faithful one religion can ask, nor the most generative for the metamodern world now emerging.

The earliest religious traditions were not primarily concerned with metaphysical essence but with presence, action, fidelity, and transformation. Hebrew faith asked not what God is but how God acts and what God requires. Her prophets did not speculate about divine metaphysical substance; rather, they called communities back to justice. Wisdom teachers did not define God's ontology; they taught alignment with life and love.

To ask whether Jesus is God in later metaphysical terms is to import static, substantialist categories to this undertaking - largely inherited from Greek ontology and metaphysical philosophy - into a world that thought in relational, historical, and ethical terms. The earliest witnesses encountered not a metaphysical theorem but a way of living life sacredly: a way of being human in radical responsiveness to divine lure.

This does not diminish Jesus. It re-situates Jesus within the very purpose of his mission to teach and show loving compassion and mercy to one another. Jesus was recognizing what earlier humanity had been feeling - that there is more to this life than living.... That humanity must situate itself within the very flows of life. To learn to become part of the divine Sacred moving through an evolving landscape with one another in loving and helping ways. Life requires help. A Jesus faith offers that elixer.

This was Jesus' (prophetic) message which Jewish Christians picked up on and elevated back into divine status as it had been forgotten and neglected by their Jewish priests and scribes. It was a message which mirrored Israel's earlier prophets who had preached to their communities in earlier eras of God's love and compassion and the need for repentance and circumspection. Jesus took the prophetic message, integrated it with the apocalypticism of his day, and died for challenging the status quo's waywardness, its teachings, its hardness of heart, and callousness to those they served.

Nor does Jesus' message absolve Christians today of their responsibility to be faithful to Jesus message of love. And yet, we do not see this today in Christianity's maga-movement. It's movement to be "great" again. As if greatness comes stripped of bigotry, racism, and oppression. Christianity's maga-message has become a cruel terror to all those whom Christians deem unworthy and without value; and is not without similarity to the message of the Pharisees and scribes in Jesus' day.  Such a wicked message has been repeatedly decried by the world that maga-Christianity's message is deformed, crippled, and ungodly. That wolves have entered its sanctuaries and debased the Christian message with side-streams and off-message formulations pretending holiness for love.

For Jesus, his response today would be the same as his response in the early first century CE... to repent, to turn from unbecoming policies, politics, creeds, confessions, and practices. To return to the Sacred divine that is present, and become with it even as it is becoming in its creation, its centrality, and its offshoots. This holy responsibility has ever been placed on mankind even as God through Jesus and the prophets of the world have preached loving outreach time-and-again immemorial.

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Jesus as Processual Disclosure, Not Ontological Closure

From a process perspective, Jesus is best understood as a becoming disclosure within history - but not its salvific closure. He does not end the religious story of salvation; he intensifies God's ongoing, redeeming work across creation. Salvation has come through Jesus, who, if God, both ends and begins God's salvific work. But any doctrine of salvation of the orthodox church is also a processual doctrine of God's work that is undone, incomplete, and without finality through the lives of his church. Greek metaphysics gave finality to Jesus' work but in process thought, it is just begun, mimicking the world of creation as God's salvation continually evolves within all processes of men and nature.

In Whiteheadian terms, Jesus may be seen as an unusually coherent actual occasion - a life whose prehensions aligned profoundly with the divine aim toward relational harmony. His significance lies not merely in who he was, but in how fully he embodied the persuasive, non-coercive movement of divine love.

This allows Jesus to be Christic without making the Christ principle exclusive nor complete. Christ becomes, not a metaphysical possession of Christianity, but a mode of incarnational love - a Sacred love that became flesh whose story is that of divine relational wholeness wherever and whenever it breaks into history (in a coming essay #14, we will discuss the Christicism of Christ = Christ as the Messiah of the world to complete this series).

Such a reading neither reduces Jesus to moralism nor inflates him into metaphysical isolation as an untouchable, uncaring, transcendent God of coming wrath and judgement per early Christian apocalypticism's portrayal of the divine Sacred. Rather, the early Christian story of the gospel honors both Jesus' historical particularity and his universal resonance (this was the entirety of the message of many of the new testament books in the Christian bible which linked and integrated the wholism of the Jewish Scriptures of the old testament).

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Scripture as Processual Memory, Not Divine Stenography

Within this framework, sacred texts retain profound importance - but not as inerrant transcripts of divine speech. They are better understood as photographs of communal growth and discernment, taken from within specific religious cultures, crises, and horizons of understanding as has been shown across all essays of this series.

The Hebrew Bible’s evolution - from its polytheistic traces --> to henotheistic loyalty --> to ethical monotheism - reveals a faith in motion. The New Testament reflects diverse interpretations of Jesus shaped by differing communities, needs, and philosophical vocabularies (refer to the series' supplementary articles and essays, SM1-SM11).

Jesus himself read Scripture this way: dynamically, creatively, ethically, and situationally. “You have heard it said… but I say to you” is not rejection but processual reinterpretation. Faithfulness meant responsiveness, not dead repetition as the Scribes and Pharisees had done.

To reclaim Scripture as processual memory is not to empty it of authority, but to relocate its authority in wisdom, trajectory, and moral fruitfulness rather than in static perfection.

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Worship in an Open, Generative Cosmos

A processual metaphysic of the spiritual envisions the universe not as a finished product but as co-creative becoming. Reality itself is participatory, relational, and open-ended. God is not the supreme controller but the deepest companion - the Lure toward richer forms of beauty, harmony, and care. This tenet then integrates Christianity with many of the tenets of other world religions and beliefs. There is common foundation which binds humanity to one another when perceived in this way.

Consequently, within such a cosmos, worship cannot mean submission to fixed decrees. It becomes attunement, participation, and response. Faith is not a brand of religious certainty but trustful alignment with what nurtures life.

Jesus matters not because he solves metaphysical puzzles, but because he models this very alignment of metaphysical inclusion through himself - sic, "love over power," "mercy over purity," "future openness over violent control". Jesus' life reveals what becomes possible when humanity cooperates with divine persuasion rather than resisting it. Jesus exemplifies "selfless, sacrificial, service" to others even as other great religious leaders throughout history have done the same in their lives. Even as today's Christian church is asked to do the likewise despite its current mis-shapened path.

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Toward a Faith Spacious Enough for the Future

At the last, this project has not sought to dismantle religion but to redeem it from its own rigidities. I did not write this series to defend Christianity nor argue for Jesus' divinity (though the Apostle Paul's message is clear that an incarnating God who dies for others is a mystery to be explored and examined. I will explore this message in the next essay re the subject of divine cruciformity).

Rather, a sacred expression of faith gestures toward a form capable of housing all faiths - whether Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, secular humanism, scientific realism, or even metamodern emerging cosmologies. Not by erasing differences, but by grounding them in shared commitments to becoming, relationality, and loving care. I think this has been extensively written of through the entirety of this series from humanity's earliest day unto the present era.

Whether Jesus is confessed as God, a revealer of God, or especial exemplar of divine-human coherence, the deeper calling remains unchanged: to participate in the ongoing healing of the world. Whether we refer to God, to a sacred cosmic reality, or to a divinity which lies throughout creation - it is the general belief of the ages that there is something more to life than mere living; and it is this sacred resonance which we share together as mortal humans.

A religion worthy of the future will be measured not by metaphysical certainty but by the kind of people and kind of worlds it helps usher into becoming. If divinity is to mean anything, it must mean love - or it must mean nothing. The Apostle Paul said as much of the Christian faith: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” (1 Cor 13.1ff)

And if love is real, then it must be lived again and again within the unfinished processes of history, community, and cosmic becoming.

In this sense, this work does not conclude. It re-opens mankind's living need to lean into the sacred divine.

R.E. Slater

January 3, 2026

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The Sacred Ever Is -

and Ever Is Becoming

The Sacred divine was never

finished, never complete; it

rose from the depths of time

to evolve from fire and dust,

from wind, storm and death,

to live upon fragile breath

and borrowed light -

feeling, sensing, fearing,

long before worshipping.

This Sacred, this God,

did not arrive all at once,

complete, scripted, known

and named; but entered

as unfolding Love whenever

humanity felt the weight

of living,  or cost of freedom,

across the patience streams

of unfolding, becoming time.

Mankind has ceaselessly 

sought for answers, for identity,

for meaning, and wholeness;
but instead, has discovered

the sacred invitations

to participate in healing

whatever breaks,

in tending what might grow,

and in listening whenever

life speaks in harsh or soft tones.

And so, humanity moves on -

not saved from the world,

not precluded from evolving,
but entrusted into the

Sacred divine's folds,

no less than creation itself.

Co-creating its future,
mimicking the loving care

which its God has bourne,

until it reaches its telos in

identity, form, or destiny, by

participating with the Sacred

in its sacred work of becoming.

R.E. Slater
December 22, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

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~ Continue to Part V, Essay 13 ~

Evolution of Worship & Religion

• Introduction
• Maps, Tables & Data
• A Proposed Outline
• Resources

• Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
• Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
• Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem

• Part II - The Age of Gods
• Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
• Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
• Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism

• Part III - Axial Awakenings
• Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
• Essay 7 - India's Axial Age
• Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason

• Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
• Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
• Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
• Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred

• Part V - Conclusion of Series
• Essay 12 - A Processual Summation of Worship and Religion
• Essay 13 - The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power
• Essay 14 - Messiah: From Anointed Saviour to Suffering Sacred
• Essay 15 - Becoming Aligned with the Sacred

• Part VI - Supplementary Materials
• SM 1 - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
• SM 2 - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
• SM 3 - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
• SM 4 - How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God:
• Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
• Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
• Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
• SM 5 - The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible:
• From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
• Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
• Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
• SM 6 - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
• SM 7 - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
• SM 8 - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
• SM 9 - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
• SM 10 - Isaiah as a Living Textual Tradition: Manuscripts, Variants &Transmission
• SM 11 - From Scroll to Scripture: Bible Versions, Variants & their Histories
• SM 12 - The Gnostic Mysterion: the Crisis of Sacred Becoming

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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I. Process Philosophy & Process Theology

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. New York: Free Press, 1978.

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.

• Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.

• Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

• Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

• Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

• Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015.

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II. Evolution of Religion & Deep-Time Perspectives

• Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

• Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

• Norenzayan, Ara. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

• Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

• Armstrong, Karen. The Case for God. New York: Knopf, 2009.

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III. Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and the Evolution of God-Concepts

• Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

• Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

• Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

• Sanders, E. P. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.

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IV. Jesus, Early Christianity, and Historical Development

• Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.

• Borg, Marcus J. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. New York: HarperOne, 1994.

• Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

• Dunn, James D. G. Christology in the Making. London: SCM Press, 1980.

• Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

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V. Scripture, Canon, and Processual Bibliology

• Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

• Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

• Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible. New York: Free Press, 2007.

• Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014.

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VI. Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Modernity

• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

• Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

• Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.

• Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.

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VII. Comparative Religion & Interfaith Context

• Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

• Panikkar, Raimon. The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973.

• Wilber, Ken. Integral Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.

• Küng, Hans. Global Responsibility. New York: Continuum, 1991.

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VIII. Science, Cosmology, and Processual Reality

• Clayton, Philip. Mind and Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

• Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

• Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

• Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty. New York: Free Press, 1997.