Quotes & Sayings


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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

Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation". Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation". Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation: In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come


"I hear today for the first, the river in the tree." - Poet Emily Dickinson

In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come

I am beginning a new section of inquiry which will be titled loosely under the themes of "pluralism, tolerance, and accommodation" and will intentionally cover the intersections of religious belief as it touches upon personal comportment and sociological behaviors and groupings. Usually this experience has resulted in the death, genocide, and enslavement of major minority people-groups as evidenced by ethnic Jews in Europe and Russia, the American Indians in America, the Russians, Chinese and SE Asian peoples under Communistic rule, ethnic African tribes in despotic African governments, the Indian cultures of Central and South America, and sadly, this list may go on and on in historical review. And yet these are the more recent historical occurrences either witnessed in our lifetimes or recently occurring in the near past resulting in dominating sociological cultures that have organized their societies around their own dominant ethics, laws and self-identities.



Curiously, one of the most recent major cultural clashes we are witnessing is that of Western civilizations adjusting and accommodating non-Western Islamic societies in a series of regional wars and conflicts, legal re-positionings and decrees, cultural adoptions and recognition. Each is separately stubborn in their own beliefs, religions, idealisms, goals and duties, while reluctantly recognizing the pluses and minuses of the other's systems and politics, economies and structures, strengths and weaknesses.

Positively, some assimilation and accommodation has begun to occur but not enough, and most probably never will, because the distinctions between both cultures are so wide and deep. Which presents the perplexing paradox to each culture as to how to co-exist one with the other in a non-interfering, "peaceable" stand-off while attempting to recognize the rights and liberties, or non-rights and non-liberties, of each culture's dominant belief systems. One side professes (however poorly) personal democratic liberties and freedoms, will the other professes (from this Westener's viewpoint, I admit) a more rigorous application of enforced religious law upon its masses creating sociological caste systems, poverty and gender-based personal inequalities under a dominating sectarian body administrating strict sectarian rule.


Consequently we have an uneasy tolerance between one culture with the other with the latter being more easily recognized by socialistic governments than by their democratic counterparts except for the alienating religious overtones that separates Islamic governments from usurping communistic regimes. Previously, Christian liberation theologies have been adopted by unempowered, undeserved, neglected, abused and misused, impoverished minorities to address many of the ills of majority rule, whether black vs. white in America and elsewhere, or ruling South American regimes over their less-empowered Catholic masses. But this biblical theme or principal does not apply to the current conversation between Christian and Islamic groups within their separate religious spheres of influence, each being the dominating and empowering people group within their own societies and from differing religious foundations.

Furthermore, religiously tolerant governments that are built upon the ideals of ethnic, cultural and gender equality (to name a few) can only be at best agnostic in their rulings, laws and ethics, and will require of its citizenry an "agnosticism" on their own part, so that, (i) a dissimilar minority group's religious beliefs and ethics are not denied, and, (ii) the majority group learns to welcome and not to alienate competing (or adoptive, or assimilated) newer religious and ethnic groups into their more tolerant and pluralistic forms of society. Usually these more urbane societies are organized around the centralizing themes of equality, liberty, freedom after being severely suppressed and discriminated against themselves and having experienced poverty, enslavement, loss of freedoms, rights, and hopelessness. Which, in the case of America, was true of many of its adoptive citizenry when immigrating from British colonial Europe (Scotland, Ireland, Wales); the Scandinavian countries; then Italy, Australia, Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe (WW1,2); the SE Asian countries of China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia under communism; the Mid-East Arabic countries from its turmoil and unrest; the Bosnians fleeing the deadly Serbian massacres of their former country in Yugoslavia; the suppressive and oppressive states of Mexico and Central America; and a plethora of displaced African tribes seeking refuge from gross feudalism and rampant tyranny. Each immigrating people group has brought its own tales of horror and woe, and each hunger for peace and freedom from oppression, violence, disharmony, hate and injustices.

In America we call this form of governmental agnosticism the "separation of Church and State" which is a poor descriptor to employ but a necessary and true conveyance of what must be a factual truth. To use the term "agnosticism" is not to imply the denial of our religious heritage so much as to imply that its citizenry expand their understanding of their religious heritage to cover all forms of faiths and beliefs within our Americanized system of juris prudence. Perhaps a better term can be found, but for the purposes of this document it is a good term to use describing the "neutrality" and "abeyance of suppressing indoctrinations" by a ruling majority people group.



And with every reception of a newer people group to the shores of democracy (regardless of country) comes the reciprocating power of dissolution of governance upon that country or fiefdom that is losing its fleeing masses; thus compounding that country's further loss and destabilization of power by want of exodus upon its masses still imprisoned within their own country. This has recently been witnessed in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The results can be seen plain enough in formerly Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan which have necessarily "democratized" their cultural institutions and adopted state policies of tolerance, freedom and liberty. And in the overthrows of dictatorships and unrest in countries without governing principles of democracy like Russia, China and the Middle East.

All this has been said to state that it is my conviction that a democracy cannot thoroughly succeed without having an "enjoined" (accepted, wanted, scrutinized) Christian foundation. And though non-Christian democracies may attempt this form of rule by its masses by copying varying forms of capitalism, it will ultimately fail (just as American governance can fail) should its citizenry no longer continue to assimilate and expand their Christian understanding of life, liberty and freedom gained from the Scriptures and through Christ. Consequently, democracies will always be faced with the fact of spiraling towards some form of socialism or towards dissolution and anarchy should they drift from the centralizing cornerstones found in Christianity. But to the degree that they do accomplish this through mass acceptance and inward social re-structuring then will those people groups succeed in the task of re-discovering, promoting and maintaining liberty for all peoples of all faiths, beliefs, cultures and heritages.

The basis for my assumption is that only in Christ, his cross and his resurrection, can be found the spiritual power for love and understanding, peace and tolerance, that can overrule our wicked and sinful hearts so soon to violence and destruction of others human beings rights and prerogatives. Moreover, it is in the hope and reality of God's coming kingdom and through the power of Christ's resurrection that any of this may be true and possible. And it is uniquely for us as Westernized Christians to learn to disseminate the Gospel of Christ to all the realms and nations of the world in a missiology that does not enforce westernization, nor promote westernizing culture, because the gospel belongs to every man, to every woman, and to every culture as much as it has belong to our own personal heritages. It must be discovered and adopted by another's inasmuch as it must be de-linked from our own cultural experiences. In Carl Raschke's words, "Christianity has no culture [to] itself but belongs to all cultures” (see GloboChrist review further below in this same section).


And though I could despair that this task might overwhelm the Christian church in schisms and fear, it is my hope that in this era of postmodernity - as evidenced by the newly arisen branch of "emergent" Christian churches - that it might be accomplished as we release our prejudices and biases, our hatreds and unloving acts and "steel ourselves" to the task of presenting Christ to the nations, his atonement, his love, his kingdom that will reach beyond all of men's kingdoms, to that of God's itself. Whose kingdom may be found enriched by all the historical diversity and pluralism that is found in man's life-and-death histories on this planet we call earth, which will someday be called a "New Earth" located in a "New Heavens" under God's Trinitarian and Holy rule of love and justice. Thus it can be said that the Kingdom of God is trans-formative, trans-national, trans-cultural and trans-temporal, making it an "eternal" kingdom. That, in Christ himself, has come the Savior of the world to live with us - his lost humanity and creation - to be re-claimed and resurrected by his holy personage, will and love.

It is to this rule that we wish to submit and to non-other as we try to interpolate God's will and holy law of love and re-create an equitable earthly rule for all mankind by whatever democratic or non-democratic governance that is operative. For the kingdoms of man must someday bow all knees, heads and hearts to a grander rulership, a more exquisite lordship, to that of our Creator God, our Sovereign, Our Lord and Savior, Jesus. It is to his reign of love that we must embrace and commit ourselves to with a servant's heart of humility, willful obedience and submission in a selfless, sacrificial service that only God's love can demand.

RE Slater
May 10, 2011



Thursday, March 31, 2011

Book Review: Carl Raschke's "GloboChrist" for all the Nations of the World!



Sadly, Raschke's predictions seem all too true in hindsight to America's 9/11 towers tragedy (2001) ten years ago, and more recently, the unrest and rock-throwing strife between Coptic Christians and Islamist during Eqypt's political turmoil and governmental change this past weekend (May 8, 2011).

I am also including a link to an article from R.E. Slater entitled "Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation" that seems a very practical application of Raschke's GloboChrist within the context of God's coming kingdom that is "here-but-not-yet" or "here-but-not-fully" in this age of the Church.

Enjoy,

skinhead


by R.E. Slater


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Baker Academics: The Church and Postmodern Culture
About the series: The Church and Postmodern Culture series features high-profile theorists in continental philosophy and contemporary theology writing for a broad, nonspecialist audience interested in the impact of postmodern theory on the faith and practice of the church.

Link to Baker's Academic Series here


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The Messenger Is the Message
How will you obey the Great Commission today?

by Carl Raschke


Reviewed by Christopher Benson
August 2008 pub. date

We roam the global village as Alice roamed the chessboard in Through the Looking-Glass: pawns bewildered at every turn. The word "postmodernism" appears backwards, like the poem "Jabberwocky." Even when we hold it up to a mirror, the concept remains slippery. Alice responds to the poem in the same way we respond to postmodernism: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate." Modernity, we surmise, was killed, and its murderers are still fugitives.

Carl Raschke is our Humpty Dumpty, perspicaciously interpreting the "postmodern moment" in GloboChrist, the third volume in Baker Academic's series, The Church and Postmodern Culture. Whereas the first two books in the series, James K. A. Smith's, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? and John D. Caputo's, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, offered textual exegesis of postmodern thinkers to correct stubborn misunderstandings and to show resonance with the Christian tradition, Raschke's book offers cultural exegesis to clarify the church's missional task in a global age. An early explorer of the intersection between Continental Philosophy and theology, author of The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, Raschke serves as chair of religious studies at the University of Denver.

While too many Christians are tiresomely proclaiming that they are pro- or anti-postmodernism, crudely defining the heterogeneous concept, Raschke steps out of the impasse by announcing what should be obvious: "a dramatic global metamorphosis." Instead of wrangling over the "uncounted usages and syntactical peculiarities" of a word, he rightly claims: "Becoming postmodern means that we all, whether we like it or not, are now going global, which is what that obscure first-century sect leader from Palestine [we know as Jesus] truly had in mind."

This book is directed to American evangelicals with the purpose of awakening them to "a pivot in world history that seems as unprecedented as the transformation of Caesar's realm during the first three centuries of the common era. That change came through the strange and distinctly un-Roman cult from Palestine centering on the crucifixion and resurrection of a mysterious nobody now known to history as Jesus of Nazareth."

Political scientists, cultural critics, economists, and sociologists have their own theories to account for today's change. Censuring the timidity of Western élites, Raschke asserts that the change agent is—hold your breath—Christ, who has been "subtly shaping and directing human history towards its consummation through the ages." After the Cold War, Raschke reminds us, futurists envisioned a "new neoliberal millennium" where peace, free markets, and technological progress would occasion worldwide democracy and prosperity. Unexamined ethnocentrism resulted in the prediction that Westernization would entail secularization. Today Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman are eating humble pie. The world is not flat, but it is becoming anti-Western and post-secular. Raschke commends the dissenting foresight of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who spoke about a "return of religion," and American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who posited the famous thesis about "the clash of civilizations." They helped reveal the "fraudulent utopianism" in the West.

Struggle—Raschke disconcertingly insists—will mark the future, not solidarity. Ethnic separatism, mass migration, feminism, gay liberation, economic oligarchy, Islamofascism, and genocide chasten our unbridled confidence, so much so that a recovering utopian like Richard Rorty confessed "it seems absurdly improbable that we shall ever have a global liberal utopia."

Globalization has a dual power to erode [as well as to] empower particular identities. The fall of Christendom in Europe and North America contrasts sharply with the rise of Christendom in China, Africa, India, and Latin America. The church is uniquely "glocal," simultaneously global and local.

Raschke observes three characteristics of GloboChristianity that buttress Protestantism more than Catholicism or Orthodoxy: decentralization, deinstitutionalization, and indigenization (the process by which the universal is comprehended in the particular). Remembering that "Incarnation is translation," in the words of missiologist Andrew Walls, we should not fear that indigenizing the gospel will relativize the gospel: "Christianity," Raschke maintains, "has no culture itself but belongs to all cultures.”

Obeying the Great Commission in the global cosmopolis does not involve a mission trip to "lost peoples at the margins of civilization"; the margins have become mainstream, while the mainstream has become marginalized. Nor does it involve sophisticated marketing campaigns. We make disciples of all nations as the pre-Constantinian church did in the face of "daunting and promiscuous pluralism":

  • through incarnational ministry, being "little Christs" to the neighbor;
  • through contextualization of the message, speaking the idiom of the neighbor;
  • and, through relevance, hearing the needs of the neighbor.

Carl Raschke
Raschke adds that relevance should not be confused with the prosperity gospel, "seeker-sensitive" ministry, the "hipper than thou" emergent church movement, the social gospel redux, or "bobo" (bohemian bourgeois) culture. Relevance is radical relationality.

Revising Marshall McLuhan's claim that "the medium is the message," Raschke argues that the messenger (Christ) is the message. Living in the time between times, we are acting in the role of the messenger, as the mystic Teresa of Avila recorded in her prayer: "Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world."

For his understanding of globalization in the light of the gospel, Raschke has drawn on a wide variety of sources: political scientist Benjamin Barber, historian Philip Jenkins, Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis, and Pope Benedict XVI are represented here; so too the "ideological architect of jihadism," Sayyid Qutb, and political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. What emerges from these insights is an ominous feeling—related to "the looming clash … between the two historico-religious tectonic plates that comprise Christian and Islamic visions of justice and the end times" — and a "hope against hope" that behind the realities of globalization there is a mysterious power at work.


GloboChrist ought to be regarded as an essential postscript to Lesslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society. Raschke is at his best when he assumes the prophetic mantle, judging the Western evangelical church for:

  • "whoring after the false gods of spiritual and material consumption";
  • uncovering how the religious left is just "a fun-house mirror of the religious right";
  • questioning if Islamism is "an understandable reaction against the global overreach of the pax Americana";
  • chiding fundamentalists for idolatrously substituting an "eighteenth-century propositional rationality for the biblical language of faith";
  • pleading for the Emergent Village to stop replaying "the modernist-fundamentalist debates of a century ago"; and,
  • exhorting postmodern Christians to overcome their passivity and "privatized sentimentality" with a witness that possesses "the ferocity of the jihad and paradoxically also the love for the lost that Jesus demonstrated."

In the film Dogma, Cardinal Glick launches a campaign called "Catholicism Wow!" and replaces the wretched image of the crucifix with the happy-go-lucky image of Buddy Christ. Neither image will suit the future, only the powerful image of GloboChrist—who brings the "clash of revelations" to a fever pitch and who subverts the triumphal secularity of the West with the humble Christianity of the South.

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Christopher Benson's reviews have appeared recently in Modern Reformation, The Christian Scholar's Review, and several other publications. Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Multi-Cultural Pluralism: The Changing State of U.S. Ethnicity

 The changing state of US ethnicity



2 November 2012 Last updated at 20:25 ET

The US has undergone many different immigration trends since the 15th Century, with various ethnic groups rising and falling over time.

This video looks at how the US population has defined itself within government census data, where US immigrants have originated from in the past, and how these patterns could change in the future.

Produced by David Gordon


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What does this mean for Christianity?

Emergent Christianity acknowledges, and widely accepts the fact, that to live in today's postmodern world is to embrace multi-cultural pluralism openly, publicly, and willingly. To realize that the many different people groups coming across America's borders are coming for opportunities their homeland could not (or, would not) provide - whether food, water and shelter; a practical education and livable wage; the benefits of freedom and liberty from fear, abuse, harm and destruction; the active protection to worship as one believes without fear of reprisal; and for many, many other reasons innumerable. Here, in America, the Constitution of the United States binds one-and-all to these many civil liberties and more, and it is to the church of Jesus Christ to likewise shoulder the burden to welcome and accept all who come.

Consequently, the gospel of Jesus was never intended to only the predominant people group of any nation, but to all people groups, tribes, and nations of every country. As such, Emergent Christianity welcomes the opportunity to listen and participate with all religions and faiths in whatever manner possible so that every man, woman or child, might have the additional opportunity to hear about Jesus. This may mean that traditional practices and messages of the Christian faith be altered from a Western flavor to one more Eastern, Asian, or Islamic. Hence, orthodox practices must become more accommodating - if not outrightly transformed - in dress and worship style, language and expression, practices and heritage.

This would also include the theology of the church... not in content but in translation. For example, rather than speaking in a doctrinal language requiring theological precision and historical acumen as we are use to in our Western traditions, perhaps we might adjust telling the gospel through the many story forms provided by Narrative Theology that can easily transform the biblical language into readily adaptable cultural narratives. That is, by fashioning salvific stories created within the cultural language, idioms, and worship styles of that minority's heritage so that the gospel of Jesus might become truly missional rather than culturally conversional.... By this is meant that the missionizing group must be willing to resist the cultural urge to transform another culture into its own style of worship and way of thinking. But rather allow minorities to adapt the gospel into their own predominant language and practices. To understand that successful evangelism does not mean Americanizing or Westernizing new converts to Jesus. But allows new converts their own assimilative practices of apprehending Jesus in their own ways and observances that is meaningful to them. That to missionize a minority people group is to actively promote the transformational state of non-native assimilation. And in the bargin discover a depth of Christian fellowship few experience between dissimilar peoples and cultures.

Furthermore, America's history has been no less awash in cultural movement than what has been experienced by other nations across all the continents of the world. If anything, history has shown how people groups have created societal upheaval and mobile disbursement when incoming refugees have fled for help, assistance, and protection. And it has been to a nation's test of strength and honor to proffer aide and assistance in whatever way that it can to those fleeing death and harm. By actively promoting the humanitarian equality of displaced populations is to strengthen a nation rather than divide it. To share the wealth of stability, protection, community, equality, and service, to those desperately in need of life, liberty and justice, is to that nation's honor and call. Yes, it will be messy. Yes, it will create displacement and stretch resources. And yes, wisdom will be required against a political will that may secede from the task at hand. But if a government and its church communities rise to the gospel challenges of compassionate welcome, aide and cultural respect, it will create a three-corded union unbreakable and strong.

And so must the believer in Christ be as welcoming and gracious to those aliens and strangers amongst us wishing to adopt our homeland as if they were our own kinsmen. And we were their own adoptive relatives. For the human race is but one tribe of many people. Let us learn to revel in our differences and be united as one people before the God of all nations seeking to aide and assist as we can. Jesus once said, "Go out into all the world and make disciples."We now have the added blessing that the "world" has come into the church's own backyard and must recognize that the "task is no less the same as it ever was." "That the mission of the church is the same as it ever was." "And that the message of salvation is still the same as it ever was." But that our community values and attitudes can, and must, changed towards welcoming all in, be they nomads or unwanted, spurned or unloved, refugee or stranger. Let the followers of Jesus be about the tasks of sharing the love of Christ to all the world without regard to color of skin or practice of belief.

Jesus' love and atonement was colorless and without discrimination. He accepted each person as they were and not as they must become in order to be received. It is a message worthy of the whole world and not to just some of the world. It is a message of God's love testified in the communal sharing of dissimilar lives one with the other in the divine cords of fellowship measured by the winnowing threshes of peace and goodwill. And not by the chaff of callousness, bigotry, willful blindness, hardness of heart, or indifference. The church is called to be as the good Samaritan binding up the wounds of others different from ourselves that this burden may then be shared by prayers of charity and grace. Amen.

R.E. Slater
November 4, 2012

see additional related topics -
"Multi-Cultural Pluralism"

Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation:
In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come


Sunday, November 10, 2013

Index - Kingdom Eschatology



King of Kings and Lord of Lords


INDEX TO KINGDOM ESCHATOLOGY
  

Kingdom as Reconciliation and Peace

Repost: Let Us Dance!

Let Us Dance!

Coming Home to Phillip Phillips "Home," Arcade's "Wild Thing's," & Guetta's "Titanium"


The Presence of the Kingdom of God

(mcknight) Church and Kingdom as Inaugurated Eschatology in Process of Finality

(res) The Presence of the Kingdom of God Now

(res) Kingdom as a Participatory Eschatology

(res, cook) What is Heaven? The Kingdom of God Come NOW to Earth...

(hauerwas) Interview & Vid Links: Stanley Hauerwas, "Cross-Shattered Christ"


Kingdom as a Social Ethic in Postmodern Theology

(res) Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation: In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come

(olson) Justice in the Kingdom of God

(ecological) Renewing God's World: The Redemptive Renewal of Creation

(pluralism) The Emergent Spectrum of Evangelicalism

(res, mcknight) The Ethical and Redemptive Aspects of the Kingdom of God

(mcknight) The Failure of Christianity is a Modern Myth


Kingdom Theology

(res, olson) Is God Always In Control?

(res) What Is Narrative Theology? It is the "Grander Story of God and Creation"

(wright) N.T. Wright - How God Became King

(res, mcknight) Book Review: "How God Became King," by N.T. Wright

(wright) N.T. Wright asks: Have we gotten heaven all wrong?

(jwh) How God Became King: Putting Creed and Canon Back Together Again

(olson) The Kingdom of God as Premillennial

(mcknight) Misunderstanding "Kingdom"

(evans re mcknight) The Gospel as the Story of Jesus

(mcknight) Review: Matt Chandler's "Explicit Gospel" misses on many fronts...


Radical Theology

Kevin Corcoran's Critique of Derrida and Caputo


Covenantal Kingdom Theology

(ap) Translating the Apocalyptic Literature of Revelation: The Defeat of the Pagan Empire of Babylon

(ap) Translating the Apocalyptic Literature of Revelation: The Woman and the Dragon and the People of God

(ap) From Old Creation to New Creation - The Story of Redemption and Mankind

(ap) How Paul Saw the Future: The "Day of the Lord" For Saints and Sinners


Historic Premillenialism v. Rapture Theologies

(olson, res) Leaving Behind "Left Behind"

(res) Of Blood Moons & Prophecy: "What Kind of God Leaves People Behind?"

(res) Kingdom Theology (Stay & Work) vs. Rapture Theology (Wait & Leave)

Is "Left Behind" Really A Christian Movie? (podcast)

Why the Rapture isn’t Biblical… And Why it Matters

Debunking "Left Behind" Theology - Resources for Shaping A "Raptureless" Theology




Thy Will be Done



The Last Judgment








The Eschatological Unfolding of the Kingdom of God

 

The Kingdom of Christ our Lord
Jesus as the Midpoint of Redemptive History
Kingdom of God as Promise
Past, Present, and Future
An Old Schema of Kingdom
(Old Dispensational Chart by Clarence Larkin)



An Old/New Schema of the Church
as an Eschatological Community




Sunday, August 8, 2021

Index - American Politics and the Church




INDEX TO AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE CHURCH


Powerful! Willie STUNS With “Stand Up” Performance!
 American Idol 2021, Apr 19, 2021



"Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM = SOCIAL JUSTICE

Imposter Christianity vs (DEI) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, (CRT) Critical Race Theory, & Intersectionality?





























CHRONOLOGICAL


Authoritarianism has entered the Church; but not in a good way...


America Divided: What the Surveys Say...



White Christian Nationalism in the United States – Session 1


Organization - Christians Against Christian Nationalism




Online Conference - Christians Against "White Christian Nationalism"


Responding to the Capitol Insurrection

The Power of God's Love - A New Christian Center


Evangelical Leaders Open Letter Condemning Christian Nationalism


Jesus and the Christian Faith v Christian Nationalism




The Politics of Love in an Age of Qanon


The Rise of Dominionism and the Christian Right


CosmoEcological Civlizations - PostCapitalistic Economies & Politics, Part 3a - unfinished


CosmoEcological Civlizations - PostCapitalistic Economies & Politics, Part 2b - unfinished


CosmoEcological Civlizations - PostCapitalistic Economies & Politics, Part 2a














The Bad (UnChristian) Idea that was "The Crusades" both Then and Now


David Congdon - No, The American Church is Not in Exile


Living in the Days of Our Ancestors: Doing the Unpopular Thing


Reflecting on "A City Upon a Hill." American Exceptionalism, Civil Religion, and True Christianity


The Choice Before Nations to Love and Forgive


Meet the ‘Nones,’ the Democratic Party’s biggest faith constituency


Is There a Crisis in Conservative Protestantism? (How To Engage the Moral Politics of the Day)


"A City on a Hill," by Governor John Winthrop


Cornel West Speaks Out re Martin Luther King's Meaning of "I Have a Dream" for America

T
The Religious Beliefs of America's Founding Fathers & the Need for Christian Theism in Ruling Government


A "Call to Faith by Breaking Faith," by Ross Douthat, NYT


The Failure of Christianity is a Modern Myth

S
Society-at-Large & Government Actually are Better at Fixing Poverty


Humanity Is Not Defined By "Militarism" and "Consummerism"


"The Day America Died" and the Birth of Postmodernism


The Deism (or, Natural Religion) of Some of America's Founding Fathers


Pluralism, Tolerance and Accommodation: In You, the Kingdom of God Has Come