Keith Giles - Here’s Why Most Christians Are Confused About Biblical Prophecy

Comment and Observation

by R.E. Slater

Deconstructing My Baptist Heritage

In my former "Covenant Theology" of the Old and New Testaments I would teach the bible in the way Keith Giles is teaching it below. But, whether Keith is a Covenant theologian or not, I do not know.

I also once entertained Calvinism as part of my covenant theology where God rules determinatively from the heavens above. Again, whether Keith Giles is a Calvinist or not, I do not know.

However, both of these approaches to the bible was how I had been taught in my (Reformed) Baptist tradition which I had grown up within. Today, I have kept the Covenants in both Testaments but have actively removed Calvinism (theocratic determinism) by replacing it with Arminianism (theocratic creational freewill agency) and have also contemporized Arminianism in the direction of Open and Relational theology. 

Further, instead of placing my biblical belief upon the foundations of Greek (Platonic) philosophy, (Catholic) Scholasticism, Enlightened Modernism; or upon analytical Westernized philosophy; I have removed these earlier philosophical foundational bedrocks in favor of Whitehead's process-based philosophy. Hence, here at Relevancy22, I will teach "Open and Relational Process theology which is grounded upon Whitehead's all-encompassing metaphysical process philosophy."

Some will describe process philosophy as a halfway house between Westernized analytical philosophy and (European) Continental philosophy.... However, I think of it as on it's own, and if comparing it with other cultural and religious ways of thinking and behaving, than as a step towards the Middle Eastern and Asian Eastern ways of perspectivizing at the world. In essence, Christianity should be more easily adaptable to non-Westernized nations if it is to be global in outreach. Moreover, nature acts more organically as a whole and less like how we have depicted it in the West over the centuries even though Whitehead was initially attempting to close the gap between Einsteinian and Quantum physics. As a result of his work Whitehead connected Hegel's prior cosmological work from the ancients to today's cultures and I have found in it a compassionate and hopeful teleology for the future.

A Covenantal God of Love

When approaching the bible I like to teach it within the theocratic Covenantal structures of its Testaments using a form of freewill agency where God is our "ruling" Creator/Sustainer and "present" Atoning/Savior but with an open-endedness to all  past assumed determinative biblical "prophecy". This would also importantly include a God who is highly relational and always relationally present in our lives and the lives and events of creation about us.

A God who urges us towards partnering with God's Self in bringing the Good News Gospel of God's Love and compassion through Jesus to the world - and to treat the world of creation lovingly at all times... which is quite the opposite which we find most non-democracies. And into all of this I have given to my Baptist heritage a process-relational structure and direction which is evolving over time as we lean into God's forgiving love, care, healing, mercy, and sustaining beauty.

Deconstructing the Bible and Our Beliefs

Now I do not expect Keith Giles to know about process relational theology. Nor, perhaps, to accept any form of lovingly "open and relational" theology. But when reading the article he wrote below I do appreciate his distinctions of biblical phraseology and would encourage those who read the bible to read it with an uncommon distinctiveness to it. By so doing, you will be creating more of an inductive bible study than the usual normative bible study positing popular conservative beliefs.

By this I mean that we learn to rethink the bible in holistic terms of thematic relational structure underlaid by God's holy love... and to define biblical terms more within era-contextualized and culturally-specific iconocology rather than grossly generalized bible interpretations popularized by American culture. Hence, within the bible's literature will be found differing Jewish beliefs over their ancient eras which sensed the Christ-event but laid out it's own cultural assessments within the God-inspired revelation they had presently understood. And when the Christ-event did take place, first-century Jews accordingly divided their beliefs along Messianic or non-Messianic lines. Hence, terms like "God's wrath and judgment" are enhanced or decentered when not informed by the Jesus' Incarnate - and Incarnating - compassinate presence.

How God Made the Heavens and the Earth

Lastly, I have tweaked how I think of God unlike how the ancients thought of God in the bible. Their faith was informed by God's judgment and wrath as well as mercy and grace... but with the evolution of science and modern technology our present understanding of natural events are less mystical and more perfunctory (carrying an attitude of indifference or apathy).

As example, a storm is a storm without any meaning or message from God ethically or morally. 

Because of creational freedom, nature's actions carry out events which are in line with it's "nature"... it's events may hold good or bad consequences for humans but in itself, we deem nature to be acting-in-kind to its natural self. It holds no form of "consciousness" per se of revenge or blessing (though process thought does recognize creation to have its own kind of living "consciousness" within its cosmic existence (we describe this as process-based panpsychism, which I have spoken to many times before). Thus, creaturely-and-natural events just "are" without any further implied spiritual meaning from God.

Yet, a wise man or woman would observe nature as John Muir or Aldo Leopold had done in the twentieth century, by recognizing within it's evolving output that nature is reacting to any form of mankind's external inputs. When we pollute a river there will be toxic biotic consequences to our actions. When we create mown lawns we are creating toxic deserts to bugs, birds, and varmints. When we enact war upon one another we will disturb the natural processes of the land upon which a war is being conducted... not to mention the tragic, desperate lives caught between war zones.

Similarly when we do good things in naive ways: (i) we recognize that farming practices feeds others but how we "till the land" can disturb the natural cycles upon the land. (ii) Building cities and roads across wetlands and swamps inadvertently create thermal heat sinks around a rural and urban metropolis to which powerful winds will build and react. (Iii) Placing a dam into canyons and cataracts provide water to people yet also produces additional erosional burden opon the streams located above a dam. Hence, for every naive industrial impact upon the land which mankind levies on the earth there will be a mounting order of ecological reaction akin to our own naivete.

The obvious message from God is that our wisdom is not like God's wisdom... that we need to consider the consequential burdens we place upon land... and it's resultant impacts upon people... when mining, digging, molding, shaping, building, or warring.

Conclusion

Overall, I wish to create a theology where God's love - and loving acts - are the foundation stones upon which we interact with God. In Jesus - and by Jesus' incarnational atoning work - God has shown God's Self to be loving as versus the more ancient biblical idea which beheld God as an angry Semitic (covenantal) despot requiring appeasement at every moment in our lives (altars and sacrifices). But in Jesus, he expanded the more important relational aspects of Covenant living with the God of God's and Lord of Lords that the Covenant-making God is first, last, and always a loving and compassionate, relationally present, God. Amen!

Perhaps these thoughts may help: i) those students of the bible, and, ii) Christians living and sharing their faith in innumerable socio-religious and cultural ways. I know it has helped myself when informing my Baptist faith when re-framing, or bathing, or re-centering, it in God's loving presence. That my Covenanting Father/God is as lovingly benevolent as he is my faithfully sovereign Lord and Savior.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater

May 30, 2024

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Here’s Why Most Christians Are

Confused About Biblical Prophecy

article link

LAST UPDATED ON: SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 AT 7:29 PM

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 BY KEITH GILES

Other than the fact that a large majority of Christians have been raised to believe in the End Times Rapture theory created in 1850 by John Nelson Darby, the main reason there’s so much confusion about the End Times and Biblical Prophecy is how we have been trained to understand certain Biblical terminology.

IA

For example, when we read the phrase “the end of the age” we hear “the end of the world” or “the end of time,” but that’s NOT what the phrase is referring to.

“The end of the age” is a reference to the end of the Jewish age which was originally prophesied in the book of Daniel [See Dan. 12:7 & 13] and later confirmed by Jesus in his Olivet Discourse. It’s not about when the world will end or the planet will be burned up, but about when the age of the Jewish people ends and the age of the Gentiles begins. Paul makes reference to this in Romans, also.

The end of the Jewish is simply when the Old Covenant Temple was destroyed, the Old Testament priesthood was ended and the daily animal sacrifice ceased forever. That was what happened in AD 70.

IB

The end of the age is also the beginning of the next age [or the “age to come”] where the New Covenant reality is unfolded and expanded upon the earth. This is the age we are in right now.

II

Another phrase we tend to misunderstand is “coming in the clouds” in reference to Jesus. For example, when Jesus says that people will see him coming in the clouds in Matthew 24, or when he tells the High Priest that soon “…you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” [Matt. 26:64], he is not talking about the day he literally comes riding in the sky on a horse to initiate the Rapture.

The term “coming in the clouds” is a reference to God’s judgment being poured out on a nation or a city used all throughout the Old Testament scriptures by various prophets. It’s never a literal “coming in the clouds” where God shows up physically in the skies, but always a metaphorical way of saying that the destruction God’s prophets warned the people to avoid is about to be poured out – usually in the form of an invading army which destroys Babylon, or Edom, or Egypt or even Jerusalem.

III

Another example of how the coming of Jesus is seen as a warning of judgment is in Revelation where Jesus speaks to the seven churches in the first few chapters and each time he warns them to repent of their sins he mentions that if they do not he will “come to them” and take away their lampstand or rebuke them in some way. The “coming” in this sense is not a good thing. It’s a sign of something you want to avoid if at all possible.

IV

One related misunderstanding is also about the Second Coming of Christ where we tend to view this event as a literal physical return of Jesus in the flesh. However, the term in the Greek is “parousia” and it simply means “presence” which in the case of Christ is something we can all experience right now, even though Jesus isn’t physically in the room with us.

The word parousia is found in the following verses: Matthew 24:3, 27, 37, 39; 1 Corinthians 15:23; 1 Thessalonians 2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23; 2 Thessalonians 2:1,8,9; James 5:7,8; 2 Peter 1:16; 3:4,12; 1 John 2:28.

Our challenge, then, is in what way the term “coming” is used or intended to be understood in the New Testament. Sometimes:

i) the “coming” is in reference to the fulfillment of a prophetic judgment event [as seen when Jerusalem is destroyed by the Romans in AD 70], and [at] other times

ii) the “coming” of Christ is in reference to the presence of Christ being experienced spiritually by us here and now.

[Summary] These are two different things: The “coming” which involves the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy by invading armies, and the “coming” which involves the experience of the presence of Christ by those who are abiding in Christ today.

Understanding the differences between when the context is the apocalyptic destruction and when the context is the presence of Christ now is pretty important.

Conclusion

For further study on this topic, I recommend the new book I just published from Quoir called “Jesus Unexpected: Ending the End Times to Become the Second Coming” which also features a Foreword by Baxter Kruger.

You can pick up a copy on Kindle or in Paperback.

Here’s what a few nice people had to say about my book:

Deconstructing your faith? Need a community to help you find space to Reconstruct your faith? If so, please meet me at Square 1. This 90-day online course is designed to help you move through the painful process of Deconstruction and onward through the freedom and joy of Reconstruction. Our next round starts Sept. 21. Register for 50% off for a limited time HERE

Keith Giles and his wife, Wendy, work with Peace Catalyst International to help build relationships between Christians and Muslims in El Paso, TX. Keith was formerly a licensed and ordained minister who walked away from organized church over a decade ago to start a home fellowship that gave away 100% of the offering to the poor in the community. Today he is the author of several best-selling books, including “Jesus Unexpected: Ending The End Times To Become The Second Coming” which is available now on Amazon.

ABOUT

Keith Giles is a former pastor who left the pulpit over a decade ago to follow Jesus. He’s been interviewed on CNN with Anderson Cooper, USA Today, Fox News, BuzzFeed and hundreds of other podcasts and radio programs. He’s a regular contributor to John Fugelsang’s Sirius XM Radio show, “Tell Me Everything”, as part of the weekly “God Squad” segment, and he is the founder and co-host of the “Heretic Happy Hour Podcast”, and his solo podcast, “Second Cup with Keith.”

Keith is also the best-selling author of the 7-part “Jesus Un” book series focused on Deconstruction of the Christian faith, and the “Sola” book series focused on embracing the mystery of the Divine. His latest book, “The Quantum Sayings of Jesus: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas” is available now on Amazon.

Keith currently lives in El Paso, TX with his wife Wendy.

Let's Talk About Process Theology vs Universalism

R.E. Slater Shorts

Let's Talk About

Process Theology vs Universalism

by R.E. Slater

My "Shorts" are given as one-offs on any given topic of the day which I may have come across in my daily readings. Hopefully they spark another way of thinking about a subject whether that subject is light-hearted or heavy and disturbing. - re slater

Concerning the process view on universalism I would describe it as quite a bit different though getting to the same conclusion as universalism arrives at re God's reconciliation of the world to God's Self.

But I'd rather approach the story of God's love from a processual gospel standpoint than from a westernized version of systematic theology.

In the process approach, God is love and will lovingly interact with all of creation in every way possible without circumventing creational agency or freewill.

As creation bears the "Imago Dei" of God it bears:

• all the ability to bless;
• to recreate thriving communities; and,
• to enrich generative acts of love across everything around itself.

But when not enacting with our divine/human creational-nature - which is not a sin nature but a processually loving nature then:

• mankind's consequential actions will not bless,
• nor create generative thriving,
• nor provide enrichment to those around it.

In Whiteheadian-based process theology, a loving God's embeddedness of God's divine Being into creation allows for pancessual evolutionary growth of love against the self - or self will - which inhabits nature's soul.

• This divinely-based soul is molded out of LOVE, not sin.

• It is described as a processual pan-en-theism (NOT the Eastern idea of pan-theism).

Quite obviously, this approach has removed the classic approach of traditional theism which leans into God's transcendence much harder than it does God's relational immanence to God's creation.

This is inconsistent with process theology which does not deny God's transcendent "Otherness" but must speak to God's incessant, necessary immanence across all westernized doctrines of abondoness, judgment, separation, and errant beliefs of Divine Holiness.

That is, process theology leans hard into the immanence of God without denying God's "Otherness." God is not more God because God is transcendent but verifies God AS God when constantly abiding with us in God's immanence. Which is why process theology must redescribed traditional theism in terms of God-with-us pan-en-theism.

Love than is the coin with two halves... It is why we all have agency and also the reason we yearn to enact beauty.... But it is also the curse which pains our souls when we cannot, or do not, enact love thus enflaming our souls by the sin and evil we do reflected in the broken mirror of Love's passionate side. (FYI. Of note, in process theology God cannot do evil. God is without sin and evil. God is love.) 

Dante's Divine Comedy in B&W Woodcuts

Similarly, the western doctrine of universalism describes hell as a present condition and not a present expectation of the Christian gospel.

Hell is popularly depicted in the Dantian description of the Catholic purgatory in the title, The Divine Comedy, which is an Italian narrative poem by author Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. In it, the Divine Comedy revels to readers the horrors their souls would go through if they did not obey God's laws nor live righteously thus promoting Christian legalism and prideful holiness by its material. And it is here that Christianity has backfilled it's idea of a Protestant Christian hell.

And because of Calvinism - though other non-Reformed approaches are likewise as guilty (Wesleyanism, Lutheran, Methodism, Catholicism, Eastern and Russian Orthodoxy) - we blame the world condition upon a controlling God determined to enact His will upon all the earth.

Calvinism thus tells us that we receive for our sin and evil divine imprecations as  spoken throughout the biblical narrative of living up to God's contractual / covenantal obligations or else suffer the consequences of our unfaithful sin and evil.

• Of course, this would be a gross misreading of the biblical covenants as the Abrahamic Covenant beautiful shows salvation as unconditionally laid upon God and not mankind. A God who willing bears the surety of God's Atoning -Forgiving-Redeeming-and Resurrecting Self acts when walking through the sacrificial halves laid out by Abram.

• Or the Landed-Form of the Old Covenant as promised by God to Israel when coming into the land of Canaan to inhabit its enculturated regions and live out the love of God in their own way with their neighbors.

• Or the Davidic Covenant God made with the children of Israel assuring the nation a blessed reign and peace when the godly lead their flocks lovingly towards truth and beauty.

• Or even dramatically, in the New Covenant's displayed on Calvary's Cross when God Incarnate (Jesus) became the Lamb of God in Jesus' ministry, slaughter/death, and resurrection, underlining God's "sacrificial selfless service" to all the world as depicted in Jesus' atoning resurrection and dramatic revelation of God's everlasting love contra the legalism and unloving laws placed by Jewish religion upon God's people (sic, a parallel religious bondage to that of Rome's civil bonage).

Hence, Westernised Christian  "universalism" seeks to theologically delimit and re-circumscribe the borders of the Jewish faith which fell into Greek hands with its prophetic fears of the afterlife. Universalism argues that the Love of God wins (or Jesus wins for those who wish to be more sancrosanct or principled than us Christian commoners).

That in God's Love all will be reconciled in this life or the next.

Which prophetic testament is also true of process-based Christian theology. But unlike process theology, progressive Christian Universalism is trying to heal its systematic doctrines founded upon Platonic philosophies which are neither processual, pancessual, nor centered in theologies of love.

Process Christian theology is progressive but it's basis wells up from upon a non-Westernized, non-Platonic foundation. It's philosophic foundation is grounded in Whitehead's process philosophy which rejects all non-processual philosophies including the church's past two Millennias of dogmatic teachings.

For a process theologian, remaking a pig by putting lipstick on it won't be enough. The entire affair of Western dogma has to be uprooted and replaced upon Whitehead's process philosophy of organism in order to be able to live up to the God of Love whom we are worshipping as opposed to the church's creaky traditional platforms weeping with theological holes throughout its substructures because of their defiences.

In conclusion, universalism and process theology share the same end result but not the same philosophic foundation. One is inadequate and unsupportable. The other is superior and can get the Church to it's intended ideation of worship a God of Love without recoursing to the bible's older ideas of secular and religious hell.

R.E. Slater

September 12, 2023

Addenda

1 - I forgot to mention that process-based panentheism is inherently combinatory , or re-connective as a processual teleology embedded in God's love. Hence, process theology really doesn't have an eschatology but a teleology which assumes that Jesus in the processual reconnector to a "broken" creation burdened with an agency inclined towards blessing but plagued with unloving responses against it's very ontological structure. You may read more on my website.

2 - For the process few out there I would welcome further written observation beyond my mere attempts to describe the why's and wherefore's of a westernized religious system that is flawed and unable to work in a postmodern, post-Christian cultural context. Moreover, I find process theology to be more adept at morphing with the times ahead of us much as the church is trying to apply outdated Hellenised-Platonic thought to do the same from its the past 2000 years of institutionalised traditionalism.Thx.

3 - My typical (Calvinistic) Reformed soteriological chart in my non-process days focused on the Work & Sufficiency of Christ. Below may be more of a Wesleyan approach emphasizing the importance of a faith verified by it's works lest it simply exists as a useless, or meaningless, faith that "indwells" with "expelling" God's love in action.

Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology

Carl Jung

“Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns...The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite.” ― Alex M. Vikoulov, Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality

Poet and Author Tennessee Williams

"Life is the perpetual destruction of innocence. If we are witness to this, and if we step forward and heal the wounds of this destruction, we become human; we might even become saintly. If we share what we've seen and learned, we may create art. To do nothing is to be utterly evil."-Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom

"The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process Metaphysician

Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology

by R.E. Slater

I was asked this weekend at our annual college Christmas party by fellow Christians to support their version of a "biblical" eschatology and how that "biblical truth" might be the more meaningful for living out our Christian faith as [liberal progressivism] overtakes the traditional church in an Age of Conservative Evangelicalism.

Mentally, my silent response was, "Yeah for American liberal progressivism seeking legal and civil equalities and recognitions to 'the unwanted other's' civil rights!" As versus the main church's active denial of those same rights by my Christian friends whose persuasion was the same one I've listened to all my life in their evangelical church traditions justifying their beliefs based upon their obsequious literal readings of the bible. (I will speak more to how to read the bible a bit later in this post.)

And secondly, my enjoining muted response in which I offered no further answers except continued silent response to their statements and thus preventing a predictably imminent and virtual crucifixion by my Christian friends. To speak would simply excite them to dig in and not listen. There was no purpose in attempting any truth speaking to religiously attuned ears seeking justifying responses to their own. I simply made a wise crack to relieve the tension in the room and left.

However, what I wanted to say would have been more along the lines of what I will observe immediately below. I would've stated that the only human Armageddon to come in my Christian friend's expected eschatological schemes (sic, from select passages in Daniel, the OT Prophets, and the NT such as the book of Revelation) would be by their own hands. Not God's. Nor the devil's. That end time judgments have usually come by the hands of the church itself historically. But of course, they would've decried my assessment against their own beliefs based upon a lifetime of personal and congregations readings, discussions, educational classes, and the pulpit. There was no winning this debate.

I Was but Now Am

Years ago I had entertained the very thoughts my friend's held that night based on old-timey fundamentalist teleologies and later, new-line evangelical teleologies (sic, the eschatological doctrine of design and purpose by God for creation). I too would've denounced my present self and shown by chapter-and-verse from Genesis to Revelation how to construct a biblical eschatology based upon a Reformed Covenantal reading of the bible. In fact, my graduate capstone paper for M.Div. certification centered on biblical exegetical studies proposing eleven major themes of the bible... several of which dealt expressly with teleology though I could easily make the case that all those same bible themes did so in themselves. Now realize that I was centering on major themes of the bible back in the 1980s; today, I could easily add a few more based upon current church discussions.

In that capstone project I merged those eleven themes with one another and discussed in brief what was meant by such subject matter as salvific discontinuity and continuity between the Testaments; God's Promises through the covenantal eras; the maturation of the major OT/NT Covenants across time; the various typologies of the Christ to come (sic, Messianic Christology); the movement of Salvific History through time, and etc. All this effort was done in order to complete a fuller picture of the coming future of God's inbreak into end-time human history describing God's divine sovereignty as God moved with humanity from the Fall of Adam to the Resurrection of Christ to the Salvation of both World & Cosmos. This then was the picture of redemptive eschatology I was taught would come to fruition via the "I-Thou cooperative" between God and man.

Now I still believe in these elements but am now expanding them beyond their traditional Christian basis when I speak to the more centralizing ideas of God's love and immanence (intimate nearness) with creation while lessening, or removing all together, the traditional church's theologoumenas as they are reflected by it's doctrines and creeds. When doing this, I am purposely placing my former education and theologies into a "progressive form" of evangelicalism and/or church traditions.

But when taking this step, I am also attempting to remove from my vocabulary and cultural mindset my own Western Philosophical thoughts when replacing them (as I can) with Whitehead's Processual thought structures. Which means all the Greek Platonic (sic, Hellenaic) philosophic structures describing God and man in the NT bible - or the more organic Semitic philosophies of the OT, are lifted out and replaced by Processual philosophy. Which in itself is it's own organic philosophy attuned to more similar mindsets from the ancient past. That is, Whitehead was echoed by Hegel who was echoed by earlier Semitic and Greek philosophers against Westernization's philosopher's such as Plato, Aristotle, and the rest who won out.

Thus, Whiteheadian process thought is the latest encapsulation of the past which is winning-over my own yearning to re-express my Christian beliefs in fuller, more congruent tones, to today's arising ecological civilizations and perhaps be recapture in other indigenous cultures and religions. Over the years I have gone into some depth to express all this... here, is my shorthand for observed momentous change which I see occurring across all of life's many disciplines and socio-political and economic landscapes as they each become more attuned to God's creative processual design in nature and the stars.

As an example of difference think in terms of the Greek pantheon's many Gods led by Zeus in their uncaring, unloving, greatness and power. Their distance from the world and their easy judgment upon mankind. This I have abandoned and refuse to conjoin Israel's and Christianity's God with such worthless Greek gods. When I read the bible now I am re-expressing the Christian God in terms of love, care, grace, mercy, and nearness, while also recognizing that the bible's authors in the ancient past did not separate their thoughts of God from their socio-cultural contexts as we have learned to do since the Enlightenment eras of the more recent past. And though their worship was tweaked to behave more in line with love than judgment and cruelty, still it was not fully enough when viewing Israel's doctrinal embodiments by the Pharisees and Scribes of Jesus' day. Thus Jesus ministry of indiscriminant love to the unwanted, unsightly, invisible, and oppressed. As well as Jesus' harshest words and actions against who were designated as priests of Israel's God. Even so today the church struggles with separating it's ideas of God from who God really is even as the bible narrators did in the past. Our pride and legalisms, wont for separateness, exclusion and holy "apartness," has brought a profound reading of the bible into today's civilizations. But again, I have discussed this at length over the years.

Hence, to contextually read the bible, one must read it in its cultural conjectures and teachings just as you would earlier ancient literature and beliefs. Some is fraught with goodness. Some not. Some is muddled in complexities by their own presumptions. And some more easier to grasp. And there's the rub. The ideas of the ancient past no longer translate "biblically" to the today's postmodern (er, metamodern?) world. Yes, the age-old metaphysical questions are the same of "sin and evil, God and man, purpose and reason for living." But the ways we approach such subjects must not be constricted by out-of-date Platonic, Scholastic, Enlightened, Victorian, nor Newtonian thinking any longer. With the age of (processual) quantum physics and (processual) evolution has come Whitehead and his predecessor, Hegel's, ideas of processual movement in a world which is never static, nor mechanical, nor without its own kind of processual (rather than reductionistic) teleology. In fact, we live in a processual creation/cosmos and don't even recognize it. We might call them "circles or cycles of life" (aka Disney's Lion King) but in Whiteheadian thought we may go far deeper than such simplistic statements.

What is a Process Teleology?

To Whitehead as a cosmological metaphysician who also happened to be a Victorian Christian, he observed a cosmology (or universe, or creation, or world) which was organic in its construction. He thought of it much like we do our own bodies and self-reflections moving through a world of experiences. We were not automatons any more than the world of quantum physics was, though scientists ascribed Newtonian philosophies to it. Yet, they did not work.

Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism spoke to a deeply complex, organically relational world of every changing causes and effects, where a positive evolution could evolve against all negative mutating circumstances. In these, like the biblical prophets and writers of old we would agree. When a God of love has essentially and purposely created creation from God's Self we would expect a struggle between good and evil - especially when it was created with agency, or INDETERMINANT free will, buried deep within the DNA of divine LOVE. Not by fiat did agency spawn. No, but by Love.

In time, Whitehead's ideas took shape and the generations after him recast his Philosophy of Organism as a Philosophy of Process, or, Process Philosophy properly stated. And as a progressive evangelical leaving evangelical teachings will keeping the bible ideas of "Covenant" and "Teleology" in my brain, heart, and faith, it became necessary to abandon not God but the old-line teachings of my faith. It held - and still does to some extent when not participating in White Christian Nationalism and Supremacy - a lot of good in it from many different directions. But of late, it's gotten tangled up with itself and has forgotten there is only one God and not the gods of politics appearing to my mind as the Evil Ones in Revelation.

None the less, these were things I thought but really couldn't speak to my present audience of Christian friends. They simply would not understand. As evidence of this I spoke to one of those friends who showed an interest for a time but then began to mentally wander off even as those close to our discussion moved away and spoke amongst themselves on other things they were more interested in. It is what it is, as they say in the state of New York. And you can't unmake that which is already decided and made. The best I can do is write down my thoughts and share with those who, like myself, must find another way.

From Faith to Faith, said the Apostle Paul

Which brings me to this observation: As a process Christian all the old line systematic theologies I was taught to believe - by both (i) exegetical interpretation of the Scriptures in the original languages plus (ii) eisigetical expositions from those studies - can no longer comport with the church's 2000 year hoary tradition of Westernized Christianity.

In its place, I am updating my faith through a more rigorous process of processual expansionism removing core Analytic Philosophical Westernized elements by replacing them with newer, more relationally organic elements pertaining both to my faith and civic life as a citizen of a liberal democracy eschewing any-and-all forms of authoritarian doctrinnaires and racisms as shown by the conservative church with its willful involvements in white neo-facist supremacy politics.

(Which is curious, as at one time I wrote here on an Age of Authoritarianism as versus an Age of Cooperative Participation of global communities with one another. To build ecological societies the latter must win out in displays of liberally adapted geographic global democracies against tyrannical and despotic governments of one or many. However, my shorthand at present is just to state Metamodernistic which implies these socio-economic elements and more.)

And so, when I now exegetically study the collected interpretations of God-and-life-and-faith in their orally derived and ancient/past commentaries, narratives, and interpretaive storylines of God in Scripture, I now read of them as plain admissions to theistic faiths in transition just like our own faiths are in transition today. Each historical era - whether in bible times or after - are attempts to describe a divinely loving God in their era-specific ageisms of culturally folkloric ideations of God-and-life-and-faith. Especially of a God who in many ways is "wholly-unlike us" but also a God who is "wholly alike us" in many, many other ways.

So when I speak of God I lean into the process version of God's nearness, participation, and fellowship with us, the world, and nature as versus the Platonic-Greek Hellenaic traditions of transcendency, wrathful holiness, and divine powers which Western theology has chosen to follow with its evidentiary histories of oppression, racism, and crusading inquisitions.

A God of Love is not a God of Wrath. The wrath we think we see is the consequences of our choosing not to love one another or the world about us. When ascribing to God Wrath, and Judgment, and Hell we are but describing ourselves and placing these qualities upon God. Which is why, I feel, the biblical authors had a hard time telling who the real God was and versus who they thought God was. 

These same discussions go on today in faith commentaries, books, and postings. And since divine revelation is open and not closed (sic, only found in the bible) I feel its a valid position to take that when a misapprehension of God is taken then I may call it out even when collected into the Scriptures. The biblical narratives are simply yesterday's newspapers of faithful believers gone wrong in their faith beliefs.

Reading the Bible As It Was and Can Become

Firstly, I don't read from a revelationally closed Bible but from an inspirationally open Bible by which I mean God is always in communication with us today as God was back then in "biblical" times. Whether by God's Spirit or however we wish to ascribe it along Western theological formulas and syllogistic equations.

Next, I would prefer to think of God's communication in terms of communing with us much as a parent would with a child... or a friend to a friend. To speak to one another in imagined divine fiats is one thing, but to commune with one another in divine love is another. A communion which vouchsafes God's lifelong fellowship and deeply earthy relational communion with us, and the universe, in continually intimate terms. Not in terms of a God ensconced upon a heavenly throne coming-and-going according to God's good whim much like the Greek gods had in the ancient Greek imagination.

Too, I've been leaning deeply into the process theological paradigms which teach God's nearness to us at all times in our lives. God does not - nay, will not - leave us as my earlier faith taught when teaching of a loving God beheld in idolatrous admixtures of a judging-and-condemning God. Without necessarily denying the ancient Greek idea of God's far-ness from us vis-a-vis the church's Hellenistic teachings of transcendence, a pan-en-theistic (not pan-theistic nor classical theistic) process faith better describes a God who created creation as One with God's Self. Think of this as a four-point "trinity" but in this case "creation" is the salient fourth point on the fellowship circle of Father-Son-and-Spirit. This then would describe a God who has no intentions of abandoning us because God is the kind of God who has been, and always will be, deeply, intimately, in processual relationship with us and God's beloved creation.

And to the outmoded eschatological idea of leaving this earth for a better, non-earthly life in heaven while the world burns itself up by its own hands in Armageddon-like ecology gone bad. This Christian theology as found in the NT book of Revelation seems quite un-God-like to a process Christian metaphysician. To such churchly beliefs of a distant God's impugning judgments upon a wicked, wasted earth, I would say this....

"If the events in Revelation's narratives do come about they will be wrought by our own hands - not by God's loving hands whose love forewarned us of sin and evil when we do not love one another. Nor does God pile-on when sin and evil measures our "endtime" existence.

Rather, one might say such calamities come from a polluted earth which we have corrupted to the point of its cosmic devastation. A devastation which bears consequences to our neglecting care of the earth.

So rather than ascribing to the Christian faith a judging Nether-God raging down His wrath and Hell upon us, I simply read in Revelation of unloving man's complete failures across societies, nature, and even the heavens itself. Which of course is a very processual theology which describes consequences to sin and evil and to which classic church doctrines would say anathema to in their closed, interpretive readings of God and Scripture and churchly dominionism."

A Heavenly Communion Which Doesn't Stay in Heaven

Further, when thinking of a "biblical" eschatology of predicted things to come first know God cannot control outcomes in a world God designed as generatively good in value and structure. Divine love does not control... it but persuades listening, obedient hearts against the misuse of its own agency.

And secondly, life is a procession of processual events both good and bad. "What we sow we will reap." A Loving God can never sow evil nor respond to evil in unloving, non-restorative ways of redeeming reunion.

And thirdly, we must learn to expand our minds and hearts away from the church's traditionalized teachings. It's biblical eschatology is divinely unbiblical as I have shown. But it also creates a closed cosmos whose future state becomes trapped within its own static statism.

However, if we substitute the word teleology for eschatology we then have a fully, more correct picture of a processually "uncontrolled" divine future working to rebalance its inherently redemptive structure away from deathly structures to divinely implanted transformative and generatively good structures. Structures I would better describe as organically inbuilt evidencing a teleology of atoning relationships between creation itself and its panenthiestically immanent Godhead. We might call such survivability as evolution, but a processually-based and divinely enable evolution speaks to continuing creative and generatively good evolving relationships seeking merger within its many cosmological forms.

Conclusion - We Are Whom We Are Becoming

Our conclusion? A process-based Christianity is more than progressive in its assessment of the world. It is a wholly-other construction away from perverse and unhelpful teachings of the traditional church (think gay re-education; or refugees being shipped to unready communities).

In essence, we are trading in a Fire-and-Brimstone God for a God of Love. And to the sins and evils in this life we do not blame God for them but ourselves for not humbling ourselves before one another and seeking goodness and kindness, listening and learning. God is a God of grace, mercy and forgiveness. Creation's very own teleology is one of generative goodness and valuative operation. Albeit, on its own terms, much like we ourselves likewise blessed with agency, but inherent in nature, in us, even the universe, is the Imago Dei of God.

And lastly, it is in creation's very nature - even us, ourselves - to redeem and recreate all things towards redemption. Christ did this very same in God's atoning emancipation. It is how creation's designed to work by active insemination from one redemptive effect to another. Process describes this creation process as "A process of Being which is Becoming." That is, we are, and we may move forwards towards what we may fully become as we can in this life and its circumstances. Like God Who once said to Israel "I AM who I AM"... so too we may also say, "We Are whom We are Becoming to Be."

Blessings,

R.E. Slater

December 12, 2022

partially updated January 23, 2023

Minding the Day of the Lord Which Has Come...

Minding the Day of the Lord

Which Has Come

by R.E. Slater

June 22, 2022

After reading through the science article below I thought it may be helpful to review what solar outages do, and do not, mean for the Christian faith. Too, it's a great solar science article speaking to solar magnetism and quantum mechanics. Enjoy. - res

Prolonged national grid failure will not be a sign of the Lord's Coming. Seemingly, I'm a preterist based on my decided embrace of Process Theology. A position which means Jesus is "here in our midst now" through his Church. A church which I will loosely define as "anyone who is sharing God's love with others, including in the service of restoring the earth's ruined habitats."

So, when Christians fervantly proclaim, "Lord Come," I will typically reply, "Lord, Become, in our midst." Meaning, we are to live and serve in the present in the fullness of Christ's atonement and resurrection whatever may come later. For now, we love and serve, minister and declare healing, hope, and forgiveness.

Nor will national outages signal the time of Armageddon, which is "End-of-the-World" stuff according to many Christian traditions. In stark contrast, process theology doesn't care about traditionalized prophetic prognostications as it views biblical prophecy as simply what I and others have been saying over the years in warnings, reproofs, and encouragement as we can.

That is, a prophet looks into our present context; weighs it against how it should be as a lived theology of love; determines its gross deficiencies; then speak to those failings.

Prophecy then is preaching in the present text of how to live love. Not proclaiming future events and describing God in wrath and judgment. This would be the opposite of a God of love. The prophets were moved deeply to speak to their community's lack of love to one another. It is this lack of loving to which they pointed to and said we can do better.

Similarly, today's prophets look at the church, its doctrines, its behaviors, and declare to unlistening, indifferent ears to repent and turn back to a God of love versus their God of Wrath.

They proclaim abomination upon all the wicked works of Christian men and women pursuing a deceiving socio-political religion of power and control commonly described as Church "Dominionism". This theology is also known as the Christian "Reconstruction" of society through decrees of sectarian dogmas to be  observed by all men.

And yet, the Church is not the State, is to be separate from the State, and is not to invoke sectarian "Jihadhism" upon the people of the State.

America is not a theocracy, not even a form of sectarian theocracy. It is a nation operating under its own civic Constitution granting equal and fair Civil Rights to  all Americans. A decree which seeks to embrace the masses of all differing colors, genders, sexes, races, creeds, or ethnicities within its nation-state. Pointed as an act of not and not simply by fiat. Which, in this regard, may lean into the church's own doctrines of love and charitable works (as versus religious legalisms, ascetisms, stoicisms, or infifference. All of which do not reflect a God, or a theology, of love).

Too, the eschatology of Process Christianity says heaven and Spirit have come in full force with Jesus' Advent (this is also the claim of church traditions). That the future is unknown, open, undetermined, and uncontrolled by our Creator God Redeemer. That we bear a deep obligation and duty to act in God's stead to "redeem" all whom we meet, influence, work with, and fellowship with... beginning with ourselves, then from people to nature.

The kind of future a Process Christian embraces is one of responsible living at all times in love. Not exclusion, nor warfare, nor civil injustice, not civil racism, nor even the suicide of nature.

And I'll go one further... if and when Armageddon-like events occur it will be bourne out not by God but by ourselves - the masses of humanity, including the church, for failure to love one another and for refusing to make each day better than the last.

"Thus saith the Lord."

by R.E. Slater

June 22, 2022

[Excerpt]

...A National Grid Failure will deeply disrupt our dependency on electrical grids, transformers, and anything electronic:

"McIntosh is already thinking ahead to the next thing—tools that can detect where a sunspot will emerge and how likely it is to burst. He yearns for a set of satellites orbiting the sun—a few at the poles and a few around the equator, like the ones used to forecast terrestrial weather. The price tag for such an early-­warning system would be modest, he argues: eight craft at roughly $30 million each. But will anyone fund it? “I think until Cycle 25 goes bananas,” he says, “nobody’s going to [care].”

"When the next solar storm approaches Earth and the deep-space satellite provides its warning—maybe an hour in advance, or maybe 15 minutes, if the storm is fast-moving—alarms will sound on crewed spacecraft. Astronauts will proceed to cramped modules lined with hydrogen-rich materials like polyethylene, which will prevent their DNA from being shredded by protons in the plasma. They may float inside for hours or days, depending on how long the storm endures.

"The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in. Those living near military installations may see government aircraft scrambling overhead; when radar systems jam, nuclear defense protocols activate."

Illustration by Mark Pernice

Here Comes the Sun - to End Civilization

article link

by Matt Ribel

June 21, 2022

Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction. Our best hope the next time Earth is in the crosshairs? Capacitors.

TO A PHOTON, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations.

The cause of the ruckus is the sun’s magnetic field. Generated by the churning of particles in the core, it originates as a series of orderly north-to-south lines. But different latitudes on the molten star rotate at different rates—36 days at the poles, and only 25 days at the equator. Very quickly, those lines stretch and tangle, forming magnetic knots that can puncture the surface and trap matter beneath them. From afar, the resulting patches appear dark. They’re known as sunspots. Typically, the trapped matter cools, condenses into plasma clouds, and falls back to the surface in a fiery coronal rain. Sometimes, though, the knots untangle spontaneously, violently. The sunspot turns into the muzzle of a gun: Photons flare in every direction, and a slug of magnetized plasma fires outward like a bullet.

The sun has played this game of Russian roulette with the solar system for billions of years, sometimes shooting off several coronal mass ejections in a day. Most come nowhere near Earth. It would take centuries of human observation before someone could stare down the barrel while it happened. At 11:18 am on September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a 33-year-old brewery owner and amateur astronomer, was in his private observatory, sketching sunspots—an important but mundane act of record-keeping. That moment, the spots erupted into a blinding beam of light. Carrington sprinted off in search of a witness. When he returned, a minute later, the image had already gone back to normal. Carrington spent that afternoon trying to make sense of the aberration. Had his lens caught a stray reflection? Had an undiscovered comet or planet passed between his telescope and the star? While he stewed, a plasma bomb silently barreled toward Earth at several million miles per hour.

When a coronal mass ejection comes your way, what matters most is the bullet’s magnetic orientation. If it has the same polarity as Earth’s protective magnetic field, you’ve gotten lucky: The two will repel, like a pair of bar magnets placed north-to-north or south-to-south. But if the polarities oppose, they will smash together. That’s what happened on September 2, the day after Carrington saw the blinding beam.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

Electrical current raced through the sky over the western hemisphere. A typical bolt of lightning registers 30,000 amperes. This geomagnetic storm registered in the millions. As the clock struck midnight in New York City, the sky turned scarlet, shot through with plumes of yellow and orange. Fearful crowds gathered in the streets. Over the continental divide, a bright-white midnight aurora roused a group of Rocky Mountain laborers; they assumed morning had arrived and began to cook breakfast. In Washington, DC, sparks leaped from a telegraph operator’s forehead to his switchboard as his equipment suddenly magnetized. Vast sections of the nascent telegraph system overheated and shut down.

THE CARRINGTON EVENT, as it’s known today, is considered a once-in-a-century geomagnetic storm—but it took just six decades for another comparable blast to reach Earth. In May 1921, train-control arrays in the American Northeast and telephone stations in Sweden caught fire. In 1989, a moderate storm, just one-tenth the strength of the 1921 event, left Quebec in the dark for nine hours after overloading the regional grid. In each of these cases, the damage was directly proportional to humanity’s reliance on advanced technology—more grounded electronics, more risk.

When another big one heads our way, as it could at any time, existing imaging technology will offer one or two days’ notice. But we won’t understand the true threat level until the cloud reaches the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite about a million miles from Earth. It has instruments that analyze the speed and polarity of incoming solar particles. If a cloud’s magnetic orientation is dangerous, this $340 million piece of equipment will buy humanity—with its 7.2 billion cell phones, 1.5 billion automobiles, and 28,000 commercial aircraft—at most one hour of warning before impact.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

ACTIVITY ON THE solar surface follows a cycle of roughly 11 years. At the beginning of each cycle, clusters of sunspots form at the middle latitudes of both solar hemispheres. These clusters grow and migrate toward the equator. Around the time they’re most active, known as solar maximum, the sun’s magnetic field flips polarity. The sunspots wane, and solar minimum comes. Then it happens all over again. “I don’t know why it took 160 years of cataloging data to realize that,” says Scott McIntosh, a blunt-speaking Scottish astrophysicist who serves as deputy director of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It hits you right in the fucking face.”

Today, in the 25th solar cycle since regular record-­keeping began, scientists don’t have much to show beyond that migration pattern. They don’t fully understand why the poles flip. They cannot explain why some sunspot cycles are as short as nine years while others last 14. They cannot reliably predict how many sunspots will form or where coronal mass ejections will occur. What is clear is that a big one can happen in any kind of cycle: In the summer of 2012, during the historically quiet Cycle 24, two mammoth coronal mass ejections narrowly missed Earth. Still, a more active cycle increases the chances of that near miss becoming a direct hit.

When navigation and communication systems fail, the 10,000 or so commercial planes in the sky will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in.

Without a guiding theory of solar dynamics, scientists tend to take a statistical approach, relying on strong correlations and after-the-fact rationales to make their predictions. One of the more influential models, which offers respectable predictive power, uses the magnetic strength of the sun’s polar regions as a proxy for the vigor of the following cycle. In 2019, a dozen scientists empaneled by NASA predicted that the current solar cycle will peak with 115 sunspots in July 2025—well below the historical average of 179.

McIntosh, who was not invited to join the NASA panel, calls this “made-up physics.” He believes the old-school models are concerned with the wrong thing—sunspots, rather than the processes that create them. “The magnetic cycle is what you should be trying to model, not the derivative of it,” he says. “You have to explain why sunspots magically appear at 30 degrees latitude.”

McIntosh’s attempt to do that goes back to 2002, when, at the behest of a postdoctoral mentor, he began plotting tiny ultraviolet concentrations on the solar surface, known as brightpoints. “I think my boss knew what I would find if I let a full cycle pass,” he recalls. “By 2011, I was like, holy fuck.” He found that brightpoints originate at higher latitudes than sunspots do but follow the same path to the equator. To him, this implied that sunspots and brightpoints are twin effects of the same underlying phenomenon, one not found in astrophysics textbooks.

His grand unified theory, developed over a decade, goes something like this: Every 11 years, when the sun’s polarity flips, a magnetic band forms near each pole, wrapped around the circumference of the star. These bands exist for a couple of decades, slowly migrating toward the equator, where they meet in mutual destruction. At any given time, there are usually two oppositely charged bands in each hemisphere. They counteract each other, which promotes relative calm at the surface. But magnetic bands don’t all live to be the same age. Some reach what McIntosh calls “the terminator” with unusual speed. When this happens, the younger bands are left alone for a few years, without the moderating influence of the older bands, and they have a chance to raise hell.

McIntosh and his colleague Mausumi Dikpati believe that terminator timing is the key to forecasting sunspots—and, by extension, coronal mass ejections. The faster one set of bands dies out, the more dramatic the next cycle will be.

The most recent terminator, their data suggests, happened on December 13, 2021. In the days that followed, magnetic activity near the sun’s equator dissipated (signaling the death of one set of bands) while the number of sunspots at midlatitude rapidly doubled (signaling the solo reign of the remaining bands). Because this terminator arrived slightly sooner than expected, McIntosh predicts above-average activity for the current solar cycle, peaking at around 190 sunspots.

A clear victor in the modeling wars could emerge later this year. But McIntosh is already thinking ahead to the next thing—tools that can detect where a sunspot will emerge and how likely it is to burst. He yearns for a set of satellites orbiting the sun—a few at the poles and a few around the equator, like the ones used to forecast terrestrial weather. The price tag for such an early-­warning system would be modest, he argues: eight craft at roughly $30 million each. But will anyone fund it? “I think until Cycle 25 goes bananas,” he says, “nobody’s going to give a shit.”

WHEN THE NEXT solar storm approaches Earth and the deep-space satellite provides its warning—maybe an hour in advance, or maybe 15 minutes, if the storm is fast-moving—alarms will sound on crewed spacecraft. Astronauts will proceed to cramped modules lined with hydrogen-rich materials like polyethylene, which will prevent their DNA from being shredded by protons in the plasma. They may float inside for hours or days, depending on how long the storm endures.

The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in. Those living near military installations may see government aircraft scrambling overhead; when radar systems jam, nuclear defense protocols activate.

Through a weird and nonintuitive property of electromagnetism, the electricity coursing through the atmosphere will begin to induce currents at Earth’s surface. As those currents race through the crust, they will seek the path of least resistance. In regions with resistive rock (in the US, especially the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes, and Eastern Seaboard), the most convenient route is upward, through the electrical grid.

The weakest points in the grid are its intermediaries—machines called transformers, which take low-voltage current from a power plant, convert it to a higher voltage for cheap and efficient transport, and convert it back down again so that it can be piped safely to your wall outlets. The largest transformers, numbering around 2,000 in the United States, are firmly anchored into the ground, using Earth’s crust as a sink for excess voltage. But during a geomagnetic storm, that sink becomes a source. Most transformers are only built to handle alternating current, so storm-induced direct current can cause them to overheat, melt, and even ignite. As one might expect, old transformers are at higher risk of failure. The average American transformer is 40 years old, pushed beyond its intended lifespan.

If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, the US could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

Modeling how the grid would fail during another Carrington-class storm is no easy task. The features of individual transformers—age, configuration, location—are typically considered trade secrets. Metatech, an engineering firm frequently contracted by the US government, offers one of the more dire estimates. It finds that a severe storm, on par with events in 1859 or 1921, could destroy 365 high-voltage transformers across the country—about one-fifth of those in operation. States along the East Coast could see transformer failure rates ranging from 24 percent (Maine) to 97 percent (New Hampshire). Grid failure on this scale would leave at least 130 million people in the dark. But the exact number of fried transformers may matter less than their location. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

Prolonged national grid failure is new territory for humankind. Documents from an assortment of government agencies and private organizations paint a dismal picture of what that would look like in the United States. Homes and offices will lose heating and cooling; water pressure in showers and faucets will drop. Subway trains will stop mid-voyage; city traffic will creep along unassisted by stoplights. Oil production will grind to a halt, and so will shipping and transportation. The blessing of modern logistics, which allows grocery stores to stock only a few days’ worth of goods, will become a curse. Pantries will thin out within a few days. The biggest killer, though, will be water. Fifteen percent of treatment facilities in the country serve 75 percent of the population—and they rely on energy-intensive pumping systems. These pumps not only distribute clean water but also remove the disease- and chemical-tainted sludge constantly oozing into sewage facilities. Without power, these waste systems could overflow, contaminating remaining surface water.

As the outage goes on, health care facilities will grow overwhelmed. Sterile supplies will run low, and caseloads will soar. When backup batteries and generators fail or run out of power, perishable medications like insulin will spoil. Heavy medical hardware—dialysis machines, imaging devices, ventilators—will cease to function, and hospital wards will resemble field clinics. With death tolls mounting and morgues losing refrigeration, municipalities will face grave decisions about how to safely handle bodies.

This is roughly the point in the worst-case scenario when the meltdowns at nuclear power plants begin. These facilities require many megawatts of electricity to cool their reactor cores and spent fuel rods. Today, most American plants run their backup systems on diesel. Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear safety expert at MIT, warns that many reactors could run into trouble if outages last longer than a few weeks.

Illustration by Mark Pernice

IF YOU THUMB through enough government reports on geomagnetic storms, you’ll find that one name comes up almost every time: John G. Kappenman. He has published 50 scientific papers, spoken before Congress and NATO, and advised half a dozen federal agencies and commissions. The soft-spoken utility veteran is the man behind the cataclysmic Meta­tech projections, and he is either a visionary or an alarmist, depending on whom you ask. Kappenman spent the first two decades of his career climbing the ladder at Minnesota Power, learning the ins and outs of the utility industry. In 1998, he joined Metatech, where he advised governments and energy companies on space weather and grid resilience.

“They’ve only done things that greatly magnify their vulnerability to these storms.”

His end-of-days predictions first gained national traction in 2010, setting off such alarm that the Department of Homeland Security enlisted JASON, an elite scientific advisory group, to pull together a counter-study. “We are not convinced that Kappenman’s worst-case scenario is possible,” the authors concluded in their 2011 report. Notably, however, JASON did not challenge Kappenman’s work on its merits, nor did the group offer a competing model. Rather, its objections were rooted in the fact that Metatech’s models are proprietary, and utility industry secrecy makes it hard to run national grid simulations. Still, the authors echoed Kappenman’s essential conclusion: The US grid is dramatically underprepared for a major storm, and operators should take immediate action to harden their transformers.

The good news is that a technical fix already exists. Mitigating this threat could be as simple as outfitting vulnerable transformers with capacitors, relatively inexpensive devices that block the flow of direct current. During the 1989 storm in Quebec, the grid fell offline and stopped conducting electricity before the current could inflict widespread damage. One close call was enough, though. In the years after, Canada spent more than $1 billion on reliability upgrades, including capacitors for its most vulnerable transformers. “To cover the entirety of the US, you’re probably in the ballpark of a few billion dollars,” Kappenman says. “If you spread that cost out, it would equal a postage stamp per year per customer.” A 2020 study by the Foundation for Resilient Societies arrived at a similar figure for comprehensive grid hardening: about $500 million a year for 10 years.

To date, however, American utility companies haven’t widely deployed current-blocking devices to the live grid. “They’ve only done things, like moving to higher and higher operating voltages”—for cheaper transmission—“that greatly magnify their vulnerability to these storms,” Kappenman tells me.

Tom Berger, former director of the US government’s Space Weather Prediction Center, also expressed doubts about grid operators. “When I talk to them, they tell me they understand space weather, and they’re ready,” he says. But Berger’s confidence waned after the February 2021 collapse of the Texas power grid, which killed hundreds of people, left millions of homes and businesses without heat, and caused about $200 billion in damage. That crisis was brought on by nothing more exotic than a big cold snap. “We heard the same thing,” Berger says. “‘We understand winter; it’s no problem.’”

I reached out to 12 of the country’s largest utility companies, requesting information on specific steps taken to mitigate damage from a major geomagnetic event. American Electric Power, the country’s largest transmission network, was the only company to share concrete measures, which it says include regularly upgrading hardware, redirecting current during a storm, and quickly replacing equipment after an event. Two other companies, Consolidated Edison and Exelon, claim to have outfitted their systems with geomagnetic monitoring sensors and be instructing their operators in unspecified “procedures.” Florida Power & Light declined to meaningfully comment, citing security risks. The other eight did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

At this point, curious minds may wonder whether utility companies are even required to plan for geomagnetic storms. The answer is complicated, in a uniquely American way. In 2005, when George W. Bush, a former oil executive, occupied the Oval Office, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which included a grab bag of giveaways to the oil and gas industry. It rescinded much of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s authority to regulate the utility industry. Reliability standards are now developed and enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation—a trade association that represents the interests of those same companies.

Some find the NERC reliability standards laughable. (Two interviewees audibly laughed when asked about them.) Kappenman objected to the first set of standards, proposed in 2015, on the grounds that they were too lenient—they didn’t require utilities to prepare for a storm on par with 1859 or 1921. Berger took issue too, but for a different reason: The standards made no mention of storm duration. The ground-based effects of the Carrington Event lasted four or five consecutive days; a transformer built to withstand 10 seconds of current is very different from one ready for 120 hours.

Under pressure from the federal government, NERC enacted stricter standards in 2019. In a lengthy written statement, Rachel Sherrard, a spokeswoman for the group, emphasized that American utilities are now expected to deal with an event twice as strong as the 1989 Quebec storm. (Comparison with an old storm like Carrington, she noted, “is challenging because high-fidelity historical measurement data is not available.”) Though the new standards require utilities to fix vulnerabilities in their systems, the companies themselves determine the right approach—and the timeline.

If the utilities remain unmotivated, humanity’s ability to withstand a major geomagnetic storm will depend largely on our ability to replace damaged transformers. A 2020 investigation by the US Department of Commerce found that the nation imported more than 80 percent of its large transformers and their components. Under normal supply and demand conditions, lead times for these structures can reach two years. “People outside the industry don’t understand how difficult these things are to manufacture,” Kappenman says. Insiders know not to buy a transformer unless the factory that made it is at least 10 years old. “It takes that long to work out the kinks,” he says. In a time of solar crisis, foreign governments—even geopolitical allies—may throttle exports of vital electrical equipment, Kappenman notes. Some spare-part programs have cropped up over the past decade that allow participants to pool resources in various disaster scenarios. The size and location of these spares, however, are unknown to federal authorities—because the industry won’t tell them.

One day regulators may manage to map the electrical grid, even stormproof it (provided a big one doesn’t wipe it out first). Engineers may launch a satellite array that gives us days to batten down the hatches. Governments may figure out a way to stand up emergency transformers in a pinch. And there the sun will be—the inconceivable, inextinguishable furnace at the center of our solar system that destroys as indiscriminately as it creates. Life on this little mote depends entirely on the mercy of a cosmic nuclear power with an itchy trigger finger. No human triumph will ever change that. (But we should still buy the capacitors. Soon, please.)