Andrew Schwartz: Panentheism, Pluralism, and Ecological Civilization

https://cst.edu/

Andrew Schwartz: Panentheism,

Pluralism, and Ecological Civilization

Homebrewed Christianity w/ Dr. Tripp Fuller

Dec 14, 2023

Dr. Andrew Schwartz is a scholar, organizer, and social entrepreneur. He is Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies and Assistant Professor of Process Studies & Comparative Theology with Claremont School of Theology at Willamette University, as well as Co-Founder and Vice President of the Institute for Ecological Civilization. He is Affiliated Faculty with the Center for Sustainability and Environmental Justice at Willamette University. His current work includes comparative religious philosophy, as well as the role of big ideas in bringing about systems change for the long-term wellbeing of people and the planet. In our conversation we discuss...

• how Andrew found Process thought

• Andrew brings up Carmen's the Champion...

• process style philosophy of religion

• process style panentheism

• religious pluralism in process & the relations between wisdom traditions

• why process theism is more biblical than classical theism

• Cobb’s contribution to interreligious dialogue - deep pluralism & mutual transformation

• Andrew’s initial thoughts on becoming a parent

• Current research projects at the Center for Process Studies

• The creepy troll & hidden rooms

Transcript

0:10hello everyone this is tripp and we're here and for christianity and process
0:16yeah you can say your name andrew come on and andrew yeah that's andrew schwartz executive
0:23director of the center for process studies
0:28you like your air horn i do you do yeah that's what i like to hear well um
0:35this this is a lot of fun because you've been on the podcast before we are obviously been friends for a while but we're doing
0:41this intro to process theology and you know john cobb is talking with
0:47everyone each week and i mean i'm just saying he's probably taught a lot of people process theology
0:54given he's 97 and has been doing it for a while um but this is the first time you've done it
1:00with like you know a couple thousand people on the internet and so i said
1:05i want to bring in each week a different person for a conversation to show the breadth depth and how processed
1:11tradition plays out other parts of religious life and such i thought it'd be fun for you to tell me
1:17why you think i picked you
1:23yeah i mean what what do you think if you if you think of our friends that we've all you
1:28know friends and part of the process community from like john gill to joe brack and donna
1:33bowman kathryn keller uh jacob erickson you like um
1:39what's the trajectory do you think was going through my mind and said i want andrew to tell his story of how he
1:45ended up in the process party well i'm a little bit younger than joe
1:51uh bracken yeah i mean joe bracken is five years younger than john copp
1:56joe bracken's only 92. um i don't know that's a good question i
2:02i'm happy to be here uh there are so many other people you could have gone with because the process community is
2:09not as small as it sometimes feels um i do love john cobb
2:15so i don't know if that's a strength or a weakness in this case if you're looking for you know alternatives to cobb mostly
2:21i think if i have an idea that is a in disagreement with john cobb i need to align myself with the truth
2:27so i take a minute breathe it in say all right what does the cobb father have to teach me today
2:33so you're a member of the hobby lobby the cobby lobby yes
2:39sell on the window to your soul um i went i went to pilgrim place where
2:45john cobb lives uh last week and for the first time introduced him to my now 10 month old
2:51son he may have cried upon arrival staring into the face of this near
2:58century-old human being and then he stopped and then he started to embrace it and i got some great pictures of cobb
3:03kissing my child which means he is forever blessed oh that's good times
3:08oh yeah i'm excited now now i it maybe it was that your child now bears the
3:14blessing of john com that got you here probably but um i mean it could also be that you didn't
3:20get here by the same uh you know means other people have um and true you know
3:26we're in this very elite group of people first witnessed to by tom ord they ended
3:32up getting their phd at claremont um and for people who don't know claremont was where john cobb taught for
3:39a long time uh methodist school uh for the seminary part and there's a graduate
3:44school connected to it and tom ward who most of you will know if you're
3:49listening this because we're doing a little thing right before the class starts is the one that introduced me to the open
3:55relational theological conversation and all that kind of jazz but for andrew
4:01tom was his professor um in the nazarene context so when when you
4:08think of you know going from well one uh a child and then encountering
4:16religion coming to belong to it and then connecting the nazarene tradition how how did that story of faith go for you
4:22uh to end up asking the questions to end up you know meeting process thought and
4:28it becoming a home yeah when i was a child i thought like a
4:34child um but i now have put childish ways behind me and embraced process theology that so
4:42as you said i i went to um northwest nazarene university for my undergrad um why did i do that uh
4:50because i was going to a nazarene church prior to going to college so i you know throughout my childhood why did i do
4:56that because my mom's like you know now that uh i have kids i got to figure
5:02out how to instill morals in them we should probably send them to church but what church and then she remembered
5:08her grandmother saying you know those nazarenes are good bible-believing people which is not what my
5:15great-grandmother sounded like and um then i was like oh great so then she
5:20found the nazarene church in our town and that's where i went and then when i was looking to go to college i was like you know
5:26if i'm gonna be a christian like a real christian you know like committed uh i can't just like
5:33do it once a week on sundays like i gotta go all in like this is life and death in fact this is more important
5:39it's eternal life and eternal death like no joke right so yeah i was like well i
5:45got it i got it oh yeah yeah yeah that was the life and death noise
5:51thank you so much i was like well i
5:56need to devote my entire self and that includes my career to the service of god what could be more important than that
6:01so i was like well instead of being a rock star maybe i should go into ministry
6:07not that those are mutually exclusive um yeah we can name some of our friends who
6:13have done both so then i was like well where am i going to go to school to study ministry church
6:19of the nazarene made a whole lot of sense that was the school in my region in idaho and my grandfather found out
6:24that i could have gone to school in nampa idaho or the sister school
6:30in san diego overlooking the ocean and when he found out that that was an option and i chose idaho he basically
6:36thought i was a [ __ ] uh for the rest of his life yeah and uh you know
6:42he's not wrong yeah i know right how my life would have been different i would have probably been introduced to
6:47process thought through tom ward's cousin michael lodol uh who teaches down at point loma nazarene university rather
6:53than through my uh it is am i an ordinance i don't know how that works anyways
7:00so it could be i'm studying theology and religion with
7:05an eye toward like pastoral ministry and this is before i even take an ord
7:10class i'm like huh this is a lot different than sunday school
7:15mostly i was wowed by the amount of diversity and complexity within christian history and
7:22thought like there wasn't just a single version of the bible there wasn't you know the way that the
7:28bible came to being was a little more uh not so straightforward as i thought um as a canon you know the canonization
7:35process the integration of different traditions and powers and politics and all these sorts of things
7:41so that started leading me to sort of question ask these like questions about like truth and theology and salvation
7:47and re like appreciate the diversity of those things which then took me away from not away from but like instead of
7:53focusing primarily on like ministry whatever that would mean i wasn't even sure at the time in my call
8:00i was like starting to be more and more intrigued by these theological like sort of issues so then when i
8:05finally did take my first class my systematic theology class from from my dear friend thomas j ord i actually it
8:12was not so much a systematic theology class now that i reflect on it it was really more of a philosophy of religion class some people might not appreciate
8:18the nuance but i did um because we were asking like these really cool questions about arguments for the existence of god
8:25and suffering and evil and all these sorts of things and sort of that thread throughout for him was both wesleyan in
8:30nature and process theology and nature and i was i loved it i was taken into it it just
8:37made sense yeah like a god that is relational loving
8:42interactive um where my prayers actually matter and make a difference uh where my life matters and makes a
8:49difference my decisions matter make a difference like all that sounded great um so that was my first entry into uh
8:56into process thought was sitting in systematic theology in uh tom ward's class so before you got
9:03in that class you had enough well you carried in with you carried
9:09into class a stack of questions that you you had the experiences of faith
9:14that made you obviously pursue educational track that could fit with ordination
9:20and trying to make sense of then you had like the intellectual questions um and and i think that gap between the
9:27questions that come from living in our world that occasional lot of questions and then
9:32the reality of our own experience with the divine then there's this gap and you're right a lot of times those
9:38theological questions end up requiring kind of philosophical tools because we're at a point where we're much more
9:46aware that there are a multiplicity of religious traditions that generate the experience of
9:52connection a flow of divine connect all that whatever way you want to do a cross-cultural statement of sorts
9:59and then there's all the conversations that involve abstracting from particular
10:05cultures or religions to go like how are they related how are they connected and then the way the sciences that have
10:11emerged in you know since modernity impact them and and i feel like that gap
10:16between the affirmation of experience in a particular tradition and an affirmation of source of meaning
10:24purpose value creativity and such that gap is where
10:29process philosophical tools help the theologian that's dealing with the gap
10:35yes uh did you just say that process theology offers a god of the gaps is that what you said
10:40[Music] never mind forget that anyway look that was a nerd triggering response for those
10:46of you that didn't get it um you should just be glad you probably have less student loans than andrew and
10:52i do yeah it wasn't even funny so i yes 100 for me i'm like
10:59process theology helped me to have a faith that actually made sense to like modern sensibilities
11:05and insight so it's like compatible with science compatible with religious
11:10experience compatible with the tradition or at least certain interpretations of like how the tradition should have been
11:18um and in my context as a child like i mean growing up like yeah i had questions and
11:24i did all the bible studies and memorization i was in awanas i got all the patches like i was there like i
11:30could memorize you know i was watching carmen music videos i knew about the champion
11:37but yeah but did the champion know about you yeah see that's the well
11:42that happens that's a theological question here's a question if everyone that's in the group watching this if you got the carmen and champion reference
11:49then just let us know because if you didn't uh if you did get it put a link
11:55in the discussion box because someone needs to watch a random baptist church do a reenactment to carmen's the
12:02champion also a complete aside andrew there's a chance you may be involved in
12:09a reenactment of carmen at theology beer camp contemporary
12:15christian music karaoke night i'm just saying i'm not i'm not i volunteer for tribute yeah
12:21well you gotta stop you're counting wrong eight seven six all right sorry you go ahead
12:29people don't know carmen now really what michael w smith you know yeah jars of
12:34clay stuff yeah yeah anyways so when the hard questions
12:40were being like coming up as they naturally do i mean you know even like little kids like ask like the really
12:46tough questions like why did jesus have to die you know like how is jesus
12:52god but like also not god like i mean i don't know people have these
12:57you know questions like how do you make sense of the trinity salvation why we're here what happens when we die
13:03why do we suffer why doesn't god stop suffering all these sorts of things and i feel like
13:09a lot of my experience in the church was basically an encouragement to not ask those questions but to accept
13:16mystery on on the basis of faith which in that context of people i think really
13:21just meant believing something that you don't understand and i definitely think that you know in the
13:28face of like ultimate reality the nature of things like mystery a healthy dose of mystery
13:36it's not a bad thing but i also think that sometimes we use mystery as a cop-out for um
13:42encouraging people to stop thinking yeah i didn't want to be encouraged to stop thinking i wanted to ask the hard
13:47questions and do the best i could to see if i can make sense of answers that were compatible with both my reason
13:54and my experience to two arms of the wesleyan quadrilateral
14:00well let's just say that if you get theological with wesley there's four arms involved
14:05and uh so when you talk about the way kind of
14:11philosophy reshapes how you ask certain questions and how you think about it how did
14:17the cultivation of kind of the kind of questions that
14:22philosophers of religion ask change the way you understood the experiences
14:28of the divine you had in your you know nazarene religious context your
14:33your parents had an impulse right like we want our child to connect to these deep moral values
14:39that are in the world and we know religions are doing these things right like and here's the recommendation
14:45for a good guy and then in that you connected to it in a way that it it it you know pulled your
14:51identity in ways that were you know a different kind of intensity um that you
14:57know led to the vocational quest now when a lot of us have had those
15:02experiences of being born in a place where then you're given a tradition and it's a positive one right tons of people
15:08have tons of trauma connected to their religious upbringing some it was a blessing that sent you off
15:14and while your perspective's gotten bigger it's easier for you to articulate it
15:20with this kind of thread of continuity that the mystery's gotten bigger but you're still seeking it and it's moved
15:26across the kind of boundaries you thought were there when you think of the tools of a
15:31philosopher of religion looking back at something they may still participate in but they
15:38participate differently how did you feel that out because a lot of people the moment they start to move beyond kind of
15:45full naive participation in a religious tradition or a mythopoetic structure they feel like they're separating from
15:51it philosophers the religion are like oh that's intriguing
15:57yeah that's a good question it's a you know it's a tough thing i think
16:02it's certain when i start uh thinking critically about my religious experience
16:08thinking critically about the songs we're singing during a worship service or what the minister is saying during a
16:13sermon about how somebody interprets a scripture or any time somebody says oh well i'm so sorry you know your nana
16:20died but you know god has a bigger plan and god's ways are bigger than higher than our ways and i mean
16:27my mind my theological brain is spinning right i'm thinking about all these things that people are saying in a new
16:32lens pro that that was different from like prior to like my formal theological training
16:38i think but for me like the idea that theology is a faith-seeking understanding
16:45that understanding part that we're in search of uh i mean that's important and
16:51i think one of the things that helped me sort of stay within the tradition um during that process was being in
16:58conversation and communion with like other professors other theologians like people who were also asking these
17:04questions most most church congregations or at least the ones i've been a part of they don't it's not just filled with a
17:10bunch of like weird phd people who are like asking philosophy theology questions like it's just like normal
17:16people with common sense and um the common sense not to take out you know six figures in student debt in
17:21order to get a phd that can't land your job that's a side uh sorry sorry that's the secret of higher education
17:28um so yeah so being in touch with people like tom ward you know when i graduate and we
17:34you know become friends and i'm able to you know be in conversation with them i realized
17:40basically that i wasn't alone that there were other nazarenes there are other wesleyans other christians who are also
17:45asking big questions and struggling with them and having different answers and conversations and that there was
17:51um sort of a you know a place for these dialogues that take place outside of the
17:56four walls of any particular church congregation was sort of affirming for me
18:02um where things maybe went astray was actually my as my relationship with
18:08the uh denomination became more and more of an exclusive one where basically i was
18:15told you have to separate your academic questions from your you know what you say behind a pulpit you have to you know
18:21you know asking questions is a slippery slope to the devil you know you got to just believe without asking questions we
18:27don't want to encourage that because if people have a faith crisis you know questions are bad because questions lead to like doubt and doubts the opposite of
18:33faith and i'm like maybe doubts the beginning of understanding but nevertheless so i
18:38guess what i'm saying is it's not easy and it didn't actually work out as i would have hoped
18:43for example when i lost my ministerial credentials with the church of the nazarene
18:49um yeah for example yeah i well i think a lot of um
18:57at least people anyone that ends up in something like this that or
19:03have had leadership uh positions in churches get that that tension
19:09um and you know and some of it is because you know where any community or
19:15denomination or something is and the way that particular body is wrestling with issues right like a
19:22heresy one generation is norman of the next sometimes in other times i i yeah
19:28you know something that's labeled heresy uh in in scare quotes uh generates the
19:33response helps the church get back to like a better kind of clarity right so
19:38it's always this living thing but when you get caught up in it and
19:45that kind of rejection is different than other ones right like short of thinking you're in a job situation right where
19:52god has it out for you the next most painful thing is to have your your church or your family do it
20:00and oftentimes they're connected right like uh earlier today i talked to a friend of
20:06mine whose parents didn't talk to him for like 11 years after he came out and he in he had reconnected with one of
20:13his family members and and it was a powerful experience but you're sitting there thinking there's almost
20:19nothing like short of really believing you know god has it out for you that would get
20:25anywhere near of your family or church or sometimes both getting there and i'm always struck by how someone
20:33processes the pain trauma and rejection and differentiates
20:40that kind of pushback and the intimacy and risk that's there
20:46and yet still goes what they gave me
20:52my faith and the context that you know flourished in i'm preserving
20:58does that make sense because i think there's a whole lot of people right now that have that grew up in a white
21:03evangelical space and then after trump they're like oh junk this is cray-cray
21:08right and that their family and their church are like you're leaving christianity behind but i think you and
21:15i would both agree like if uh i don't know if white supremacy eco denial and uh
21:24in military so we're chasing you out the door it's probably good to leave but
21:29does that make sense do you have wisdom in in that process of being to navigate
21:35uh those space oh yeah let me give you some wisdom right here
21:40no probably not but i will say my from my experience something that i i found helpful was remembering the church is
21:47diverse so it was like the very first like aha moment when i started studying theology as like a 18 year old freshman
21:54is also the thing that that still keeps me engaged and interested today there is no one-size-fits-all
22:00christianity different people believe different things they do different things they act differently in the world
22:06uh they engage differently they're you know different degrees of openness and in
22:11um and even within a particular denomination or particular congregation um some people may be much more
22:17affirming uh to somebody who's questioning and seeking whereas other people may be super
22:23exclusive and say no you can't ask questions because those uh threaten me and what i believe um because usually
22:28what it means is not i don't want you asking questions uh so far as is i don't want your questions to sort of like
22:35taint my my belief and start to get me to ask questions because i don't have good answers and then what if i don't
22:40believe in god then i go to hell oh no right so you know fear
22:47fear does funny things with people but um christianity is big enough
22:52um and sort of even outside of traditional christianity god is big enough
22:59uh to for there to be a place for you regardless of what you believe uh and
23:05and who you are there's a place for you so feeling free to sort of find that place
23:10um i would i would just say it takes courage and it can be a painful journey but don't stay in a place where you're
23:16feeling like you don't belong or that you have to like deny who you really are um
23:22whatever that means in order to sort of belong to a close-minded exclusive community it's
23:28just not worth it well um you know underneath the
23:35those kind of observations about in some sense a tension between
23:42an individual whatever the community they may or may not belong to at any point and then this kind of bigger
23:47reservoir of of the divine that leads to
23:52okay those intuitions come from somewhere right and underneath it for you is a
23:58process vision of the way god and the world relate now i want to end up getting to talk
24:04about things like pluralism or ethical questions around like something like the ecological crisis and such but when you
24:11think about the task of a religion and how they may relate to each other that only makes sense once it's nestled
24:17and kind of like the bigger doll nesting doll of the god in the world god
24:23and world relationship so what's the kind of basics or outline of that perspective for you that that enables
24:29you to have um you know cohesive threads running through big questions like you know like
24:35uh like like pluralism or like thinking ethically about the ecological crisis and those kind of things
24:42so one is you know just the belief that you know god is is good and and loving right so
24:49the idea that we've got a god worthy of worship um a loving god that actually cares
24:55about us and the world um i feel like is a big foundation for well most christianity but also especially
25:01processed theology uh if god were some sort of evil demon that
25:06just didn't care about us or some distant deity out there that sort of didn't give
25:12two shakes about the world it's like what's the point um you know a create and run kind of a
25:18situation is not really like what we want um so that god cares i think is one step but
25:25then the other is like okay so if god does care then how in the world how does god relate to the world and for me that's where process really
25:32reframed things for me because i i already had the idea that god cares god is love as like part of my theological
25:39framing but the idea of how god interacts with the world i remember you know being a younger more conservative
25:45christian that would sit out on the porch with my bible open waiting for the wind to blow over the right page that i
25:52can know the message that god wanted for me at that specific moment and you know later i'd go to the store and i would
25:58pray for god to find me a good parking spot close to the door and when he did i would be like yes thank you god you are
26:03awesome um and then forget about the fact that there are people starving in the world and dying all the time and
26:08somebody who's diagnosed with cancer the other day and then you know but but god made sure that my football team won
26:14right so like god is uh big enough to care about the the tiny minutia in my life but somehow too small to take care
26:20of like real problems and that was just was incoherent it didn't make sense and the more i started
26:26to push on that the more i realized that um i had a problem with how i was
26:32understanding the way that god works in the world um i wanted to believe that god does something in the world yet
26:39if god is truly good then why do all these bad things happen in the world god's strong enough to find me a parking
26:46spot but not strong enough to like you know cure a disease like what's going on right and again that's where you get to
26:51these uh you know mystery ends up being like a big common answer for people so
26:57what i found and process thought was an alternative to the doctrine of omnipotence the sort of notion that god
27:03sort of unilaterally single-handedly determines everything and instead a view of god as working
27:09cooperatively and persuasively with the world um sort of co-creating a future together which also puts more
27:15responsibility on me as a person to carry out god's will you know in seeking the kingdom of god here and now but also
27:22um it helped to basically it was a way of explaining why bad things happen yet god could
27:29still be good that makes sense yeah and and so that would mean a
27:35um a process a particular kind of panonthism how would you
27:41kind of invite people to think about or kind of like understand the process
27:46version of pananthus that's a tough one because i'm not sure if there is a single process version of
27:51panentheism well since this is an intro class andrew and there is people are very interested
27:59andrew and i have a podcast episode where we taunt other pantheisms
28:05to not being as cool as a very clermont interpretation of processed pain and
28:10theism but like let's just let's just assume
28:19is the normative one for the next 30 minutes perfect which is
28:24as it should be so right i panentheism basics right it's
28:30pan so all n which is an e n but it sort of means in like i n they don't don't
28:36one won't get worried about that if they're in the south and ion and e are not that
28:43truth distinct and then it's a theism right so all is in god that's basically what it means
28:49that describes in a very literal sense the idea that um the world is bound up
28:55in god the world is related to god that god's not separate from the world but intertwined with the world
29:00um it also on the flip side of that is not just that the world is present to and in
29:06god but that god is also present to and in the world so there's sort of a mutual imminence
29:11so some theologies describe a god that's sort of out there um you know even when we say the lord's prayer right our
29:17father in heaven um like so not our father here not hey god
29:23uh you know who's continuing to be uh an active presence and that's making the world uh a more loving and gracious
29:30place no no it's god like out there right so the process panentheism wants to say um
29:37god is not somehow sort of distant and other and only occasionally intervenes
29:43supernaturally but the god is always bound uh up within the world always
29:48active acting um to alluring and calling us toward uh the best possible
29:58outcomes um in the world um so there's not a sense of god
30:03supernaturally intervening at any particular moment and then failing to intervene at all other moments which is
30:09how a lot of people explain why some people get healed and other people don't it's like oh well sometimes god intervenes sometimes god doesn't
30:15intervene and a process views turns that around and says it's not that god is like sometimes trying to do good things
30:22and sometimes not trying to do good things god's always working for the good always actively involved in the world
30:27trying to bring about the best possible outcomes and that the restrictions are not so much on what god wants but
30:34what's possible in the world given our own freedom our own choices the conditions uh in
30:40environment that we're in in any particular moment so yeah i guess i would say from an introductory point that's probably what matters most in the
30:46process of theism yeah and i think that there's a um
30:52a sense that pananthism as a philosophical perspective kind of opened
30:57back up for uh a lot of theologians
31:04a host of biblical images a lot of the biblical language about god in the world
31:09relating involved a very pantheistic picture one where the future is also open
31:16where things aren't determined and the way humans and the uh impacts the way god responds and vice versa is and so
31:24the there's this experience at least for me as someone who was
31:30always kind of intellectually invested and
31:35kind of learned how to be a good reformed person that the open and relational perspective and
31:42and process philosophy in particular gave a framework that connected with the
31:48scientific worldview and engaged in all the philosophical kind of rigor you want
31:53but it also made the biblical testimony to a living and life-giving god actually more compelling
32:00than the vision of god that dominates most classical pictures of the divine
32:06and i i remember a moment and i'm interested if you had this one where you go
32:14oh junk so there's a picture of the world that coheres the science more actually makes
32:21a better fit with biblical testimony
32:26it also means things like prayer matter like you start going through the list of
32:31so many parts and you're like well um um not only like paramedic but like maybe god's as nice as the one jesus calls
32:38abba right like around omni you start like going through this list and you're like so what is process clg you google it and
32:45you're like heresy uh like that experience it happens to so many
32:52people and it's hard to compute how that bit that pan and theistic kind
32:58of shift opens back up ways of re-engaging previous
33:04ideas practices understandings scriptures and things in a completely new framework
33:10because you aren't kind of running around trying to like
33:15attach with duct tape all the little pieces of our experience our tradition what happens in worship
33:21and this kind of stuff too a philosophical picture uh that is uh ultimately flawed so
33:28do you remember that that kind of experience was there a particular question that like triggered where you
33:33go oh if i just like change out the philosophical operating system so much of this works better
33:40it's so true i so i don't i mean you know in day-to-day life
33:45you know your average person is probably not talking much about plato and aristotle um or you know bad-mouthing
33:52renee descartes they weren't a teenager that had uh got
33:58stuck in lockdown with me but i will say one of the explanations
34:04that actually that i discovered through process uh literature on why
34:10process theology would be called heresy even though it's uh so much more compatible with what we see in scripture
34:16than classical theism actually is explained through the classical traditions uh adoption of like
34:24plato platonic philosophy um so you get things like these notions of like a perfect being
34:31um you get notions of power as like you know being able to control things
34:37without being affected by things and these sorts of frames that are are not actually theological in nature but
34:43philosophical in nature then impose a particular lens on which we interpret
34:48theology so if god is a perfect uh being and god is the most powerful then god
34:54must be unchanging and god must be unaffected by the world so these
34:59doctrines what we call in theology immutability god's unchanging and impassability god's uh unaffected um are
35:07actually directly tied into the sort of like greek philosophical lenses that the church began to use to
35:14interpret um you know the the theological lens of christianity so it's when you
35:21replace that with something like a process relational philosophical lens all of a sudden you know
35:29you don't need god to be unaffected and unchanging you can actually embrace a
35:34god that is fully the most effective right than what we might call the most moved mover um that's completely bound
35:41up and intertwined with the world making a difference in the world but also being you know this in this give and receive
35:46relationship which just makes so much more sense because it's how all relationships are it's how any loving
35:54relationship is it's always back and forth give and receive and that's what we see uh described in scripture that's
36:01what we feel in our own spiritual experience and that's what process theology is describing
36:06um so really it's not heresy to the biblical tradition it's heresy to
36:12the greek philosophical tradition uh which probably just needs to be uh tossed out and replaced anyways
36:18well amen the uh the thing that's really well put so of all the different things that
36:25you've you spent energy in in publishing the one that you spent quite a bit of time and worked with john on
36:32um was religious pluralism um for john has minimized this in the actual
36:38class but uh so maybe you should say a bit about this before answering my actual question like one first question
36:45is if someone asks big questions around religious pluralism why is john cop such a big deal
36:52no you should answer that one and then i'll ask you the next question because as you know
36:58uh if either one of i if either one of us not either one of i that sounds like
37:03what is it uh i me me my um if either one of us had uh accomplished like 10 percent of
37:10john you know accomplishments we'd be obnoxious
37:16uh so when it goes to question of religious pluralism how because people got an idea
37:21of the kind of process vision that you're working with and things like how how did that enable john to do something
37:28different in the philosophical theological in a religious conversation then
37:35the ways christian theologians had dealt with it prior yeah
37:40well so for those of you who don't quite know what we mean by religious pluralism it's basically
37:46um a a position within the a conversation about um you know is
37:52salvation available outside of the church or outside of christianity is truth uh found in other religions other
37:59than christianity so the the plurality or multiplicity or openness of truth and
38:04salvation beyond any particular religious uh tradition and it's its borders
38:10so within that frame you get people who say no there's only one way only one truth
38:15and it sort of excludes all other views so it gets called exclusivism um there's
38:21also a sort of a modified view that tries to be more inclusive that says oh no well like there is truth found in
38:28other religions but it's not sort of like unique to them it's like all truth is god's truth so it's like
38:34you know it's uh it's still christian truth it's just sort of christian truth and new rapping um
38:39and then there is a pluralist position that wants to affirm um the
38:45multiplicity of of truths and and um the the possibility of of salvation outside
38:51of christianity that there is a liberative path in hinduism a liberative path in buddhism and a liberative path
38:59in christianity um and so on so two of the two of some of the big
39:05figures uh who promote that sort of last view that religious pluralist view are john hick and john cobb
39:12and these dual johns both the dual adjusters yes both professors in in claremont
39:18california um at the same time right so um now john hick is is really known for its um
39:26a sort of a i don't know i guess what you could say has been the dominant pluralist view um we don't have to go
39:32into the details of what that is cobb so there was a there was interesting there there were a series of
39:37of two books that came out of some conferences um on like um the myth of christian
39:43uniqueness which is basically like an apologetics for pluralism and then there
39:48was like christian uniqueness reconsidered which is supposed to be like the apologetics for christian exclusivism or something and these two
39:55there's two volumes that sort of competed with each other and cobb believe it or not published in the
40:00exclusivist volume and not because cobb is an exclusivist but he's because his the pluralism that
40:07was being expressed was not pluralistic enough and what he basically means by that is
40:13instead of saying there are many different paths up like a single mountain which would be sort of that
40:19traditional john hick type pluralism john cobb wants to acknowledge that maybe not all religions are asking the
40:25same questions or trying to achieve the same goals so there are actually different paths of different mountains
40:31different religious ends so it's more pluralistic creating space for religious others to to sort of really be
40:39different um to not say that nirvana is basically the christian you know the buddhist version
40:44of heaven like those maybe they're actually just two different kinds of concepts that enlightenment and buddhism and heaven and christianity are not
40:51two different ways of describing the same things but they're actually different ways of describing different things right so instead of it being it's
40:57so it's apples and oranges um together they can actually create a well-balanced diet with vitamin c and
41:03vitamin a so you know doing both um but you know under underneath that
41:08right is the way in which the category or label religion
41:14ultimately problematizes difference correct so stepping back a bit john cobb
41:21actually grew up in japan his uh parents were were methodist missionaries uh there
41:28um and so a lot of his like early formative years as a committed christian were also
41:33already being engaged in conversation with buddhism and buddhist neighbors
41:39he then became sort of the we could call him the cobb father uh of
41:44uh buddhist christian dialogue so he and masao abe and others uh sort
41:50of putting zen uh buddhism and uh sort of this process wesleyan christianity in
41:56conversation together um as early as like the you know 1960s
42:02and 1970s and cobb's view on um
42:07sort of how and why we would engage with difference is an embrace of what he calls mutual
42:13transformation um which i also think is is rooted in this uh sort of nature of humility um
42:19the recognition that sort of we're all doing our best to make sense of these sort of big complex questions
42:26but within the process philosophical frame and i think this is probably what you're getting at like maybe the unique process
42:33contribution to pluralism discourse instead of saying uh as somebody like
42:39john hickmite that there is sort of there's one religious ultimate one god one divinity
42:45and it just goes by different names john cobb's process pluralism rooted in a white hedian
42:51view of sort of a multiplicity of ultimates says well actually maybe there are
42:57it's not just one ultimate with different names but like actually different ultimates you're like what in
43:02the world does that even mean different ultimates i don't know it's okay so imagine this even in the christian tradition sometimes you hear god spoken
43:10of as like the supreme being uh the mo in this sense it's god's very personal
43:17characteristics like love um jealousy even um
43:22and in order for us to have a relationship with god god must have these sort of personal
43:28attributes to relate on a personal level yet you also see in christian theology
43:34particularly in some mystic traditions you know people like paul tillich started talking about this like you get
43:41this notion of god or divinity is also the ground of being or being itself um
43:48so there you have what's more described as an impersonal sort of frame or principle that even
43:55allows uh being to to exist so already you have the ground of being
44:03the supreme being as two different ways right impersonal and personal two different ways of describing um what
44:11sometimes these categorize as god which we could just say is is an ultimate
44:16um so process sees this and says well maybe it's not two different ways of describing the same thing maybe what
44:22we're doing is describing two different things um an impersonal ultimate
44:28that's the ground of being and in process terms we might actually call this creativity and it could actually
44:35map onto some of the religious traditions that believe in an impersonal ultimate
44:42so there's you know ultimacy that out there that that is not sort of um a divine person but still is something
44:48sort of beyond the world and beyond humanity and then you have the idea of of god as a supreme person
44:55and then that maps on to traditions you know in islam christianity and judaism that talk about that
45:01but then you also have the world in some religious traditions that are oriented toward the world as being um
45:08ultimate that at the end of the day like what we see before us is is really sort of so it's the the totality of finite
45:15things the collection of the cosmos right and that tapping into and relating to that as a sort of a sense of ultimacy
45:22so then you have god creativity in the world a sort of three distinct yet
45:28interconnected ways of describing what is ultimate in the nature of things so process theology
45:34then says well maybe that helps explain why the different religious traditions some talk
45:41about the world in sort of an ultimate sense some talk about the ground of being in an ultimate sense and an
45:46impersonal ultimate sense and others talk about sort of a god as a personal ultimate that maybe these
45:53aren't um conflicting descriptions of a single ultimate but
45:59they're actually complementary descriptions of of different uh sort of types of ultimacy
46:05um so there's a process philosophical frame that helps to explain why different religions could give different
46:12answers to these sort of questions about ultimacy being oriented towards something different yet at the same time
46:17being oriented towards something that's very real in the ultimate nature of things so it's a deeper religious pluralism is
46:24what yeah process people describe that was that was out there i'm sorry if that that may have been a little bit like
46:29what in the world is he talking about okay well let me try it let me try to say parts of it back to you because i
46:35personally was like was clear he just talked about this multiple times um
46:40the uh and and published about it and all that kind of stuff but the you know um john in the class had
46:49talked about the distinction between supreme being and being itself and that most of our
46:56discussions right as uh especially in the west have been
47:01between some account of like the hyper supreme being with all the omnis that process is
47:06like how are you getting you know goddess love and omnipotence and the reality of
47:12evil and all that kind of stuff there and then you have the the being itself especially it tillich is a great example
47:18um but for fertilic the ground of being or the unconditioned and all these things
47:24it to connect to it is to connect to something that doesn't distinguish difference
47:30in any moment so the contingent reality has distinctions unconditioned doesn't
47:35because it's not conditioned it's un uh and those distinctions
47:41and if you're seeking salvation matter right
47:46inequality injustice those are distinctions that make a difference
47:51uh if and and the idea that that's the exact same thing as enlightenment
47:57where that involves the recognition that those distinctions aren't final they aren't ultimate and that releases you
48:05from your identity being in completely determined by those distinctions
48:10to say that salvation in the distinction like i don't know mountains are knocked
48:17down and valleys are filled up if you were jesus's mom or yet just go through the prophets that
48:24that's the same thing as recognizing that all particularities have this have
48:31a source that relativizes any privilege and power in a moment
48:37that's enlightenment they're not the same thing and for like someone like john hick and for a
48:43lot of us that grow up in the west and go there are people on my street in all these other religions and they are
48:48better humans than me what do i do ah we're all going up the same mountain at the top it's cloudy there's lots of
48:54mystery there but they're all the ones that meditate and probably have their books on super soul sunday
49:00um right like that's one temptation and then you're going to look at everything and go you
49:07are a religion and what does religion do it does its thing until you don't know what the
49:12thing is but i promise they all meet in the end right like that maneuver that we're coming out of
49:19wanting to be pluralist affirming beauty in all the things actually dissolves the difference
49:25and what what what whitehead enables cobb i think to do and because he grew up in a
49:32context right that that the normal exclusivist option isn't
49:37available and hicks already didn't does it make sense because he knew how different the traditions were is to go
49:43like no no what if we aren't going to use the category invented in modernity religion
49:49uh and then force a bunch of things into it and then give one explanation for the whole thing
49:55and that deep pluralism you described is a way to honor difference and
50:00distinctions and not collapse them and recognize that there's a wisdom in each of them
50:06that there's a wisdom to recognizing injustice and seeking a different world and
50:13there's a wisdom in recognizing that there's no no power over or under anything
50:19that that ultimately undoes the shared reality of all things
50:26salvation and enlightenment right like supreme being in and
50:32ground of being distinctions are kind of essentialized
50:38uh versions of of god in the world like god creativity
50:43and in process yeah so so basically if if you're listening and you say you know
50:49i want to be a christian or maybe a different religion okay i'm not going to judge john cobb would say he thinks
50:55christianity is still the best religion which is why he's a christian and you can get into that with him sometime if
51:00you want he pretty much loves jesus and paul and he's willing to stand by that but he's not wanting to say that because
51:07he affirms a christian view that he has to reject um views that are
51:12different than christianity um and how do you find that space
51:17that is both affirmation without negation um right how can you say i'm this
51:23christian and um you're a muslim and that i don't have to be anti-you in
51:28order to be pro-me um and i think that's what the pluralist is trying to do is find that space right but the way
51:36that traditional pluralism in the in the tradition of john hick does it is to sort of
51:42wash away difference by saying and this is why by john cobb and david griffin refer to his type of pluralism as an
51:49identist pluralism or even a superficial pluralism is because it's not ultimately
51:54saying different paths different religions different truths it's saying
52:01it appears different but underneath it all they're really the same they're all lead to the same end or they
52:07result in the same you know goal um they're uh you know the difference is sort of at the level of appearance or at
52:14the level of naming and he his his uh sort of reasons for that are sort of built into his adoption of
52:21of um emmanuel kant's way of seeing the world um and cobb comes in and says
52:27well no um i don't think that's good enough like there's something off-putting
52:33for a christian to say ah i know what the buddhist is really
52:38saying even if they don't think that's what they're saying uh you know that that kind of
52:44colonizing of of buddhist minds from a western perspective is uh problematic
52:50and cobb says no what we really need to do is create the space for difference to be different without trying to say it
52:56only looks different it only sounds different but it's ultimate you know he's like hey if it uh walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck
53:03it's not nirvana you know it's uh it's something different like it's okay um
53:08so difference is actually different in process thought that's the that's the
53:13bottom line and i think that is um well you earlier you talked about his
53:20vision of being mutual transformation right like so that religious traditions actually in their difference enable a
53:27different kind of dialogue than seeking sameness um and and that
53:33in some ways captures like oh what's his beyond dialogue i think's the name of
53:38the book but it's like kind of brightish blue with red lettering and the subtitle has something to do with
53:46beyond absolutism and relativism and i think when it goes to religious
53:52pluralism those are the easiest temptations to give into
53:57right uh for me and a lot of my friends and that are liberal mainline
54:02protestants the easiest is relativism and not a relativism that's like oh it
54:08doesn't matter but a relative isn't like it doesn't matter
54:16like you really just want to know it's not like it doesn't matter if you're grounded in something and like being
54:22formed in a community for meaning purpose value justice seeking and all that kind of stuff no that's great it's
54:28just like which one and and and so it's relativistic about
54:35any of the unique claims of a tradition and any of them can function to form the to
54:43perform the same task right and that's that's wonderful and then the absolutist one is where
54:49all the differences and particularities become thing like kills to die on right
54:54and by the time you get done it's like the one true biblical christianity and it's probably a one that didn't exist
55:00until the 18th century and it doesn't matter to you because you have all the bible verses worked out or
55:06you know you could do this for you know or you know uh pre-vatican ii
55:11uh catholicism where the ark of salvation was the catholic church and everything out of it well it's not
55:17personal and don't worry god hangs the bow up after this
55:23um the like the absolutism right i think a lot of people find
55:30morally like repugnant and relativism
55:35non-inspiring and i think that like you hinted at this weird tension in general he's like no i
55:41i'm really into jesus like i'm really christian and things and um i think i'm a better christian
55:48because i've learned a lot from buddhists and i couldn't have learned it from my christian friends
55:53whatever space that is it's a different kind of pluralism i think that's connected to that deep part you were talking about
55:59yeah and i think so i mean obviously you know the absolutism piece is is more familiar right it's like it's it's my
56:05way or the highway there's only one right answer and just so happens that i have that right answer lucky me that i
56:11was born into the right family or learned the right religion or went to the right church because uh now i've got
56:16the truth in my pocket i can carry it around with me you know it is very convenient very comforting
56:26but i will say the extreme of that um
56:31you know also somewhat convenient to say oh well um you know whatever is true for you true for you is
56:37true your truth is your truth my truth is my truth you know let's just agree to disagree and then you sort of have a
56:44almost like a a non-position position that wants to say anything goes
56:51that also can be morally repugnant as you had said because now it's like okay so um what do i stand
56:58for i everything is acceptable everything is you know it's a
57:04justifiable path to salvation you know hitler you know maybe not so bad from his perspective uh
57:11maybe it's okay to uh you know commit genocide murder all the jews and other people like it's just a matter of perspective right
57:18so anything goes depending on what your standpoint is and that would be the sort of extreme of relativism
57:24and pluralists say well i need space to be able to disagree with hitler but i also need space to agree
57:31with more than just people you know to affirm more than just the people who think like me
57:36and that is that sort of both and tension of affirmation without negation
57:41that i think is is sort of the sweet spot of pluralism and how do we find a way to embrace others to embrace
57:48difference without giving up on our own convictions i mean that's exactly what cobb has you
57:54know shown beautifully um others like him you know inspired by him like paul neuter you know beautiful book without
58:01buddha i could not be a christian let me just ponder that for a little bit i think i think you're right i think
58:07cobb would probably say something similar if it weren't for his experiences with buddhist in his dialogues with buddhist um
58:13he wouldn't he's a better christian now today because of his buddhist christian dialogue throughout his life i think that i think
58:20he would agree with that yeah no i i i think that i think that captures it well
58:25um and that the idea of mutual transformation something that shows up even you know
58:31recently in giving the example the way what's the one of the unique
58:36contributions of the christian tradition that he latches on to is the way that jesus
58:42in some way instantiates the non-violent resistance option
58:47in the human species and and you know it's connected to one good god
58:52that knows and cares and loves for neighbor nature and enemy right and
58:58then so what does it mean to embody that right and jesus does and then who is it that picks it up in the
59:0420th century but gandhi and it transforms the normative religious structure
59:09uh in india yeah and we want to remember i remember being a i'm just going to
59:14interrupt you i remember being a in seminary thinking about these things and learning about pluralism for the first
59:21time and learning about john cobb for the first time and sitting in church in a small church in idaho thinking
59:27so gandhi goes to hell but the the d-bag behind me uh you know
59:34kicking the back of my chair is uh he's going to heaven because he's sitting in the right building and gandhi was not
59:40i'm like there's something that doesn't feel right about that um basically that where you're born um and
59:48you know it makes a difference on whether you know where where your eternal uh resting place will be
59:53um heaven or hell like that i'm like wait a second this this just doesn't make sense and that's a part of what was motivating
1:00:00me to like really think more carefully about religious pluralism how do i make sense of the fact that um
1:00:07gandhi could also be embraced by god um if that was something that i want you
1:00:12know and what well we can get into whether or not that's what gandhi wanted but that's a whole other conversation
1:00:20well the the the thing especially about gandhi for
1:00:25capturing you know what cobb's up to i think in part is it
1:00:31um jesus inspires him to engage in non-violent resistance on
1:00:36behalf of the underside right and the metaphysical structure behind
1:00:45um the dominant religious expression of hinduism in gandhi's space is one
1:00:51where the caste system was justified ontologically right like the the caste
1:00:56system that dominated this social cultural framework is one that had a justification
1:01:02um connected to a religious structure that had been kind of seized by the powerful to say like yeah our religious
1:01:08structure believes in you know brahman is atman atman is brahman and so all the
1:01:13distinctions that make a difference ground of being style you know if you think paul tillich's like all those distinctions that make a
1:01:20difference if you do the you know cheesy ground of being version i think paul tilek's version is a little
1:01:26bit better um or uh western buddhism
1:01:31or any of these things where you're fit to a system and you're able to deal with the anxiety
1:01:36and pain and stuff because the distinctions aren't ultimately ultimate john's like
1:01:42yeah that's a problem now we have problems of our own if you want to ask mother earth
1:01:49what the side effects of western monotheism are but gandhi introduces this wisdom from
1:01:55another trace and it transforms the tradition he's in he doesn't leave it behind and actually brings about this beautiful
1:02:02response to imperial colonialistic logic and such that was in the received
1:02:07tradition and the colonizing one and and then what is gandhi inspire
1:02:12the reintroduction of that vein in the vibrant way in the civil rights movement through martin luther king it's a like
1:02:18when john gives that example it's showing in ways that there are gifts in different traditions it can transform
1:02:25the other tradition it is precisely by being different that the transformation happens rather than relativizing the
1:02:31difference and you know in some sense uh ultimately supporting the world as it
1:02:37is and it's uh problematic structures and perversities yeah and since you've name-dropped uh
1:02:43you know mlk it's probably worth mentioning that there's some evidence that he was influenced by process theology
1:02:49um you mean that he voluntarily took a white head seminar and then did the assignment and got an a on it
1:02:55when he was a phd student for example this one
1:03:05he wrote on right uh empiricist style process theology in tilik for his uh dissertation
1:03:14but i think so i mean why in the world do we call it process theology if it's all about uh
1:03:21you know relational loving god why don't we just call it relational theology well some people do that's a whole other
1:03:26discussion but the process piece is the recognition that sort of reality
1:03:35is always moving always flowing it's in process right and
1:03:41i think that if you take that same frame and you apply it to religion a static christianity
1:03:48is a dead christianity and that's not adequate we need a christian faith in a
1:03:54christian tradition that is in process with the rest of the world that's continually adapting and reinventing
1:04:02itself um for a new context and and um and i think that's what process theology
1:04:08is is offering us to do another one of the reasons why it sometimes gets sort of pigeonholed as a heresy is because it
1:04:14actually challenges tradition it doesn't just you know sort of accept it
1:04:20and people rightfully say well what gives you the right to question tradition what makes you think you know
1:04:26more than you know augustine it's like well because his name's augustine and uh second it's no i i i
1:04:34get it okay i get that tradition's important and there is definitely some like i can see why people would think it
1:04:40seems arrogant uh that process thinker theologian or philosopher
1:04:45would want to privilege their own reason and insight over that of the people who came before
1:04:51but it's also kind of super practical to do that don't we always privilege our own
1:04:56perspective and even if you change your perspective uh to adopt somebody else's perspective
1:05:02like in that very act it becomes your perspective so you can never actually like avoid privileging your own
1:05:08viewpoint because it's always your viewpoint that you're knowing and believing from we sort of take that with
1:05:13us so anyways i i just i'd like to say yes i think process
1:05:20process can respect tradition while also challenging it um and that's actually a very healthy and natural thing for all
1:05:27of us to do if we want a faith that is living um and interactive with an ever-changing
1:05:32world in process one last thing i i realized
1:05:37that my list of questions and topics we won't get to because
1:05:43well dude we could do a rapid fire round no no we're not gonna do rapid fire because
1:05:48i actually want you to talk about the i want you to talk about ecological civilization because
1:05:55you know underneath that pluralism discussion is the way in which a process framework enables you to
1:06:03deal with a uh a seeming distinction and abstraction that's been
1:06:11kind of fossilized and then created this diffic these difficult problems between
1:06:16religious traditions because everyone assumed they were running monopolies right rather than franchises of sorts
1:06:22and the in the distinction generates a lot of problems another one that whitehead
1:06:28spends time on is the way in which we bifurcated nature that in the modern world
1:06:35uh the power the explanatory power of science has
1:06:41given so much power to one way of engaging the world
1:06:46usually involving epistemological distance experiencing the world as an
1:06:51object to be interpreted so you can understand possess that power and then generate
1:06:58predictable repeatable responses for your own kind of uh
1:07:03hypothesis or hypothetical agenda of sorts um that bifurcation of nature the the power
1:07:10of that one kind of engagement has led us to mute silence and disengage
1:07:16another kind of way of engaging the world connected to meaning purpose value that kind of stuff and it's created
1:07:22a a a space where the
1:07:29authority of a late modern capitalist world is one
1:07:34you know when people use the word neo-liberal or and all that market logic and all that kind of stuff
1:07:40it's it's the world we call reality through that
1:07:46enlightenment frame that involves those distancing maneuvers and the way the scientific frame gets
1:07:52immunitized and uh authorized of sorts and and whiteheads
1:07:57like not dismissing that but recognizing that that mode of engagement's the only
1:08:02not the only mode of engaging uh the world
1:08:07and so there's this whole other part of life and one of the projects that you've put
1:08:14a lot of energy around thinking about ecological civilization and such is the impact of dealing with a
1:08:21nature muted a nature bifurcated and
1:08:27i think a lot of people right now are getting more and more aware of the ecological crisis
1:08:32but not that it's something generated by a way of viewing the world
1:08:39right in the process relational framework you've talked about from the beginning of the conversation like how you answered your religious questions
1:08:45and all that kind of stuff uh pan and theism thinking about religious diverse all these things are connected to a
1:08:51vision that sees that bifurcation of nature as ultimately generating the kinds of
1:08:57problems that we can't address without you know responding or redressing the
1:09:04bifurcation itself you did a rather remarkable job spelling out multiple books worth around
1:09:10religious pluralism in a short time so um what's the cliff notes for thinking
1:09:17what do we do with civilization from a process perspective uh when we when we see this bifurcation of nature
1:09:23taking place well so that was not a very good question it was more of like a long
1:09:28ramble that's set up for you to say things i hear your ramble um and i will
1:09:33uh so here's the thing so a lot of christianity is anti-science
1:09:41right why because oh well we can't make sense of you know evolution we can't
1:09:46make sense of you know creation and all these sorts of things uh from our interpretation in and sort of somehow
1:09:53see that that's compatible with the scientific explanation so science must be wrong in order for me to hold onto my face and process says
1:10:00maybe they actually are compatible and we need a faith that makes sense to our modern sensibilities so already uh you
1:10:06know there's a bunch of christians that are sort of anti-climate change
1:10:11peeps because of the basic sort of anti-science peeps and
1:10:17a process does not do that the other thing the process does not do
1:10:22is say that well there is no climate crisis because nothing's really in crisis god is in
1:10:28control and if god wanted to sort of stop global warming god would just do it in that moment and uh unilaterally we
1:10:34don't have to worry about it there is no problem it's all under control right which sounds like the you know the
1:10:39captain of the titanic being like everybody stay calm you know it's all under control as we're all going down
1:10:45it's like well i'm sorry but uh despite this beautiful violin playing on this upside down ship like i think maybe we
1:10:51have a problem so because process offers an alternative to
1:10:56the traditional doctrine of omnipotence is like you've got in unilateral single-handed kind of power and control
1:11:03process says well actually the uh we have a moral responsibility to address
1:11:08the major social and environmental challenges of our time you know inequalities racism uh you know
1:11:14environmental degradation all these sorts of things are not things we just close our eyes and say jesus take the wheel hope you fix it
1:11:21we have a responsibility to do something about these things um so then it's like
1:11:27okay well what in the world does process actually have to say about doing something about these things
1:11:32and um on that note you already hinted at the fact of this shift from a
1:11:37mechanistic worldview to an organic worldview right whitehead's philosophy of organism which we call process
1:11:44philosophy because an organismic worldview will make all our immature people chuckle
1:11:50and what it basically says is like i had said before right a religion that doesn't adapt and change as a dead
1:11:57religion same same with the world if the world is like a machine then it's basically dead
1:12:04and what process does is takes an organic view of the world rather than a mechanical one and says the world is not
1:12:10dead it's alive we have a living earth and that um the well-being of people uh humans and
1:12:17all life is dependent on the well-being of that living earth it also says um that everything's
1:12:23interconnected right so it's another core principle of process thought so it's not so saving the whales and saving
1:12:30the rainforest and addressing systemic racism are not actually all separate
1:12:35things that we need to devote our time to separately they're actually part of a whole web of uh
1:12:41complex problems so there's a sort of systems orientation to the way that process
1:12:46understands the environmental and social crises as one that's sort of complex and interconnected
1:12:52echoing um you know a lot of the things that are said by pope francis in la dato c we don't have two separate problems
1:12:59one social one environmental but we have one complex crisis right that's both social and environmental and
1:13:05so when we talk about in the process movement of an ecological civilization
1:13:10it's civilization in the sense of we're trying to speak as broadly as we can
1:13:16about sort of everything um about how human life is organized our systems of education politics and
1:13:23governance our economies the way we do agriculture uh the way we do you know
1:13:29anything right energy and transportation and you know fill in the blank and rethinking those from an ecological
1:13:36lens what does that mean partly it means rethinking them in the terms of sort of long-term
1:13:42sustainability the long-term well-being of people on the planet it also means seeing these as interconnected
1:13:49complex holes and systems not sort of fragmented issues and seeing this as as dynamic and
1:13:56self-organizing so we need instead of economies that are primarily built around the pursuit of unlimited wealth
1:14:02and growth we have economies that are built around um health and well-being um that's a
1:14:09whole different frame that then has implications for how we structure you know market exchange
1:14:16so it's not saying we've got to do get rid of economic uh
1:14:21interaction um same thing with agriculture it's not saying oh well we have to stop growing
1:14:27food i mean that would make no sense right we want the well-being of people in the planet depends on food but
1:14:33the way that we're doing agriculture that treats nature as a machine
1:14:40says listen i don't care about the health of the top soil i don't care about biodiversity i don't care about bees
1:14:47i only care about how much wheat i can grow and harvest with a single tractor
1:14:52in order to make the most profit with the least amount of uh cost to me because ultimately this is
1:14:59not about the health of people or the planet it's about uh profit and power for
1:15:04uh you know agro business so process thought and ecological
1:15:09civilization is putting in a new worldview um an ecological worldview um a process worldview that says
1:15:16everything's interconnected everything's in process all life has value you get the panentheism extended to what and
1:15:22process people call pan experientialism that sort of um gives subjectivity to all living things
1:15:29not just to human things and it sees humanity as part of not separate from nature
1:15:37overcoming that alienation you talked about and it's funny because when you start to do that it changes everything
1:15:44if you flip the switch and all of a sudden you go from a dead earth view that's only has instrumental value uh it
1:15:50only it's only valuable in so far as it serves my personal needs or my human needs and then you shift
1:15:56that and he says no the earth has its own intrinsic value and it's valuable in and of itself that living earth perspective changes how we
1:16:04organize uh human life and uh is the kind of sort of fundamental paradigm shift needed to
1:16:10address the environmental crisis rather than attacking you know carbon mitigation separate from attacking
1:16:16poverty separate from attacking you know something else it's all part of this reframing of of our story and our
1:16:22systems for um people on the planet yeah oh all right so
1:16:29i really feel like you did a good job again so i might like you and i'm really wrong
1:16:35but in my head uh you've managed to give a picture of
1:16:40pananthism and pluralism and ecological civilization
1:16:46and introduce us to more of the process framework now there's one other thing i want to ask
1:16:51you about before we wrap up you are a new dad i remember
1:16:56becoming a new dad and i know a lot of people know the experience of becoming a new dad
1:17:02and it's hard to communicate the um existential impact of such a thing
1:17:10what have you learned in the last 10 months i'm genuinely interested because there are very few times you have adult
1:17:15friends that you know they've had an experience that will force them to reflect on things they haven't thought about or see it in a new way
1:17:23and i was like wow we're recording i have to say something um
1:17:28so the what's what's been that experience of uh
1:17:34you know watching the arrival of life becoming a father and all all this entailed
1:17:39all right so i i will avoid describing um the birthing process which i i did
1:17:45get to witness um yeah i feel like that's a safe move
1:17:50yeah but uh i also will avoid talking too much about the fact that um
1:17:57my child is like four times bigger than i expected him to be and um
1:18:02i makes me question who his his real father is um probably shaquille o'neal
1:18:08or somebody along those lines because he's just too big to be mine uh but um
1:18:14we don't have to get into that he's cute it's awesome and i realize there's an immense responsibility on me
1:18:21to minimize the amount of screwing him up it's kind of like the like a doctor pro you know it's like oh i'm gonna do
1:18:27no harm and it's like well i do gotta cut you open to do the surgery so maybe there's some harm but uh maybe uh i'm
1:18:32not doing it on purpose right um what it's gotten me to do actually is
1:18:38the all jokes aside is stuck to to really reflect on my own experience as a child um to
1:18:44to reevaluate my own assumptions about um the way that i talk the way that i act
1:18:51the example that i want to lead dealing my own trauma and my own baggage and trying to figure out how to get my
1:18:56own sort of mental health and well-being in check
1:19:02so that i can try to minimize the amount of baggage that i pass on
1:19:08i want to give good uh you know i want to give him good tools for
1:19:15for having a happy and successful life not um not a bunch of things that he has to go
1:19:20to a therapist for the rest of his life we'll see we'll see how that goes but um
1:19:26that you know i've been reading some really cool books though um one called the whole brain child another
1:19:34one called yes brain there's one called no drama discipline oh yeah and uh one that's uh how to stay
1:19:41human in an f'ed up world um also a good book so these sort of psychology books these
1:19:46parenting books that are helping me to rethink about like a lot of the assumptions that i hadn't really like
1:19:52explored but uh it's rethinking some of and examining those is helpful kind of like my parents were like oof
1:19:59you know i hadn't thought about religion before but now that we have a child we have to figure out how to make sure they uh you know learn morals
1:20:06um you know there's certain questions that come up you know when you're just like i'm a parent now i hadn't given much thought to this
1:20:12before but um i got to reevaluate my blah blah blah blah right fill them fill
1:20:18in the gap yeah it was definitely one of those moments where you realize
1:20:24until you become a parent or i'm sure there are other ways this happens to people because plenty of people know
1:20:29this and aren't apparent but at least for me there was a becoming a parent which i did younger
1:20:36than most people was one of those moments where you realized that you had been so intimately engaged into receiving the
1:20:43world and now you're now actively engaged in
1:20:48uh giving the world sharing it um and the act of parenting
1:20:55is going to be i mean i guess unless you hit yahtzee in some weird
1:21:01dice roll of a life like the most influential thing you'll ever do and so it puts all these pressure on
1:21:06you and you might read those books the other side of it is yours you're not even that control of much of
1:21:11it exactly what i was going to say so humans by p people are people um
1:21:18yeah and uh yeah i can't even figure out how to control myself yeah yeah no so
1:21:26yeah the idea that i'm gonna sort of put my kid in a bubble and protect them from all suffering and pain and woes and i'm
1:21:33gonna make sure they follow everything no no no no nope uh but i hope that my son will grow
1:21:40up feeling unconditionally loved and that will uh empower him to be himself in all
1:21:46in all settings yeah the the the way i've talked about it and thinking about it is one
1:21:53um especially early on when you look at most developmental psych kind of things it's like your goal is to
1:22:00affirm them in ways that don't require the statement right so that they experience deep trust because that trust
1:22:07is connected if you're a process person to the trust you could have that every moment no matter where you've been where
1:22:12you've done what you've done and where you've gone and such you encounter um
1:22:18god in the very next moment luring calling and stuff and then the other side like other other than the
1:22:24affirmation is like helping them cultivate their attention like what is it they draw their attention to the kind
1:22:31of values they're responsive to are not things you say at them there's things you practice with them
1:22:37uh and that starts from the very beginning um the way they see you modeling respect and care
1:22:44to the other family members in the space to i mean so many things
1:22:49but um i like the recognition that
1:22:54are the two things that struck me where the realizing the kind of parent you are
1:23:00will make a bigger difference in anything you ever convince anyone to [Music] you know um intellectually or whatever
1:23:07if you're like you and i if you're in a ministerial or educational kind of thing like
1:23:12you just the amount of output any child you raise has
1:23:18and the other side is that um ultimately you succeed by helping them internalize value rather than forcing it
1:23:26upon them it takes a different immo you know it sounds sounds like you're not talking about parenting it sounds
1:23:32like you're talking about theology you know the idea of a a god that is sort of like unilaterally
1:23:39controlling things and that you better obey that god otherwise you're going to end up receiving eternal punishment
1:23:45so if you don't want to end up being punished and you know receiving all the the wrath of hellfire and damnation
1:23:52you better straighten up and fly right you know because the you know mf over there is checking
1:23:59his list and checking it twice and all this kind of stuff you know and it's like god's got way one up on santa when it
1:24:05comes to you know checking on your moral uh activities it's like that explains why trolls are
1:24:11creepy they're like secret they're like the elf on a shelf for god
1:24:16well and i'm like yeah so creepy troll or doll eyes i i don't know about the troll situation
1:24:23but i will say i think you know the fuzzy hair the little treasure i know i oh yeah i used to cut their hair it's
1:24:28good times okay like for a second i was like do we not all know what trolls are you know do
1:24:34you see how i'm in a basement people listening if you've ever seen any videos of home brewed in the last three years
1:24:39i'm in the basement there was a single troll doll in here in a dark corner
1:24:45like behind the corner like in the corner and the bricks weren't even it was like on this side
1:24:52there's this creepy troll doll that
1:24:58it's super creep it's super creep um anyway did it pre-exist you're living
1:25:04there oh yeah we discovered it when we cleared this place out so i could work down here like
1:25:09um you can see this is like bomb builder station
1:25:15uh the floors are covered with all sorts of technical equipment um
1:25:21yard instruments sanders and saws sauls it was
1:25:27but there was this little creepy troll um now you were gonna say something important
1:25:34to trolls uh you know speaking of trolls the internet right so i all jokes aside it is kind of like
1:25:42well do i want to be more like the process god that leads by example that's not an
1:25:48exception to the principles but like an exemplification of them metaphysical or ethical um and that i
1:25:55want to be the kind of god that uh not kind of god the kind of dad
1:26:00uh that so my wife my wife jokes about the fact that she uh is my my son's creator um
1:26:08and also his sustainer um so his god i don't i don't i mean creator
1:26:14and sustainer you tell me anyways um gave him life and sustains his life for ten minutes now
1:26:19through her body sounds like god to me but that aside um we talked about gaia some other time
1:26:28i think that a lot of people myself included have experienced a religion
1:26:34that leads you feeling um self-conscious feeling ashamed feeling
1:26:40guilty um and not feeling loved but always worried that somehow you're gonna
1:26:46piss off the divine and you're gonna receive this wrath you're going to lose your your salvation credits or something
1:26:52like that and like you know salvation criticism you don't want to lose it oops you did it again right so
1:26:58uh whereas the process god is like wait a second here you go now we have a god that can make you you know recognize
1:27:04that you are loved unconditionally a god that's not going to smite you but god that's calling you uh to be your best
1:27:11self in every moment a god that's leading by example that's a whole different frame um from the scare the
1:27:18hell out of you kind of god to the the god that you're drawn to uh to be in a loving relationship with
1:27:24and i think parenting can be the same one you're you're you know are you going to be the kind of authoritative top-down
1:27:29hierarchical parent that says it's my way or the highway you know it's my house my rules um or
1:27:35are you going to be the the kind of a parent that developed as you said a deep trusting relationship um
1:27:42that is an example um not a perfect one because as we've seen in the commercials
1:27:48you don't have to be perfect to be a perfect parent
1:27:53i'm going to be internalizing that now because it won't take long once they
1:27:59start talking it doesn't it's you're not far from telling yourself you've completely
1:28:05failed and you can't believe you failed so quickly it's uh
1:28:10yeah the other thing i would just say no need to moralize preferences
1:28:18um this tension sometimes comes up after you get married and stuff like each of
1:28:23you from family or origin you had certain preferences and then you experience them as morally important and
1:28:29it creates all sorts of tension yeah you think it was intense before you had children now
1:28:34preferences and how you parent get moralized and junk gets awkward
1:28:40and then one of you reads some book or watching 100 demoralized real mayo over
1:28:45miracle whip well um okay he's asking you to be insane i just kind of say
1:28:52yeah if you just telling me you're like look when he gets older i'm going to introduce him to really malty east coast
1:28:59ipas it'd be like whoa well no no no why would you do something yeah there's still a right and
1:29:06wrong yeah not relative yeah okay so the last the last thing i want
1:29:14you to answer and i'm gonna see if i can find the troll while you start answering this question because my children are
1:29:19moving around the basement because of your position at center for process studies you are
1:29:25always a part of kind of new research initiatives and a center for where
1:29:31a lot of new kind of books texts and things
1:29:36come through so for people it might be new to process theology and are
1:29:42participating in this class could you say a bit about kind of new research endeavors you're
1:29:47excited about and kind of new resources or books that you think
1:29:53if this is something you're interested in and you've spent six weeks with john cobb like you know here's a couple of books you
1:29:59should check out yeah that's a good question there is so
1:30:05much going on with the center for process studies specifically but also the sort of worldwide process community generally
1:30:13that i'm really excited about the we just did a conference
1:30:18that my colleague andrew davis organized uh astrobiology
1:30:23exo philosophy and cosmic religion was the title and if that title leaves you
1:30:29scratching your head wondering what in the world we talked about he brought in some scientists from nasa and some philosophers and theologians from around
1:30:35the world and we said let's talk about the implications of life on this planet but also beyond this planet
1:30:42biological ethical theological uh you know uh implications that's kind of a
1:30:49fun project so there is a book going to be coming out um on that topic um you know
1:30:55process the center for process study works in so many different areas um theology is one of them we've been
1:31:01talking about that here i mean within theology different you know uh parts of different conversations a recent book
1:31:08came out on um process theology and catholic thought um there's
1:31:14obviously a lot of books being done and and work being done on sort of environmental uh thought and process
1:31:19thought uh people are interested in educational theory and process thought some of my friends in arizona
1:31:27sandra lebarsky and mark ford launched a new process-inspired college called flagstaff college
1:31:34that is sort of taking whitehead in principles and inspiration of john cobb and sort of
1:31:39developing an entire curriculum and entire sort of college educational structure around that philosophy we've
1:31:46got people who are doing work in psychedelic research and sort of rethinking experience
1:31:54and sort of extraordinary experiences from within a process framework
1:31:59so really the question is not what is there going on that might interest people it's a question of
1:32:05what are your interests and if there's not something that the center is doing right now that uh
1:32:10that strikes your fancy why don't we talk and let's uh figure out about uh creating something new
1:32:16striking of the fancy okay i found it
1:32:22are you ready i am this thing was in this room it was very packed in the corner you saw this
1:32:34oh that that is perfect on on every level
1:32:40look at this this is all that stuff dripping off of him uh-huh he's just creeping up there
1:32:46and he's like hello hey andrew i live in the hotel
1:32:53like that um if you're only listening the audio of this go look for the point
1:33:00that is the creepy troll i'm never getting that creepy though my kids are all down here
1:33:05clearing this out and there's this like corner you turn you kind of got to go through because you had to clear out to even get anywhere and i hear one of them
1:33:12ah what there's something creeping in there and that troll
1:33:19is what we discovered i'm assuming that it was and i emily said i'm going to hope that
1:33:24was intentionally left by the people who occupied your space before you yeah and that they said oh this is going to be so
1:33:31funny i hope you're going to that's right yeah so now i want to be friends with them
1:33:37whoever they are well you can decide after you hear these two additional factors
1:33:42um the the the family lived here it's a future for a long time from the time it was spot long time they died elderly the
1:33:50kids decided to rent it they ran it to one family for a short period of time before we got here
1:33:55we move in there's bad experience with this family behind all the radiators were soiled undergarments
1:34:03and they were soiled by at least three types of things and they were just cooking you know
1:34:10behind the heaters when it got cold so that was a one experience uh
1:34:17a surprise along with this troll who hasn't hidden their soiled panties and underwear
1:34:22behind a you know a heater this one does yeah i mean i'd yeah yeah well a couple
1:34:29like two or three months ago we we had had a moisture problem and they
1:34:36finally agreed to put these fans in they go put the fan we can't figure out how to get power to this thing
1:34:41we don't know how to get in your attic well there's no attic here we thought for three years
1:34:46well there is there's a trap door you go upstairs that guy if we find it
1:34:52this guy goes upstairs and there is a whole second floor to this
1:34:57house um children's toys pull out beds all sorts of stuff like
1:35:04anne frank style right just in time for you to move got it yeah yeah and we're like what
1:35:10what's going on and about a whole new power cord every two or three feet and we're like oh i
1:35:16guess it's easy to plug power for these lights and fans in because there's power cords
1:35:22running all upside so we're freaking out going like did the people here before that
1:35:27had gotten removed from the house for uh breaking certain laws involving the
1:35:32sale of certain items and you know all this kind of stuff like
1:35:38were they running a grow house up in the house we we're thinking first there's a there's a whole kind of
1:35:43glowing contraption with lights running through it little igloo in the upstairs
1:35:50next to the room with the bed uh mattresses on the floor
1:35:55well we're all freaking out the guy there is installing it's like i've never seen anything like this before
1:36:01come to find out the family owned this place knew it was up there this didn't want anyone to know because it wasn't licensed
1:36:07and uh granddad uh built it to stick the kids up there
1:36:13and he thought they got loud and i'm like no one told me this so we sit here all lockdown i've been sitting
1:36:18in this uh basement with a creepy troll staring at me four and a half foot high having to
1:36:25run a air filter all the time that i change every other week because it's full of smut and there's a whole nother floor is
1:36:31finished out oh anyway that's an unrelated process
1:36:37theology injury you you should see if there's a uh a sub basement below your basement
1:36:44you never know you know what there is this is creepy we'll see if the editor
1:36:49leaves this in all right you see that all those bottle tops right there
1:36:54uh-huh okay so um there was a
1:37:00cabinet over that whole thing and when the first time it flooded down
1:37:06here some weird smells were coming out of that hole and so i moved this cabinet all the way
1:37:11off and i realized there's a hole and there are probably 15 or 20
1:37:16gallon jugs full of some liquid in a hole where they dug into the foundation and place these jugs there
1:37:23and i just haven't messed with them i i just assume you haven't had the liquid tested to see what it is no i'm not
1:37:30touching it i'm like not messing with this
1:37:35nothing about this space makes me feel like i need to open mysteries that are already closed off and covered
1:37:42because that's probably wise are those buckets full of anything in
1:37:48involving this friend or is it something else and with that
1:37:54i want to thank stevo for figuring out how to edit the end of this
1:38:00episode i want to thank andrew for nailing multiple topics
1:38:06uh introducing processed thought pandemptius i'm tackling religious pluralism ecological civilization and
1:38:12describing the ways in which a process vision engages across disciplines that was great i want to thank the troll for
1:38:19still being creepy af thank you for inviting me uh no it's been it's been fun all right smoochy
1:38:25boochies peeps

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

* * * * * * *

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.