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

-----

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

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Wendell Berry's Stunning Words on Condemnation and Hatred

Wendell Berry expounds on gay marriage
 
Monday, January 14, 2013Social Issues
by Bob Allen
 
Writing for Associated Baptist Press was founded in 1990 as the first and only independent news service created by and for Baptists. ABP is an autonomous, nonprofit news organization that offers news, features and opinion articles every business day for a global audience of Baptists and other Christians at ABPnews.com and its companion site, the ABPnews Blog.
 
 
A Kentucky farmer, essayist, writer and activist, sometimes described as a
modern-day Thoreau, criticizes theological strategies used to marginalize gays.

 
Wendell Berry
(Photo by David Marshall, Wikipedia Commons)


Christian opponents to same-sex marriage want the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons subject to discrimination, similar to the way that African-Americans and women were categorized in the past, cultural and economic critic Wendell Berry told Baptist ministers in Kentucky Jan. 11.
 
Berry, a prolific author of books, poems and essays who won the National Humanities Medal in 2010 and was 2012 Jefferson lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, offered “a sort of general declaration” on the subject of gay marriage at a “Following the Call of the Church in Times Like These” conference at Georgetown College. Berry said he chose to comment publicly to elaborate on what little he has said about the topic in the past.
 
“I must say that it’s a little wonderful to me that in 40-odd years of taking stands on controversial issues, and at great length sometimes, the two times that I think I’ve stirred up the most passionate opposition has been with a tiny little essay on computers (his 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” published in Harper’s led some to accuse him of being anti-technology) and half a dozen or a dozen sentences on gay marriage,” Berry said.
 
Berry said he could recall only twice before when he commented publicly on the issue, in a single paragraph in a collection of essays published in 2005 and in an interview with the National Review in 2012.
 
“My argument, much abbreviated both times, was the sexual practices of consenting adults ought not to be subjected to the government’s approval or disapproval, and that domestic partnerships in which people who live together and devote their lives to one another ought to receive the spousal rights, protections and privileges the government allows to heterosexual couples,” Berry said.
 
Berry said liberals and conservatives have invented “a politics of sexuality” that establishes marriage as a “right” to be granted or withheld by whichever side prevails. He said both viewpoints contravene principles of democracy that rights are self-evident and inalienable and not determined and granted or withheld by the government.
 
“Christians of a certain disposition have found several ways to categorize homosexuals as different as themselves, who are in the category of heterosexual and therefore normal and therefore good,” Berry said. What is unclear, he said, is why they single out homosexuality as a perversion.
 
“The Bible, as I pointed out to the writers of National Review, has a lot more to say against fornication and adultery than against homosexuality,” he said. [And] “If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare -- with its inevitable massacre of innocents -- as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.”
 
“Jesus talked of hating your neighbor as tantamount to hating God, and yet some Christians hate their neighbors by policy and are busy hunting biblical justifications for doing so,” he said. “Are they not perverts in the fullest and fairest sense of that term? And yet none of these offenses -- not all of them together -- has made as much political/religious noise as homosexual marriage.”
 
Another argument used, Berry said, is that homosexuality is “unnatural.”
 
“If it can be argued that homosexual marriage is not reproductive and is therefore unnatural and should be forbidden on that account, must we not argue that childless marriages are unnatural and should be annulled?” he asked.
 
“One may find the sexual practices of homosexuals to be unattractive or displeasing and therefore unnatural, but anything that can be done in that line by homosexuals can be done and is done by heterosexuals,” Berry continued. “Do we need a legal remedy for this? Would conservative Christians like a small government bureau to inspect, approve and certify their sexual behavior? Would they like a colorful tattoo verifying government approval on the rumps of lawfully copulating parties? We have the technology, after all, to monitor everybody’s sexual behavior, but so far as I can see so eager an interest in other people’s private intimacy is either prurient or totalitarian or both.”
 
“The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals is to propose that homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals,” Berry said. “If this is not industrial capitalist paranoia, it at least follows the pattern of industrial capitalist competitiveness. We must destroy the competition. If somebody else wants what you’ve got, from money to marriage, you must not hesitate to use the government – small of course – to keep them from getting it.”
 
Berry said “so-called traditional marriage” is “for sure suffering a statistical failure, but this is not the result of a homosexual plot.”
 
“Heterosexual marriage does not need defending,” Berry said. “It only needs to be practiced, which is pretty hard to do just now.”
 
“But the difficulty is not assigned to any group of scapegoats,” he said. “It is rooted mainly in the values and priorities of our industrial capitalist system in which every one of us is complicit.”
 
“If I were one of a homosexual couple -- the same as I am one of a heterosexual couple -- I would place my faith and hope in the mercy of Christ, not in the judgment of Christians,” Berry said. “When I consider the hostility of political churches to homosexuality and homosexual marriage, I do so remembering the history of Christian war, torture, terror, slavery and annihilation against Jews, Muslims, black Africans, American Indians and others. And more of the same by Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Catholics, Protestants against Protestants, as if by law requiring the love of God to be balanced by hatred of some neighbor for the sin of being unlike some divinely preferred us. If we are a Christian nation -- as some say we are, using the adjective with conventional looseness -- then this Christian blood thirst continues wherever we find an officially identifiable evil, and to the immense enrichment of our Christian industries of war.”
 
“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred,” Berry said. “Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.”
 
“Perhaps the most dangerous temptation to Christianity is to get itself officialized in some version by a government, following pretty exactly the pattern the chief priest and his crowd at the trial of Jesus,” Berry said. “For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.”
 
 
 

Why is God Angry in the OT and Forgiving in the NT?

What’s God So Mad About, Anyway? (or, why is God so mad at an evolving creation?)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/01/whats-god-so-mad-about-anyway-or-why-is-god-so-mad-at-an-evolving-creation/
 
by Pete Enns
January 21, 2013
Comments
 
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
 
How often do we read about God’s anger, wrath, etc. in the Old Testament?
 
What are the kinds of things–specifically–that make God angry?
 
What does God do to the offenders because of his anger?
 
I’ve been wondering about this since I started thinking more seriously about evolution a few years ago. Why? Because according the Genesis 3 and Romans 5, death is a result of God being angry about something.
 
According to an evolutionary model, death (and the violence that goes with it) is part of the natural way of things. In fact, death is evolution’s friend. Without it to weed out the weaklings, you wouldn’t have the survival of the fittest.
 
On the other hand, the wrath of God that leads to death means death is unnatural, imposed onto the world. I think this is one of the biggest conflict areas between Christianity and evolution. Why is God so mad with an evolving creation?
 
So, that got me thinking more specifically about God’s anger in the Old Testament (that and reading through the prophetic literature last summer).
 
Take the Adam and Eve story. Death was God’s punishment for Adam and Eve disobeying God in the garden by eating the forbidden fruit. Of course, this raises the follow-up question: why was death the proper punishment?
 
Same for the flood. People become sinful, and it gets so bad that God regrets he ever populated the earth. Drowning everyone seems to be the only solution.
 
If you skim through the Old Testament page-by-page you see that God is quite often angry and imposing physical discomfort or death seems to be his preferred method of resolving the matter. Here, too, the question is why? You may answer, “because of sin.” OK, but what exactly did the people do to warrant death, etc.? ”Sin” is the easy answer. But what were they doing that was sinful and why was death so often the best solution?
 
I’ve never done it before, but it would be an interesting project to catalogue every instance of divine wrath/anger, etc. in the Old Testament and give (1) the passage, (2) the offending party, (3) the precise offense, and (4) the divine reaction (either threatened or carried out).
 
I would be very happy to welcome serious comments engaging this issue.
 
And here’s the flip side of that issue. In the New Testament, God seems different. Some of the things that God commanded the Old Testament, where disobedience resulted in some form of punishment or death, seem to have gone by the wayside in the New Testament.
 
I know God is not a senile old uncle in the New Testament, but he is less–well, reactionary about certain things. Comedian Lewis Black wonders if having a son mellowed God out a bit. You might not like the joke but you can get the point.
 
I would welcome thoughtful comments on this idea, too: how does the wrath of God in the Old Testament compare to the New?
 
These aren’t new questions, of course, but I do sometimes wonder if we are too casual about all this.
 

 
~  Please refer to comments section above for more discussion ~
 
 
 
 

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


Cornel West Explains Why It Bothers Him
That Obama Will Be Taking The Oath
Published on Jan 20, 2013
January 19, 2013 C-SPAN



Dr. Cornel West - Government can be Oppressive

Clipped from: Tavis Smiley Presents Poverty in America, Jan 17, 2013
Dr. West gives a passionate speech about governments' love for power, and the fact of government oppression. MLK could have been jailed without due process under the NDAA or killed without due process under the present administration
Wikipedia BiographyCornel West
Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, academic, activist, author and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. West is a 1973 graduate of Harvard University and received his Ph.D. at Princeton University. He is currently a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and of Religious Philosophy and Christian Studies at the Union Theological Seminary in New York.
The bulk of his work focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including: the black church, Marxism, pragmatism, and transcendentalism.

* * * * * * * * *




Historical Background: Wikipedia - I Have A Dream


* * * * * * * * *

MLK's Address in Washington, D.C.
August 28, 1963
17 minutes

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm






* * * * * * * * *


[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio. (2)]

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.
We cannot turn back.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."¹

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."2
This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.


And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3



- Martin Luther King, Washington D.C., August 28, 1963

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

 
Though himself neither cute nor a bunny, my friend James McGrath over at Exploring Our Matrix has posted this ever-so-cute response to creationism by the two ever-so-cutest stuffed bunnies you’ll ever want to see.
 
Of course, the point of this bunny dialogue is applicable not just to creationism but to other issues of theological disagreement where the familiarity and safety of an “authoritative tradition” collides with thoughtful and needed exploration that challenges that authority.
 
And, no, I’m not saying tradition is always wrong and exploration is always right. Sheesh. I’m saying that, well, gosh….if I have to explain, you’re the bunny in the dress and you wouldn’t get it any way.

With that, I give you… the bunnies.
 
 
Think Outside The Box
(The Cutest Response to Creationism Ever!)
by James McGrath
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Related Articles by Pete Enns -
 
3 Ways I Would Like to See Evangelical Leaders Stop Defending The Bible
 
 
 
 
3 Things I Would Like to See Evangelical Leaders Stop Saying about Biblical Scholarship
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cometh the End of Days in Postmodernism's Deconstructive Light




If the subject matter immediately following is unlike what you had hoped, then good. Welcome to the world of postmodernism. You have now entered into the wild, wacky world of postmodernism. For that was my experience not many years hence where my expectations did not match the reality of what I would soon discover. It will push at you from a lot of different places, sometimes making you uncomfortable, at other times confused, and even downright bothered, and all the while making you want to give up and return to the simpler worlds that you once inhabited and thought you understood.

In my journey (because postmoderns must always speak of their journey) I've gone through a wide range of emotions until finally learning that it was my own background that worked against me, instead of for me. It was a painful transition which I now think (had I not made it) would've held me back for the rest of my life, confining me to personal spaces I should not be living within, nor able to personally grow within. I suppose there were many factors that contributed to its occurrence in my life beyond the ones I shall talk about here in this present discussion.

It began formally when I finally admitted to myself that I had to ask the question of why my Evangelical faith had become so conflicted between what I believed and what I was observing in the church fellowships and organizations I was familiar with. Having noticed trends in both church and theology that were highly conflicted. Trends that needed better questions, and certainly a lot better answers if it were possible. And then, somewhere along the way, over the past generation or two of my lifetime, I found myself moving at a different pace from my more comfortable, very structured, past. Its internal drift was growing by the day and required some little investigation along with some mighty large answers that, if they couldn't be answered, at least needed a better place to land.

The other thing I noticed was that the emergent Christian fellowship I was joined to were also experiencing similar growth pains of movement and barrier, centrality and definition. For it's seekers were dealing with questions of what a follower of Jesus might expect in a lifetime of familiar and unfamiliar experiences, resulting from deeply personal upheaval, unwanted and unsought. For I know of no one purposely seeking directional change in life without some sort of catalyst to get it all started. And for me it was the catalyst of being out of sync with the cultures around me - mine own, my friends, the church, and with society at large. It was more than simply living as a Christian with all its fundamental differences. No, this was something else completely different.

My earlier, evangelical-period of life, marked completion of academic training from a large, well-known university during the end of America's Vietnam War. A bloody war whose ravages laid everywhere about the campus and society - from the cruel sacrifices of America's sons and daughters, family and friends, to institutional breakdowns, civil race riots, rampant drugs, sit-ins, and "peace" rallies of despair, hate, and conflict. All of which had come to my "Berkley of the Midwest" making it a microcosm of the moiling turmoils and deep strife found within the nation at large as I walked everywhere upon its campus. And as I pursued my studies in science, mathematics, engineering, humanities, and language, the hot cauldrons of deconstruction boiled over into the hallowed halls of academia, its grand dorms, civic life, and all things in between. The academic setting I had imagined were in deep conflict with what was being  personally experienced, so that after three years of nearly daily turmoil my heart, mind, and soul, were no longer at peace. My grades were slipping and I could no longer concentrate on the reasons that brought me here. I had become weary of contending the daily battles of atheism in all its ragged forms of deep despair and angled bleakness. And all the while, was discovering in my Christian witness and sustaining fellowships a need for more formal biblical studies than I could discover on mine own. I wasn't sure how to discern the mind-and-mood altering affects of the epistemological deconstruction witnessed about me, so that after three long years of absorbing godlessness and despair, and nearing my final two semesters of study in advance mathematics, I applied to a small, fundamental/evangelical college much to my family's dismay. All their hopes and dreams vanished overnight for me with that application. And I suppose a little bit of myself had died as well.

Before all this, I was raised in an isolated farming region that quickly was losing its past 150 years of  pioneering history and becoming overrun with the spreading blight of urbanization. Many of the old timers I remembered seeing and visiting with were quickly passing away. And the mangled social  interconnectedness that a  once futile land brought to our farming communities was fast disappearing. From my perspective, farming families were uniquely bound to the land in very similar ways to that of the native American Indian we had displaced. With the exception that our spirituality was disconnected from it, though in another sense, it too grew from the land we loved and found rebirth. Without the land and its heritage we had no identity. And with it we had no income. So that from around the start of the 20th century farming families began to find work off the land wherever they could. And as they did, so also began the educational "uplift" of time honored stories, superstitions, legends and folklores (or, was it the cultural lost of the same that I was observing in my small childhood?) Whatever it was, I could sense even then the conflict between the clash of very old worlds lost upon the newer altars of enlightenment and revered modernism. And in this way, the pioneers of the old days, and the old ways, had grown in companionship to the native American Indians of old, who too had lost their ancient traditions, time-honored customs, and land-bound heritages. The tie that bound was one of deconstruction. Ever faithful. Ever present. Ever disruptive.

In any event, as industry and urbanization spread, relatives and farming families began to leave the land of its heritage for the factory floors and business offices of the city. So that by the time I was raised, what then remained to me were the dusty shrouds of ancient artifacts hanging from the rafters of our failing, hand-hewn, post-and-beam, red-painted barns still seated upon their crumbling foundations. Or beheld in the rusted, empty stanchions of a dilapidated and crumbling milk house once vibrantly warm and alive with the life blood, and odorous manured stench, of fat dairy herds on a cold winter's morn. Closed in to the colours of the rising sun, and noisily ganged together eating underneath the stray coverlets of dimmed 40-watt light bulbs sparsely hung from the heavily strawed rafters seeping from double planked floor above. Or seen in the overworked and fallowing fields bounded by sagging barbed wire and disintegrating driftwood fencing. Once holding flowing fields of wheat and hay under a hot summer sun's risen heats, stained with the sweaty odors of working men dutifully labouring beside oiled remnants of mechanized machinery straining in the faraway turns and bends of distant fields, hearing the scrape of metal upon metal upon ungiving ground.

As well, my little one-room school house was in its last generation (my brothers and I we were the fifth, and last) of a long legacy of great uncles and great aunts. Since the age of 5 we learned to walk the fields and cross the broken fencelines between vigilant stray dairy herds ever watchful of our guarded, early morning crossings. Holding tin lunch pails in our  small hands, and wet up to our knees in the tall morning grasses, we marched faithfully day-after-day to learn about worlds to come. Sitting in our wooden, flip-top desks, in crowded aisles and rows ushering 19 other children more worldly wise than ourselves. Who lived in the "city" and not on the land of their birth. Listening to the wooden floor creak underneath the step of every waif, and feeling the billowing breeze of uplifted curtains flowing above the high shelves of very tall windows. There, in front, looking upon us was Lincoln and Washington, and with these great men we stood to present our daily lessons to the only grand teacher I would ever know (spare one many years later). Loving, kind, patient. Our link to a wider world of grandeur. And paean to our future. Too soon would come the public school fast looming on the horizon like the vista of our little school beheld in the early mornings. To which sixth grade was my induction into its darkened labyrinths and stonewalled dungeons. And with it, the age of modernized education commenced leading to a later university training that would take me far afield to an infinite degree beyond what once was old and familiar. A place were radically new, and turbulent ideas, imprisoned the land of my heritage, and its distant spirits, to another time and era. At once unfamiliar, and breaking apart at the seams, by its own undoing and destructions. For this was the heady era of glorious modernism which was all hail and fury. A fury that undid its charms and made me long for the better days of youth and mystery. Adventure and wonder. A youth unclaimed until modernism died by its own hands, and with it came the promise of a postmodern future more alive with the wonders of an ancient past lost.

Years earlier, at the age of eleven, I became a Christian. It was a significant event that still stands clear in my mind on a late summer's Sunday eve after hearing the gospel of Jesus and what it meant to me in personal terms of salvation. Having followed my Sunday School teacher's instructions to pray the believer's prayer that night around 8 o'clock just before bedtime, I went down the hallway to tell my mom, deeply engrossed in knitting and darning, patching and sewing. After which, to rest, she would play a new upright piano to the deeply glorious strains of the classics, black-noted upon the thick pages of her music books, remembering the days of her stage performance downtown at the Royce Auditorium. When telling mom of my prayer, she absently replied that that was nice and wished me lovingly off to bed for early school the next day. Which was about the extent of my Christian upbringing. We went to a Baptist church in the city many miles away once a week on Sunday. And occasionally that same church sent out a faithful country preacher to our little school house to share flannel graph lessons of Bible stories with us. It was a steadily growing community of warm believers, filled with warm ministries, to both children and community. Dad grew up there and mom started to attend when they married, leaving her Swedish/Lutheran background behind for a Scot/English one. She once told me the Lutheran hymns she sang as a  child made more sense to her in dad's Baptist church. Even so, during a length of several summers, I remember receiving "catechism" from mom's Lutheran church, experiencing the grand music and worship  of its massive sanctuaries and organ-strewn pipes held against the walls in silvery runs everywhere I looked. At our simpler Baptist church we had devotional Sunday School lessons in children's church, sang occasionally for the congregation, and in time, when coming of age, were allowed to attend "big church". There, we were to sit quietly. Listen. And try not to fuss too much under dad's ever diligent eye (learned in the trade of the police after coming back from the lines of the DMZ in Korea). Or bother those around us, as we sat in the hardened, smoothed pews of the backmost row, with my uncle's family (always to the left), and a blonde-headed girl ahead, sitting quite contentedly with her family, to my curious adoration and wonder (something my brothers and I seemed always to struggle with!)

After graduating from bible college I taught for a brief year out-of-state at a high school (a church school no less) and then returned with mixed feelings of whether to begin seminary education. My interest was still in biblical studies with a passing interest in pastoring (which both did, and didn't happen). My wife and I met, dated, married, and lived a long time without children, doing as much ministry as we could in her home church (fast becoming the city's main mega church supplanting mine own). Years past, ministries grew old, boards came and went, church families moved on, or passed away, becoming distant memories, and soon we found ourselves in our third church. A church that was birth from our past home churches and to become the city's next, newest mega-church. One that would change everything familiar, grand, and comfortable. While unknowingly to us - as well as to itself in those early days - it would soon become formed under the influences of nascent emergent Christianity. A new church movement feeling its way along a path both radical and new. Radical in that it wished to leave the failed days of modernism behind (to no dismay of mine own). And new in that the only thing to be put in modernism's place was a form of postmodernism, spun towards our religious/ideological drift and direction. It required of us a generation's worth of re-thinking what we had learned, had taught, had exampled, and must now change, much to our amazement. A change we didn't think was necessary until looking about and seeing that many Christian friends were hunkering down into staid, conservative forms of religion that felt unfamiliar to our own lively backgrounds of past university life and passionate Christian witness. Or, by those who had become road kill from Christian churches who said they didn't fit into the proscribed religious lifestyles and beliefs it held. Or, were simply overlooked in the busyness of life where careers, jobs, and wealth accumulation mattered most to the congregants of the church. At which point this "emergent" Christianity began to make sense, identifying as it were with our own turbulent past, and personal mandate, for Jesus-first ministry. So we stayed, learned to adapt, and worked through (yet once again) another formidable period of change (at least my third in a lifetime of fluid, and flexible, deconstructive boundaries).

Consequently, it is important to me to know how the evangelical churches and institutions that I was familiar with - where I found nurture and support - were likewise being affected by the same changes I was personally experiencing. I would like to know just what had occurred during those years between my graduation from seminary until now, a generation later, that would place me in the position of finding myself writing about a postmodern faith. An emergent faith requiring new thought tools, a more contemporary theology, and a more radical mission deployment, that my older faith had not given to me. A faith that would create a renewed focus upon Jesus, and His kingdom, and cause all things related to Jesus to be cruciform, and incarnational, in ministry and worship. That wishes to "work" its faith as much as "speak" its faith. And to understand how it is different - radically different! - from my own fundamental and evangelical past. And yet, not unlike my own past, where Jesus came in to my life and made all things radically new. Reinvisioning new worlds. New thought forms. New methodologies. New insights and practices. New embracements of a wider world. A wider culture. A wider global appreciation for those different from myself. Where the old wineskins of my earlier faith could no longer hold the new wine of  Jesus' postmodern gospel. And even though I didn't know it at the time, I needed the new wineskin of Emergent Christianity to move on with Jesus into relevancy to the world today.

Certainly it was confusing. And chaotic. Because how many times does one go through a 500 year seismic change in the history of the church? The early Remonstraters once did in the Age of the Reformation. And before that, those followers of Jesus did during the collapse of the old Roman, and later Ottoman, Empire. And before that, those early Jewish Christians did with the advent of Christ into their Old Testament Jewish religion. Even so, is the church of the early 21st century undergoing such a change. Reconfiguring from its formerly understood self, having worn for too long the outdated garments of Enlightenment and Modernism, while hesitantly looking at the newest runway apparels and designs from New York and Paris' latest fashions of deconstruction and postmodernism. The music has changed. The politics and economics have changed. The cities are growing to mega-proportions. The climate and ecology of the Earth has changed (what massive glaciers I once walked in my youth have disappeared). Man's scars and marks is on everything organic and structural. Our wars and disagreements have changed. Even our lifestyles have changed.

So then, it is of no surprise that our Christian faith must change. And will change. And will never be like itself from one era to the next. From one generation to the next. If it doesn't then the gospel of God in Jesus will have no relevance unless we learn to break down the barriers we seem to constantly placed upon it.  And to stop thinking we are diluting the Gospel by allowing relevant change to occur. To trust that there will be enough relevant theologians working within the fabric of society to help keep to the ancient faith without fear of losing it. While learning to accept it's more relevant expressions and forms of outreach, ministry, and mission. Count on it. For it must be so, even as there will ever be constants within the Christian faith of old. That will be assured through the patient study, and presentation, of the Bible into every era of mankind at the ever faithful hands of God.

Nay, God has not forsaken His church. Quite the contrary.... He is powerfully working within our midst calling to repentance, reform, revival, renewal, reincarnation, even resurrection. Do not make the error of the Scribes and Pharisees by calling God's redemptive work within humanity that of the devil, and putting to death the Son of Life. Jesus came to bring life. Not death. Learn to trust God and to distrust ourselves. It is  how the Spirit works by calling all afresh to hear God's holy name. Be at peace and rest in this knowledge.  You are not forsaken. Nor has your ancient faith been abandoned. Simply challenged to become relevant in its mission and message.

And so, not unlike Jesus, I've felt that we've entered into a long line of dissembling eras just as the church of yesteryear had until an Augustine, or a Luther, or a Calvin, stood up and spoke out, declaring new practices, new worship styles, new theology, new dogma. Even now is that occurring again - as hard as it is to entertain or comprehend. And this time by not only figureheads but by the masses of believers themselves as they serve, and work, and witness of Jesus each day around this nation, and this earthly globe.

For we have entered into that long line of "the first and the last" - the "first" to enter into new eras unsought and unwanted. And the "last" to leave the ruins of a crumbling past and precious memories to be forgotten in the long ruins of a more ancient, more distant past. Each journey was as unknown then, as it will be now. Each filled with adventure, exploration, rebirth, and renewal. As much as with uncertainty, hardship, turmoil, and a diminishing hold to the misty moorings of an earlier time. Eh verily, I suspect there might yet be a few new lands to discover until the end of days. But through all these many journeys does God walk with us - whatever the shadows or valleys, the mountains or glades. He is there. And will be our firm assurance. Our rear guard. Our advancing scout. And ever faithful Captain of the Hosts of the Lord. 

R.E. Slater
January 16, 2013

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Defining “Evangelical”: Why It’s Necessary and Impossible