The Church's Most Radical Theology is Learning to Teach and Be Love

The Church's Most Radical Theology is

Learning to Teach and Be Love

in all it is, does, and preach

by R.E. Slater

The very best biblical hermeneutic to live in our lives is also the simplest and most effective.

True, a hermeneutic is how one reads the bible. More specifically, how one interprets the bible using exegetical tools of grammatical, historical, and contextual development of ancient oral traditions collected in their recitement by the temple of Israel and the early Christian church and passed along in their generations to both the peoples of the OT (the Hebrew Scriptures) and NT (the Christian Scriptures which include the Hebrew Scriptures).

However, as studies and earnest converts to the Christian faith we live out the hermeneutics we have learned. And if we are looking for outcomes of faith it must error towards love and not simply truth.

Why? Because is a God of love first and foremost. And secondly, because what we grasp as "truth" is most often not truth but forms of folkloric traditions we believe are truth.

Many examples abound across the history of science and the church as each struggled with the other in defining what truth means to any given situation. This struggle hasn't lessened but as I have discussed on multiple occasions here, with the right kind of theology, the epistemological traps of both church and science can be overcomed. All this can be found in the science section of the topical list on the right (and in the Index lists found within the topical list).

From reading the bible we know that within it are hundreds of stories written around the word "love's" power to change things. As can truth when contextualized in its epistemological parlance. But for many faith keepers we speak best when we love. To speak truth, as we often try to do, but shows to us much of our failure in this task. Thus, as a Christian, I would wish the church lean towards love rather than use "truth" as its marker of faith. Not to discount the importance of truth but to honestly say that Christians seem to be particularly terrible at distinguishing truth from fakery, fakerers, and false teaching.

• Now some may call LOVE radical while others hardly mention it at all as a bastion of Christianity. Yet, in the bible, as well as in the stories of the world, whole stories of redemption are written around LOVE.

• Large words are used to describe LOVE - atonement, propitiation, expiration, transformation, renewal, rebirth, even resurrection. But all the best stories can be captured by this word's four simple letters... LOVE.

• LOVE is the most humble of words. The most simple, most often overlooked word. 

• LOVE can aptly be described as overlooking itself while bearing all.

• All the best theologies are underlaid by LOVE's essence.

• All the best faiths and churches are centered around LOVE.

• Whole seasons and holidays are dedicated to LOVE.

• So when entering any faith or belief remember to look for LOVE's centrality.

• If LOVE is only a cursory subject to that faith's foundations and messaging than walk away from all such people and institutions whose own words have replaced it with other words.

• Without LOVE as the keystone, lodestone, or cornerstone to one's life animus, life force, or life energies, no other stones are equal to its grace, power and ability to heal, or provide soul nourishing constructs.

• More simply, LOVE is God and is of God.

• God's imparted Imago Dei is our own inner construct however conflicted by our own lives and experiences.

• LOVE begins when it is unlocked by God's Self through Jesus. This faith experience of Godly grace and forgiveness has gone on to revolutionize everything. Except, of course, it's very simple frame usually becomes lost around other words promising power and meaning.

• Inside the breast of everyone man and woman can be found LOVE as displayed by our passion and zeal for the things which motivate us... both the good things in this life as well as the bad things, the addictions, the drives for money and power, the lust for power, dictate, and harm. Underneath these drives is the driving force of LOVE gone bad.

• At the last we must learn to re-see LOVE. To recenter around it. To lean into it in all we do. For without LOVE we are but shells to life's energies. But with LOVE, it can change everything we do... beginning with ourselves.

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022

Speaking for the Generation to Come... Why Christianity Can't Get Out of Its Own Way: "3 Short Shorts"

Speaking for the Generation to Come... 

Why Christianity Can't Get Out

of Its Own Way:

"3 Short Shorts"

by R.E. Slater

Short 1

The best of Christianity seems to lie in it's many imaginations of itself calling its deeply rooted traditions holy and beyond questioning. An acknowledgement which I, as a Christian, cannot make with my brethren in the uptake of watching present day Christianity (from the 1980s through to the Trumpian years of 2020+) blow itself up with socially unjust doctrinaires and unbiblical proposals of who God is and how God acts through its indiscriminate, myopic, literal readings of the bible.

However, like Christianity's former socio-politico histories as Philip Jenkins and other authors like him have reminded us, it is in the realm of faith imputation and impartation where we must disentangle the church's religious unGod-like core from its knotted ungodly past in order to move forward from itself.

Herein, I am finding Process Christianity the post-evangelical and progressive knot-wrangler which can best lead the world from itself to more generative healing forces underlying human social and ecological reconstruction. For more on this subject select appropriate "Indexes" from out of the topical list to the right of this blog.

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022

amazon link

 

The Fifth-Century Political Battles That Forever Changed the Church. In this fascinating account of the surprisingly violent fifth-century church, Philip Jenkins describes how political maneuvers by a handful of powerful characters shaped Christian doctrine. Were it not for these battles, today’s church could be teaching something very different about the nature of Jesus, and the papacy as we know it would never have come into existence. Jesus Wars reveals the profound implications of what amounts to an accident of history: that one faction of Roman emperors and militia-wielding bishops defeated another.

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Short 2

I do count myself as:

1 - A conscientious objector to my inherited evangelical faith;

2 - A "positive" deconstructionists to evangelicalism's biblically strayed faith, acts, and thinking. And,

3 - Unabashedly sympathetic to the “nones and dones" who have "left" the Christian faith to wander in a wide wilderness of similarly lost sheep.

I now move within the complicated relationship of my past towards a clearer-eyed understanding of where it must go when utilizing a progressive version of post-evangelicalism as I continually revise past evangelical doctrines, beliefs and practices to become more expansive, loving, and generatively healing in all the right directions. Present day evangelical teaching is a bundle of disproportionate teachings and practices misapprehending God, mankind, and very creation itself. 

This newer version of post-evangelicalism I am describing as Process Christianity which finds me more content and eager to embrace my inherited Jesus faith once again having removed the cultural blinders from my eyes by the Spirit of God's help and assistance. I can now begin to see, hear, feel, read, and experience greater involvement with the ancient struggles for Christian faith by recovering its past in more positive directions than its past sermonic theologies had taught or are teaching today.

Perhaps the value of theology is in its loving outcome and direction. If so, I find progressive, post-evangelical, process theology the space I wish to inhabit and participate in regenerative healing efforts of race, society, and restructural post-apocalyptic world development when building a process-based Christian faith connecting people and habit to ecological civilizations and processual cultures as positive worldly outcomes.

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022

Named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year in 2020 by the Academy of Parish Clergy

"Drawing on his own spiritual journey, David Gushee provides an incisive critique of American evangelicalism [and] offers a succinct yet deeply informed guide for post-evangelicals seeking to pursue Christ-honoring lives." ―Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Calvin University

Millions are getting lost in the evangelical maze: inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, racism, LGBTQ discrimination, male dominance, and Christian nationalism. They are now conscientious objectors, deconstructionists, perhaps even “none and done.” As one of America's leading academics speaking to the issues of religion today, David Gushee offers a clear assessment and a new way forward for disillusioned post-evangelicals.

Gushee starts by analyzing what went wrong with U.S. white evangelicalism in areas such as evangelical history and identity, biblicism, uncredible theologies, and the fundamentalist understandings of race, politics, and sexuality. Along the way, he proposes new ways of Christian believing and of listening to God and Jesus today. He helps post-evangelicals know how to belong and behave, going from where they are to a living relationship with Christ and an intellectually cogent and morally robust post-evangelical faith. He shows that they can have a principled way of understanding Scripture, a community of Christ’s people, a healthy politics, and can repent and learn to listen to people on the margins.

With a foreword from Brian McLaren, who says, “David Gushee is right: there is indeed life after evangelicalism,” this book offers an essential handbook for those looking for answers and affirmation of their journey into a future that is post-evangelical but still centered on Jesus. If you, too, are struggling, After Evangelicalism shows that it is possible to cut loose from evangelical Christianity and, more than that, it is necessary.

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Short 3

It's easy to get lost in the Christian faith as its own history has shown... today, evangelicalism has destroyed itself from within once again and in its aftermath has birthed newer, post-evangelical groups asking good questions of themselves, their history, and of the directions they are going.

I have become one of those having internally dessented by moving away from evangelicalism's unbiblical tenets of God, people, and nature; and by purposely rebuilding and sharing my post-evangelical faith towards a more vibrant form of Process Christianity across all existing forms of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christianity.

There are other responses of course to evangelicalism's breakage ranging from atheism to mysticism but in a theological processuaI world-view I can find the best of evangelicalism in acts of rejection across its many unapologetic beliefs and practices and in so doing, when applying a similar effort of expansion to its heart, missions, and gospel. More simply, I didn't have to re-create the wheel but only adjust its faith journey and direction which led quite naturally to its update form of processual faith and journey.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022

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amazon link

 

This stimulating history of early Christianity revisits the extraordinary birth of a world religion and gives a new slant on a familiar story.

The relevance of Christianity is as hotly contested today as it has ever been. A New History of Early Christianity shows how our current debates are rooted in the many controversies surrounding the birth of the religion and the earliest attempts to resolve them. Charles Freeman’s meticulous historical account of Christianity from its birth in Judaea in the first century A.D. to the emergence of Western and Eastern churches by A.D. 600 reveals that it was a distinctive, vibrant, and incredibly diverse movement brought into order at the cost of intellectual and spiritual vitality. Against the conventional narrative of the inevitable “triumph” of a single distinct Christianity, Freeman shows that there was a host of competing Christianities, many of which had as much claim to authenticity as those that eventually dominated. Looking with fresh eyes at the historical record, Freeman explores the ambiguities and contradictions that underlay Christian theology and the unavoidable compromises enforced in the name of doctrine.

Tracing the astonishing transformation that the early Christian church underwent—from sporadic niches of Christian communities surviving in the wake of a horrific crucifixion to sanctioned alliance with the state—Charles Freeman shows how freedom of thought was curtailed by the development of the concept of faith. The imposition of "correct belief," religious uniformity, and an institutional framework that enforced orthodoxy were both consolidating and stifling. Uncovering the difficulties in establishing the Christian church, he examines its relationship with Judaism, Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, and he offers dramatic new accounts of Paul, the resurrection, and the church fathers and emperors.

Conclusion

The end of the story is that we learn to support those generations coming after us in our voting, acts, behaviors, words, and deeds. I may not understand Gens X, Y and Z but I know my generation's answers have fallen far short of the needs of the young families and children coming after us.

We must learn to hear again through the eyes of the disenfranchised other and to stop listening through the megaphones of those who would keep us to all the old ills of our cultural societies.

There is value in listening and deeper value in connecting. The way is through love, peace, kindness, and thoughtfulness. None of which we do well at. Even those who claim a loving God and Savior, myself included. We are broken people who can - and must - do a better job in our faith, our conduct, and along our paths through life.

Each day must be a working day in which we seek more peaceful, cooperative solutions with one another. Solutions which may not appear readily but can come when we learn to listen and cooperate. Which, for myself, also means distinguishing my present from the future I wish to go using resistence, education, expanding my biases, and creating a wider world from which I was birthed.

This is my imagined new faith both of a loving God who is intricately involved with us and creation around us and of one another when seeking the best solutions to world needs in crisis and calamity, in peacetime and war.

Let us not give up but let us neither give in.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022