Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology

Quotes & Sayings

We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

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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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Paul and the "New Perspective of the Bible"

http://www.preachingpeace.org/

From the pen of my friend Michael Hardin -

The New Perspective on Paul (see the Index of Relevancy22 for more articles on this subject) has for almost four decades (since the publication of E.P. Sanders 1977 'Paul and Palestinian Judaism' [and even before that in Krister Stendahls' 1963 essay on 'Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West') been deconstructing the older reading of Romans as focused on personal salvation and now understands the Pauline meta-narrative to be that of the justification of the Gentiles inclusion into the covenant people of God. In other words, Romans is not about "my" personal salvation by faith" as much as it is about the bringing together of enemies (Jews and Gentiles) together in faith or by faith. The old paradigm has been completely debunked.

Almost all recent scholarship on Paul has moved in this direction (except for the hard core Lutherans). This is one of the most significant moves in reading the Bible since the Reformation. Sadly, pietistic Evangelicalism and spiritualist Charismatic Christianity still live in the illusion that the old "I,me, my" reading of Romans is still proper to Paul when it is not. The massive deconstruction of this position in the first 470 pages of Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God completely mitigates the narcissitic reading so familiar to 99% of the Christian population. This is not to mention all of the incredible work by Pauline scholars such as Tom Wright, Jimmy Dunn and others.

Appeals to the Fourth Gospel and arguments therein that Christians are called to have an intimate relationship with God, (as though that was the primary overarching meta-narrative of the Fourth Gospel) have for a long time been critiqued with the recognition placed by the writer and redactor of this text on the community of faith. Furthermore, as I have shown, the structure of I John is one oriented, not to a personal relationship with God but to social ethics.

Jesus' call to discipleship is never to the crowd but always to the individual. This is true. However, that call to discipleship in the Synoptics never has to do with a personal relationship to him in some 'spiritual' or 'pietistic' sense but is a call to live out in one's life the same ethic he lived out in his life.

My point: one skews the Bible if one reads the meta-narrative of the Bible so that the goal of the Bible is to create a personal mystical relationship with the divine. That component, to be sure, is not absent from scripture, but it is not its emphasis. People who read the bible this way are out of step with the Bible itself which is always focused globally, historically and cosmically. The notion of a 'personal relationship' with Jesus (or God) is a fiction of the post-Reformation era, a step-child of the Enlightenment fantasy of the 'individual.' Humans are not individuals, we are inter-dividual (to use a term coined by Rene Girard). This is why ethics plays such a prominent role in the New Testament. Notice I said ethics, not morality, not law. Ethics has to do with our human relationships, especially our relationships with the enemy 'other.'

Over the past two years I have seen more misunderstanding of the Bible from certain circles than I could have ever imagined. The swamp of a 'personal relationship' with Jesus has turned into a tar pit from which persons do not seem to be able to escape. Why? Because they have turned their own personal experience into a subtle form of self-justification. Their experience has become a 'Law' internalized, psycholgized and spiritualized. Thus they cannot see beyond themselves and so it is that they identify their salvation with their experience. This is just another form of natural theology, so roundly critiqued by Karl Barth. Those who fail to see this are doomed to dwell in their own subjectivity which they project onto the highest category they know (God).

There is a world of difference between discipleship and the modern 'personal relationship' with Jesus. The former teaches persons to follow Jesus, the latter seduces the person into just following themselves (or the group/cult leader). And so it is in these circles we have the never go ending merry go round of self-justification, whether it be by orientation to an external law or orientation to an internal law. Either way it is self-justification. And as such, this type of Christian focus has nothing to do with the gospel of the Lord Jesus and his work on behalf of all humanity.

Please remember that in the parable of the sheep and the goats, it was the goats who 'had they seen Jesus in the 'other'' (that is, had they recognized that the 'other' was Jesus with whom presumably these goats had a 'personal relationship' [sic]), they would have aided them. It was the sheep who 'did not see Jesus in the other' (who did what they did because it was the right thing to do not out of some alleged 'overflow of a personal relationship' with Jesus) who are commended.

Michael Hardin

April 12, 2015

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publications by M.H.

ps - What I'm Not Saying: "I am NOT saying that one cannot have a personal experience of the transcendent; I am simply saying we should neither make personal experience the meta-narrative of the Bible nor should we confuse our subjective experience with 'Reality.' "