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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Yet, i) the very biblical text itself resists such closure even as it ii) parallels the gift of language which acts in kind... as a living and responsive reading testifying to the changing nature of reality. Hence, the usual reading of Scripture is high unusual; doesn't correspond with how either reality works nor how language works; and is artificially fixed in static repository contrary to the very nature of God and God's work in creation. More plainly, how the church insists we should read the bible is exactly how NOT to read the bible.
Thus, within Scripture's "revealed pages" are divine voices that i) do not always agree; ii) narratives that shift in tone and direction; and, iii) differing theological visions of the divine and divine will that develop and are taught across the biblical narratives and their generations.
Moreover, canonical law gives way to divine prophecy. Wisdom sections question human certainty. Devastating exiles shape-and-reshape personal, communal, societal, and national identity. And even God's emissary, Israel's Messiah-Jesus, willfully and full-throatedly reinterprets sacred Hebrew tradition. And lastly - if not presently - the early church reread its Jesus-inheritance in light of ruptured divine meanings and identities. So no, the bible isn't all one thing but many things across many voices, eras, and divinations.
And so, Scripture, is not one single, continuous voice of divine will - but a multivocal, multifocal, and multilayered - divine witness reflecting lively-lived and evolving experiences between humanity and the "perceived real" arising from God, world, and mankind itself.
Hence, we must ask a far deeper question:
Is the Bible best understood as a static word about God, or as a dynamic record of humanity’s engagement with the divine as it wrestles with the brute conditions of life??
Embodied Process Realism (EPR) suggests the latter.
EPR invites us to read Scripture not as a closed system of abstract, disconnected propositions and beliefs, but as a living field of evolving meaning - where understanding is formed, fractured, reconfigured, transformed, redeemed, lost, and carried forward....
This means that the biblical text does not stand outside reality, describing it from a distance. But experientially participates in reality’s fluid unfolding, bearing witness to moments of clarity, conflict, rupture, and renewal.
To read Scripture in this way is not to diminish its authority, but to relocate it. So-called "Biblical Authority" cannot rest in fixed traditional interpretation alone, but in the linguistic-text’s philological capacity to continually speak within evolving eras of life's movements, tragedies, successes, contexts, harms and joys, across generations.
Text, cultural meaning, ideology, and so forth, only persists in the minds and urgencies of those church organizational bodies wishing to protect and dominate what they believe is true and beautiful.
Yet divine reality does not work in this way. Nor did it ever work in that way. Rather, it transforms from one moment to the next requiring not only a God, but a people, to live redemptively transforming lives themselves.
Consequently, we are to inhabit the same processual spaces as our processual God does --- "As the Creator, so God's people." --- "We live-and-move together, or not at all."
What follows then is an exploration of Scripture through an embodied lens of process realism - not to resolve tensions, but to understand them as integral to reality's nature as set by God above.
I. The Limits of Static Scripture
If the limitations of a static reading arise from treating Scripture as fixed, then an alternative approach must take seriously the movement already present within the text itself. Scripture need not be made dynamic. It already is.
What is required is a way of reading that can recognize and follow this movement.
Embodied Process Realism provides such a lens. It does not impose a foreign structure upon the text, but brings into focus patterns already at work - patterns of meaning, tension, rupture, and continuation that unfold across the biblical witness.
Scripture speaks. It names, describes, and communicates the world as it is encountered by those who lived within it. Laws are given, stories are told, wisdom is offered, and teachings are preserved so that meaning may be shared across generations.
And yet, this meaning is never static.
Words shift in significance. Contexts change. What once seemed clear becomes newly complex. The same passage, read in different times and places, carries different weight. Meaning, therefore, is not simply contained within the text, but arises in the ongoing interaction between text and reader.
Scripture does not lose its meaning through this process -it is sustained by it.
Scripture does not present a seamless account of reality. It includes within itself moments of conflict, contradiction, and unresolved tension.
- Laws that are later questioned
- Promises that appear delayed or broken
- Voices that challenge one another
These are not flaws to be removed, but features to be understood.
The book of Job stands in tension with more straightforward claims about justice and reward. Ecclesiastes questions the reliability of meaning itself. The prophets challenge religious certainty, exposing gaps between belief and practice.
Such tensions do not weaken Scripture.They deepen it.
They reflect a world in which understanding is not given all at once, but emerges through struggle, questioning, and response. This is what is meant by reading the Scriptures processually.
At key moments, Scripture does not simply continue what has been - it interrupts it too.
The Exodus is not a gradual development, but a decisive break. A people moves from bondage into freedom, and in doing so, redefines its identity.
The prophetic tradition disrupts established structures, calling into question the very systems meant to preserve faith.
And in the life and teachings of Jesus, inherited interpretations are not discarded, but reconfigured:
“You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…”
Here, continuity is not abandoned, but transformed.
Such moments are not anomalies. They are central to the biblical narrative.
They reveal that faith is not sustained through repetition alone, but through the capacity to receive what is new.
Despite these ruptures, Scripture does not dissolve into fragmentation. It continues.
Traditions are carried forward. Stories are retold. Teachings are reinterpreted. The early church reads its own experience in light of what came before, reshaping its understanding while remaining connected to its roots.
This movement is neither purely continuous nor purely discontinuous. It is a process of ongoing formation - holding together what has been with what is becoming.
Scripture, in this sense, is not a closed book, but an unfolding witness.
To read Scripture in this way is not to impose change upon it, but to recognize the change already present within it.
And it is this recognition that opens the way for a deeper engagement with the text - not as something to be finalized, but as something to be entered and re-experienced.
If Scripture is indeed a living and unfolding witness, then this must be seen not only in theory, but within its narratives themselves. The movement of meaning, fracture, rupture, and continuation is not abstract—it is embodied within the stories that shape the biblical tradition.
The Exodus stands as one of the defining moments of rupture within Scripture. A people enslaved is brought out of bondage, not through gradual reform, but through decisive interruption.
This event reshapes identity, theology, and community.
God is no longer understood only in terms of ancestral promise, but as one who acts within history - one who liberates, disrupts, and calls forward a new way of being.
The book of Job resists easy explanations. It confronts the assumption that suffering can be neatly explained within a framework of reward and punishment.
Job’s friends defend established theology. Job challenges it.
The result is not resolution, but deepened questioning.
Here, Scripture does not eliminate tension.It gives voice to it.
In the teachings of Jesus, tradition is neither rejected nor preserved unchanged. It is re-read, intensified, and reoriented.
“The Sabbath was made for humankind…”
“You have heard… but I say…”
These are not minor adjustments. They are reconfigurations.
Meaning is not discarded, but transformed.
The early church, and particularly Paul, continues this movement. In light of the Christ-event, inherited categories are revisited and reinterpreted.
Law, identity, and inclusion are all reexamined.
What emerges is not a break from the past, but a carrying forward - one that reshapes what has been received in light of what has occurred.
These narratives do not present a static faith. They reveal a tradition that lives - one that responds, adapts, and continues.
Scripture, in this sense, is not simply about reality.It participates in it.
The gift of language and communication is that of presence.
When presence is no longer present, language and communication dies.
"As the Creator, so God's people. We together move or not at all."
Scripture is not encountered once, nor is it resolved in a single interpretation. It unfolds across generations - read, questioned, reinterpreted, and lived forward within changing conditions.
- What is received is tested.
- What is assumed is challenged.
- What is broken opens new understanding.
- What remains is carried forward.
To read the Bible is not merely to recover what was once said, but to enter into the ongoing movement through which meaning continues to emerge.
And within this movement, the question of God is not closed.
It is lived.
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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Isaiah → emergence + novelty:
"Behold, I am doing a new thing."
- Book of Isaiah 43:19
"In their appearance and structure:
the wheels were intersecting,
like a wheel within a wheel."
- Book of Ezekiel 1:16
"Meaning within meaning,
movement within movement,
reality unfixed - ever turning."
- R.E. Slater
Relation within relation
Movement without final rest
Divine presence ever dynamic."
- R.E. Slater
The Living Text
by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT
its words on Divine hold
Nay, they must pass through fire,
through heavy loss and change,
through cruel exile and return,
e'en hard, questioning hearts.
Yet, as Law became longing,
and Divine promise protest,
loud voices quieted to event,
learning to hear and speak.
And in the telling,
and in the hearing,
in the breaking open
of what was thought complete -
the stony text resurrected,
not as final word -
but as evolving paths
beneath shod and holy feet.
For in the turning,
in scripted lines on lines,
humanity discovers the spoken -
March 21, 2026
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
Primary Text
The Bible
The New Revised Standard Version Bible. New York: National Council of Churches, 1989.
Biblical Studies and Interpretation
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
———. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
Wright, N. T. The New Testament and the People of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.
Barr, James. The Bible in the Modern World. London: SCM Press, 1973.
Process Theology and Philosophy
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.
Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.
Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.
Philosophical Context
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
How does God act in a world that is not static?
Two prophetic images - each separated by context yet united in vision - offer a profound glimpse into the nature of reality as lived, dynamic, and unfolding.
From Book of Isaiah comes the declaration:
“Behold, I am doing a new thing.” (43:19)
And from Book of Ezekiel the vision:
“Their appearance and structure: the wheels were intersecting, like a wheel within a wheel.” (1:16)
At first glance, these passages appear distinct - one announcing divine action in history, the other describing an enigmatic celestial structure. Yet when read together, they reveal a shared insight: reality is neither fixed nor chaotic, but structured in motion - ordered, yet open; coherent, yet unfolding. This then is a description of ongoing processual evolution.
Isaiah speaks into a moment of rupture. Exile has destabilized identity, fractured meaning, and called into question the continuity of God’s promises. Within this context, the announcement of a “new thing” does not point to an escape from history, but to an emergence from within it. The new arises not apart from the world, but through its very conditions of loss and transformation.
"No one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." - Jesus (Gospel of Mark 2:22, Gospel of Matthew 9:17, Gospel of Luke 5:37–38)
Ezekiel, likewise situated within exile, offers a vision not of stability restored, but of motion revealed. The wheels - intersecting, multidirectional, alive with movement - suggest a form of order that does not depend upon stillness. Structure here is not rigid, but relational. Each wheel moves within another, implying depth within depth, relation within relation, motion within motion.
“Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” - Jesus (Gospel of John 7:38)
Together, these images resist a static metaphysic.
They do not describe a world governed from above by an unmoving force, nor one abandoned to disorder. Instead, they point toward a reality in which form and movement are inseparable - where structure enables transformation, and transformation reshapes structure.
In this light, the divine is not best understood as external to the world’s unfolding, nor reducible to it. Rather, God may be discerned within the very movement of reality itself: as the source of novelty within continuity, and as the depth within relational structure.
The prophetic imagination, then, does not present a closed system of meaning. It offers a way of seeing.
A world in which:
Meaning unfolds within meaning,movement arises within movement,and reality is never fixed, but ever turning.
Or again:
Process within process,relation within relation,movement without final rest -a divine presence that is ever dynamic.
Such language does not resolve the mystery of reality. It honors it.
For what these visions disclose is not a final explanation, but a pattern - one that continues to be lived, interpreted, and carried forward within the ongoing movement of existence.
Lastly, when comparing the Gospel of Jesus to processual reality, Ezekiel had envisioned life flowing from the temple. However Jesus relocated that flow into the human person.
We might say that what was once structured in the temple life of the Hebrew people becomes embodied in the believing heart of Jesus' followers as well as in the life of the church centered this time around Jesus. Both eras, Israel and the Church, are centralized around participatory life in the divine.
From:
- structure → embodiment
- location → participation
- fixed center → distributed flow
Here is another quote from Jesus that we can use processually:
“The wind blows where it chooses… you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” - Gospel of John 3:8
the connection? In Ezekiel the Spirit animates, move, lifts; and in Jesus, the Spirit speaks to "uncontainable movement." Hence, in the work of God across each era we see the Spirit's movement from structured encounter in the OT to dynamic flow in the NT.
And though that sentence makes good preaching to a Sunday School class or small group fellowship, in all honesty, this observation was as fully true in the Temple era as it was in Jesus's day. Structures are always embodied by the divine and move towards dynamic participatory action once begun. If not, the Psalms would not have been written nor the epistles testify to communal life in the divine.
One last, we move from exilic rupture to transformation in Ezekiel to personal/spirit rupture in Jesus:
“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you.” - Book of Ezekiel 36:26
“You must be born from above.” - Gospel of John 3:7
Though Isaiah and Ezekiel envisioned divine life flowing from the temple, Jesus relocated that flow into the human heart. And where what was once structured became embodied in Temple life (even as it is today in Jewish worship), what was once centralized became multiplied and anchored into participatory spirit life through Jesus.
- wheels → movement
- spirit → dynamism
- water → life-flow
All are brought into an "embodied, lived, participatory reality" (epr).
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