Evolution of Worship and Religion: Part V - The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power (13)

The Evolution of Worship and Religion:

From Cosmic Awe to Processual Faith

A Metamodern Journey through the History of the Sacred

THE WAY OF CRUCIFORMITY:

WHEN GOD REFUSED POWER

PART V - ESSAY  13

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.

---

Essay 13

When God Refused Power:

The God who Suffered and Died

A Processual Study of Divine Cruciformity

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

The Way of Cruciformity is a Christian concept referring to a life shaped in the way of the cross (crucifixion + conformity) and entering into the pattern of Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection, so as to participate in, and share, God's love as one learns to live-out selfless sacrificial love, forgiveness, and compassion for others, the world, and creation itself. It embodies Jesus' humility, solidarity with the oppressed, and willingness to die to self for the sake of life in God, transforming daily actions, leadership, and engagement into Sacred identity and uplift with a suffering world.

Speaking the Name of Love

The gods of heaven

ruled from above.

They did not share.

They demanded worship,

and later - power.

Humanity gave gifts

to appease the gods,

as it bent towards fear,

offering, ritual, and

religious order.

Was this arrangement Sacred?

Was it truly Divine?

Or was it the depravity

of the human heart,

lost in its worship

and fabricated religion?

The Christian God,

called Jesus, Messiah,

descended among us.

He came to serve, to heal,

to love without homage,

by body and blood.

The world saw Love.

Rejected Love.

Judged Love.

Tortured Love.

And, Killed Love.

But Love did not stay

buried. It rose.

The God who died by humanity's hands

was no mirror of gods past, or of

unholy, unloving, pantheons ancient;

this cruciformed Sacred, this Jesus-God,

became mankind's judgment,

its Sacred undoing, and unmasking,

as sacrifice and heavenly rescue.

In this Jesus-God was disclosed

the identity of the Sacred:

that unloving holiness

and divine perfection are empty

containers without meaning

if not founded completely

on Self-giving Love.

R.E. Slater

December 22, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

---

Preface

Christianity does not begin isolated, alone, or dropped intact from heaven above. No, it begins where all religions have begun - from within the deep time of evolutionary history, and in the ancestral bowels of humanity's forming birth - as it lived and died and felt around-and-about itself a sense of the Sacred within-and-without each living moment.

In our past recent essays we have traced the world's religions within the long arc of human evolution - and through the inward processes of increasing awareness and discovery of the divine Sacred - which emerged from within the deep time of humanity's birth. To be shaped by hardscrabble events and difficult experiences normal to life encompassing wonder, tutelage, suffering, and rescue, in widening, existentially-awakening, cycles of repeated reorientation towards cosmic meaning, order, hope, and salvation.

The earlier essays 1-12 were framed intentionally within this scope to show that Christianity cannot be understood apart from the humanity's broader religious imagination gained by trial and adversity, conscious feeling, and the human senses. We have traced humanity's long, shared, evolutionary search for the Sacred from mankind's deep time some 2.6 million years ago towards a living (creedal) faith that has located Christianity within a vast and ongoing religious landscape which continually evolves. Throughout these essays I wanted to loosen Christianity’s grip on it's feelings of "divine" supremacy without dissolving its meaning - nor its meaningful journey towards the Sacred. And yet, something essential remains to be said in concluding this series.

Firstly, Christianity does not endure merely because it fits into the evolving arc of religious history. It endures because, at its center, it carries an historical beginning so strange, so odd, so unsettling, and morally dangerous, that it continually resists any domestication beyond the spiritually radical.

That beginning is Jesus.

Not the Jesus abstracted into formulistic and static doctrine.
Not the Jesus absorbed into the Western-Christian empire of imperialism.
But the Jesus that served, sacrificed, was tortured, crucified, and died by humanity's hands.

This essay asks why Christianity, when it remains faithful to its center in Christ, becomes unlike any other religion... and why that difference matters, not as triumph, but as provocation and goad towards the Sacred divine.

This essay then will explore the strangeness of the Sacred through Christ Jesus.

---

Introduction: The Oddity No Theology Can Fully Tame

Christianity does not merely participate in the religious evolution of humankind. It is UNLIKE any previous religion before its day or at its start. When Christianity remains faithful to Jesus, it introduces a rupture within the evolution of religion - an unsettling inversion of what religion itself had largely come to expect from its man-like comprehension of the divine. This rupture is not primarily doctrinal, metaphysical, or even philosophical. It is deeply moral and existential.

At the center of Christianity stands not a cosmic vision; not a sacred law; nor an enlightened teacher; but an executed God - and that God's audacious claim that his execution will reveal the heart and soul and willingness of a sovereign God to not seek mere comfort, security, worship, adulation, or empire:

The Temptation of Jesus (Mt 4.1ff)

4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit (sic, Sacred divine) into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written, “ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”

5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple 6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and  “ ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ” 7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! (the one who does not follow the Sacred divine) For it is written, “ ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’ ” 11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. 

Jesus Begins His Ministry

12 Now when he (Jesus) heard that John (the baptizer) had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. 13 And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, 14 so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled...

Christianity then does not begin with a sacrosanct order of worship or overpowering divine victory. It begins with a condemned God executed by the state, abandoned by followers, and silenced by violence. The central symbol of the faith is not a throne, a crown, a book, or a vision of power - but a wooden cross ushered in by leaven bread and a common chalice on the eve of God's death:

Luke 22:19-20: "And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, 'This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.' "

These acts and events alone makes Christianity odd.

Across the ancient world, gods ruled by strength. They secured order through dominance, demanded sacrifice to maintain cosmic stability, and mirrored the hierarchies of empire and kingship. Even when compassionate, they remained distant, aloof, far away - above the mortal fray of human suffering rather than to participate directly within it.

This makes Christianity unique. Singular. Alone. That it dares to say something else entirely: that the Sacred is revealed not by a God or godly pantheon escaping suffering, but by entering within it without retaliation, without judgement, without wrath.

This is not a metaphysical claim - it is a moral one. And it has consequences that no theology has ever fully contained. Including later Christian theologies that tacked on doctrines of hell and deadly apocalypse (such as found in the book of Revelation or the teachings of 2 Peter) by Christian congregations actively refusing to acknowledge a lovingly divine act of unretributive sacredness contextualized in pure, unconditional offering by the Sacred for the life and welfare of all creation.

Christianity, then, begins not in triumph but in apparent failure. Not in other-wordly revelation safely received, but in flesh-and-blood, and bodily-revelation, rejected. The foundational event of the incarnational Jesus-faith is not divine ascent, but divine descent - a descent into social and political humiliation, communal abandonment, and a cruel, violent death. God came to earth and rejecting religion killed this God.

No amount of theological sophistication can remove this fact that Christianity’s central symbol is a God that died on an instrument of torture. That this God, its redeeming-founder, did not escape human suffering. That this God entered into humanity's suffering fully and completely and without any heavenly retaliation. In consequence, Christianity insists on remembering the passion, ministry, life, and death of its Saviour-God. To celebrate Jesus' birth. To honor his teachings. To mourn his death. And celebrate his bodily resurrection:

And Jesus said to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die." (John 11.25-26)

This sacred event makes Christianity not merely distinctive, but awkward, strange, uneasily held. It does not fit neatly into divine categories of religious power and success. And it is precisely this awkwardness, this oddity - this refusal to resolve itself into the power structures of the world - that constitutes Christianity's enduring provocation not only to the world, but to its own errant followers and congregants who, when gaining power, misuse and abuse Love's sacrifice.

This has been the way of the church historically whenever it gains power even as it has been the way of bad religion generally across the millennia. The Christian church's past is no different from it's beliefs and actions in the 21st century. We see it all too clearly in Trump's Maga-church followers as they commit crimes of hatred upon those they despise, oppress, and do not want.

This was never the way of Jesus who rejected power for love, rule for sacrifice, enthronement for living a cruciformed life. Jesus did not speak death into people, he spoke life... the sacred life of the loving divine of creational life. This is the real Christian message, its gospel not of holiness but of love (or loving holiness, or holy lovingness). The Sacred is Love. To love is to be in the Sacred.

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I. The Crucifixion as Theological Axis, Not Historical Accident

The crucifixion of Jesus is not an accident appended to an otherwise noble life. It is the point at which Jesus' way of being collides decisively with the world as it is, and always seems to be.

Jesus proclaims a vision of God radically unlike all prevailing religious expectations. God is not aligned with the powerful but attentive to the powerless. God’s reign is not secured through violence or exclusion but through mercy, forgiveness, and restorative justice. Authority is exercised not through domination but through service.

Such a vision is not merely inspiring; it is socially, politically, personally, and religiously destabilizing.

• Rome crucified Jesus not because he preached spirituality, but because his message threatened the political imagination that underwrote its empire.

• Jewish religious authorities oppose Jesus not because he lacked piety, but because he relativizes sacred boundaries that elevated and sustained institutional control.

• Even the later Christian church confused power with love, administrating its supposed, or inferred, divine decree in non-sacrificial, non-loving, modes and means.

The cross, then, is not a theological ornamentation or pretty necklace to be worn... It is the moment when love confronts power and is crushed by it.

Christianity’s daring claim is that it is at this very moment of Jesus' crucifixion which reveals the Sacred God more truthfully than any religious vision of the Sacred or divine invincibility could ever evidence, witness, attest, or demonstrate. 

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II. Cruciformity and the Inversion of the Sacred

Across ancient pantheons, divinity is associated with elevation: gods rise above humanity, ruling from distance, radiating power, demanding sacrifice. Even benevolent gods rarely relinquish supremacy. The Sacred is imagined as that which stands over the world even as mankind imagines itself set-apart from the creation world and one-another.

But Jesus reverses this gravitational pull of mind and heart...

• In him, the sacred moves downward - into vulnerability, risk, and exposure.
• God does not demand blood; God bleeds.
• God does not secure order through fear; God absorbs chaos without returning it.
• The cross is not divine cruelty but divine self-emptying.

This inversion is what theologians have called cruciformity:

the cross-shaped nature of divine love on active display.

Cruciformity refuses the logic of domination. It insists that the deepest truths about reality is not divine coercion but relational fidelity - a love willing to suffer rather than violate the freedom of the beloved. 

This is not weakness. It is a redefinition of strength.

In process terms, this aligns with a God who persuades rather than coerces, who works within history rather than overriding it, who risks rejection for the sake of genuine relationship. 

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III. Imagining the Death of God as the Death of Violent Theology

When Jesus is crucified, Jesus-Christianity dares to say something extraordinary: that the image of God as violent ruler, cosmic enforcer, and imperial guarantor is exposed - and judged. Not mankind. But mankind's imagined gods and pantheons!

What dies on the cross is not divinity itself, but particular theological imaginations.

The cross marks the end of the god who sanctifies domination, who demands suffering for stability, who rules through fear.

This is why the crucifixion is so threatening. It unmasks sacred violence as idolatry.

Christianity’s most radical claim is not simply that God suffers, but that God refuses to be God in the way the religions and empires of men expect.

The cross then, is not only redemptive; it is iconoclastic. It shatters false images of divine power.

This is why later Christianity has struggled so deeply with its own symbol. A crucified God cannot easily be reconciled with empire, supremacy, or authoritarian certainty.

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IV. Resurrection: Love’s Persistence, Not Power’s Return

The resurrection does not undo the cross. It does not turn humiliation into domination nor suffering into revenge. Jesus does not rise as a conqueror reclaiming authority through force. He rises as forgiving Lord and Savior to all - both enemy and friend.

To understand that Jesus rises bearing wounds:

Isaiah 53. 1 "Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?"

2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

8 He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

9 And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

This matters profoundly. Resurrection is not the negation of cruciformity but its vindication. It declares that self-giving love is not ultimately defeated by violence, even when violence appears victorious.

In process theology, resurrection can be understood not as divine interruption of history, but as creative persistence - the affirmation that love, once embodied, cannot be erased from the fabric of becoming. God does not cancel the risk of love; God carries it forward.

Resurrection is not triumph over enemies. It is the future opened by forgiveness.

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V. Prophetic Aftershocks: Why the Cross Generates Resistance

Because Christianity remembers a crucified God, it carries within itself a permanent tension with systems of domination. When it is faithful, it aligns instinctively with the oppressed, the marginalized, and the victims of power.

This is why Christianity, when it is at its best, has generated prophetic movements:

• resistance to slavery,
• struggles for civil rights,
• advocacy for the poor,
• critiques of empire and militarism,
• care for the sick, imprisoned, and forgotten.

These are not accidental byproducts. They flow directly from the cruciform imagination: "A God revealed in suffering love cannot be comfortably allied with systems that produce suffering."

When Christianity forgets this, it becomes indistinguishable from other religions of power. When it remembers, it becomes disruptive - even dangerous to state and religious systems.

Jesus does not found a religion designed to rule. He ignites a moral disturbance that refuses to settle within the profane, the destitute, the wicked.

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VI. Christianity’s Betrayal - and Its Inescapable Memory

Christian history is filled with betrayals of the cross.

• In seeking certainty, Christianity has often fled vulnerability.
• In seeking power, it has embraced coercion.
• In seeking supremacy, it has silenced the very voices Jesus elevated.

Yet Christianity is never able to fully escape its founder:

• The cross remains, judging every attempt to make the faith safe, respectable, or dominant.
• Jesus does not belong to Christianity; Christianity is accountable to Jesus.
• This is both the Christian faith’s tragedy and its hope.

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Conclusion: The God Who Would Rather Suffer Than Rule

Or, The Faith That Refuses to be Safe...

Christianity is not unique because it claims exclusive truth. Many religions have done so, and history bears the scars of those claims. Christianity is unique because it dares to confess that truth allowed itself to be killed rather than to kill in return, that ...

... the Sacred chose vulnerability over victory,

faithfulness over force,

and love over survival ....

This confession does not elevate Christianity above other traditions. It unsettles it - as well as itself.

It renders this kind of Christian faith perpetually uncomfortable with-and-within itself:

• Christianity is unable to rest easily in domination, violence, or certainty without contradicting its own center.
• That a crucified God cannot be neatly aligned with empire, coercion, or religious control.
• That the Cross stands as a standing judgment against every attempt to make God useful, manageable, or safe.

When Christianity remains faithful to Jesus - when it resists temptations to move beyond the cross - it offers humanity something very rare and fragile: a vision of the Sacred ...

• Not as Controller of history, but as Companion within it;
• Not as distant ruler, but as Co-Sufferer;
• Not as enforcer of order, but as Love willing to be wounded rather than withdraw.

In this vision of the Sacred, divine power is not the ability to dominate outcomes, but the capacity to remain present, faithful, and creative even in the face of rejection and death.

• Such a faith does not conquer the world. It interrogates it. It unsettles it. It displaces it.

• It does not silence other traditions, but listens for truth wherever-and-whenever love bends toward justice, mercy, and healing... as it can within every religion.

• It does not promise certainty, but calls forth responsibility.

• The cross does not resolve the problem of suffering; it refuses to abandon those who suffer.

That is why this vision still matters - not as conquest, not as supremacy, but as conscience. It matters because it reminds humanity that holiness without love is hollow, that power without compassion is idolatry, and that any religion worthy of the Sacred must be willing to lose itself rather than betray love.

In the end, Christianity’s gift to the world is not an answer it possesses, but a posture it refuses to relinquish:

• that love is more truthful than power,
• that solidarity is more divine than control,
• and that God - if God is to mean anything at all
• is found not above the world, but with it,
• faithfully bearing wounds,
• faithfully calling creation forward,
• faithfully abiding with all who seek.

---

After the Cross...

The cross does not point upward - 

it points outward.

Into history,

into suffering,

into the unfinished work of love.

Not as command,

but as orientation.

Not as answer,

but as way.

If God is love,

then love must risk refusal,

endure loss,

and still remain love.

This is the strange direction

that Jesus leaves us with - 

as we live in a world

of wounds and worth.

R.E. Slater

December 22, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

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~ Go to Supplementary Materials, Part VI, Essay 1 ~

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

• Part VI - Supplementary Materials
• 1 - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
• 2 - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
• 3 - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
• 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)
• 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)
• 6 - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
• 7 - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
• 8 - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
• 9 - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
• 10 - Isaiah as a Living Textual Tradition: Manuscripts, Variants & Transmission
• 11 - From Scroll to Scripture: Bible Versions, Variants & their Histories

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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I. Jesus, Crucifixion, and Historical Context

• Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

• Crossan, John Dominic. Who Killed Jesus? San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.

• Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. New York: HarperOne, 2006.

• Wright, N. T. The Challenge of Jesus. Downers Grove: IVP, 1999.

• Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987.

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II. The Cross, Suffering, and Divine Vulnerability

• Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

• Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

• Kitamori, Kazoh. The Theology of the Pain of God. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

• Hart, Trevor A. Regarding Karl Barth: Toward a Reading of His Theology. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1999.

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III. Power, Violence, and the Exposure of Sacred Domination

• Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

• Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

• Wink, Walter. Engaging the Powers. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

• Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972.

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IV. Cruciform Ethics, Prophetic Witness, and Resistance

• Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

• Ellul, Jacques. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. New York: Seabury Press, 1969.

• Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

• Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988.

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V. Process Theology and Cruciform Divinity

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

• Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

• Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

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

• Cobb, John B., Jr. Christ in a Pluralistic Age. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1975.

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VI. Contemporary Christology & Non-Triumphalist Theology

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

• McFague, Sallie. Metaphorical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1982.

• Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

• Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

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.

---

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

---

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

• Part VI - Supplementary Materials
• 1 - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
• 2 - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
• 3 - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
• 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)
• 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)
• 6 - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
• 7 - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
• 8 - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
• 9 - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
• 10 - Isaiah as a Living Textual Tradition: Manuscripts, Variants & Transmission
• 11 - From Scroll to Scripture: Bible Versions, Variants & their Histories

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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.