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

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Where Does Space and Time Come From?



Where Do Space and Time Come From?
New Theory Offers Answers, If Only Physicists Can Figure It Out

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/12/where-do-space-and-time-come-from-new-theory-offers-answers-if-only-physicists-can-figure-it-out/

April 12, 2012Comments


SANTA BARBARA—”Maybe we’re just too dumb,” Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. (He went on to explain why he doesn’t think we are too dumb, though.) Since his lecture, I’ve been learning about a theory that seems, at first, to confirm this worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I’ve been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.

The theory was put forward in the late 1980s by Russian physicists Mikhail Vasiliev and the late Efin Fradkin of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, but is so mathematically complex and conceptually opaque that whenever someone brought it up, most theorists started talking about the weather, soccer, reality TV—anything but that theory. It became a subject of polite conversation only in the past couple of years, as math whizzes who take a peculiar pleasure in impossible problems dove in and showed that the theory is not impossible to grasp, merely almost impossible.

Inspired by their bravery, I’m going to take a crack at explaining this strange beast, synthesizing lectures I’ve attended by Steve Shenker of Stanford University, Andy Strominger of Harvard, and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as informal chats with Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Joan Simón of the University of Edinburgh. I’m sure they’ll set me straight if I get something wrong, and I’ll edit this blog post to reflect comments I receive.

Vasiliev theory (for sake of a pithy name, physicists drop Fradkin’s name) takes to extremes the basic idea of modern physics: that the world around us consists of fields—the electrical and magnetic fields and a handful of others that represent the known forces of nature and types of matter. Vasiliev theory posits an infinite number of fields. They come in progressively more complicated varieties described by the quantum-mechanical property of spin.

Spin is perhaps best thought of as the degree of rotational symmetry. The electromagnetic field along with its associated particle, the photon, has spin -1. If you rotate it 360 degrees, it looks the same as before. The gravitational field along with its associated particle, the graviton, has spin -2: you need to rotate it only 180 degrees [to find its original image]. The known particles of matter, such as the electron, have spin -1/2: you need to rotate them 720 degrees before they return to their original appearance - a counterintuititive feature that turns out to explain why these particles resist bunching, giving matter its integrity. The Higgs field has spin -0 and looks the same no matter how you rotate it.




Figure 1: Unification of forces and superstring theory It is thought that when the universe was born, there was only one kind of force, which bifurcated into four kinds as the temperature decreased with the expansion of the universe. Superstring theory is expected to provide a unified explaination for the initially bifurcated gravitational forces and the other threee forces, and even to solve the riddle of the birth of the universe.



Figure 2: A moving string as the minimum unit of matter At present, the electron and quark are considered to represent the smallest units of matter. The standard model assumes that a point is the smallest unit, whereas superstring theory assumes a string. The string turns into a quark after entering one mode of vibration and an electron after entering another mode.


In Vasiliev theory, there are also spin -5/2, spin -3, spin -7/2, spin -4, all the way up. Physicists used to assume that was impossible. These higher-spin fields, being more symmetrical, would imply new laws of nature analogous to the conservation of energy, and no two objects could ever interact without breaking one of those laws. The workings of nature would seize up like an overregulated economy. At first glance, string theory, the leading candidate for a fully unified theory of nature, runs afoul of this principle. Like a plucked guitar string, an elementary quantum string has an infinity of higher harmonics, which correspond to higher-spin fields. But those harmonics come with an energy cost, which keeps them inert.

Vasiliev and Frakin showed that the above reasoning applies only when gravity is insignificant and spacetime is not curved. In curved spacetimes, higher-spin fields can exist after all. Maybe overregulation isn’t such a bogeyman after all.

In fact, it may be a positive good. Higher-spin fields promise to flesh out the holographic principle, which is a way to explain the origin of space and gravity. Suppose you have a hypothetical three-dimensional spacetime (two space dimensions, one time dimension) filled with particles that interact solely by a souped-up version of the strong nuclear force; there is no gravity. In such a setting, objects can behave in a very structured way. Objects of a given size can interact only with objects of comparable size, just as objects can interact only if they are spatially adjacent. Size plays exactly the same role as spatial position; you can think of size as a new dimension of space, materializing from particle interactions like a figure in a pop-up book. The original three-dimensional spacetime becomes the boundary of a four-dimensional spacetime, with the new dimension representing the distance from this boundary. Not only does a spatial dimension emerge, but so does the force of gravity. In the jargon, the strong nuclear force in 3-D spacetime (the boundary) is “dual” to gravity in 4-D spacetime (the bulk).

As formulated by Maldacena in the late 1990s, the holographic principle describes a bulk where dark energy has a negative density, warping spacetime into a so-called anti-de Sitter geometry. But this is just a theorist’s playground. In the real universe, dark energy has a positive density, for a de Sitter geometry or some approximation thereof. Extending the holographic principle to such a geometry is fraught. The boundary of 4-D de Sitter spacetime is a 3-D space lying in the infinite future. The emergent dimension in this case would not be of space but of time, which is hard even for theoretical physicists to wrap their minds around. But if they succeed in formulating a version of the holographic principle for a de Sitter geometry, it would not only apply to the real universe, but would also explain what time really is. A lack of understanding of time is at the root of almost every deep problem in fundamental physics today.

That is where Vasiliev theory comes in. It works in either an anti-de Sitter or a de Sitter geometry. In the former [anti-de Sitter] case, the corresponding 3-D boundary is governed by a simplified version of the strong nuclear force rather than the souped-up one [(no space, no gravity)]. By biting the bullet and accepting the borderline-incomprehensible Vasiliev theory, physicists actually end up easing their task. In the de Sitter case, the corresponding 3-D boundary is governed by a type of field theory in which time does not operate; it is static. The structure of this theory gives rise to the dimension of time. What is more, time arises in an inherently asymmetric way, which might account for the arrow of time—its unidirectionality.

It gets even better. Normally the holographic principle [(cf. Wikipedia - Holographic principle)] can account for the emergence of one dimension, leaving the others unexplained. But Vasiliev theory might give you the whole kit and kaboodle. The higher-spin fields possess an even higher degree of symmetry than the gravitational field does, which is a lot. Higher symmetry means less structure. The theory of gravity, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, says that spacetime is like Silly Putty. Vasiliev theory says it is Sillier Putty, possessing too little structure to fulfill even its most basic functions, such as defining consistent cause-effect relations or keeping distant objects isolated from one another.

To put it differently, Vasiliev theory is even more nonlinear than general relativity. Matter and spacetime geometry are so thoroughly entwined that it becomes impossible to tease them apart, and our usual picture of matter as residing in spacetime becomes completely untenable. In the primordial universe, where Vasiliev theory reigned, the universe was an amorphous blob. As the higher-spin symmetries broke—for instance, as the higher harmonics of quantum strings become too costly to set into motion—spacetime emerged in its entirety.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Vasiliev theory is so complicated. Any explanation of the nature of space and time is bound to be intimidating. If physicists ever do figure it out, I predict that they’ll forget how hard it used to be and start giving it to their students for homework.


About the Author: is a contributing editor at Scientific American. He focuses on space science and fundamental physics, ranging from particles to planets to parallel universes. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory. Musser has won numerous awards in his career, including the 2011 American Institute of Physics's Science Writing Award. Follow on Twitter @gmusser.
More Resources:

Wikipedia - SpaceTime

Wikipedia - The Philosophy of Space and Time

Scientific American (5/17/11) - Space Is An Elaborate Illusion

Scientific American / res - The Paradox of Time: Why It Can't Stop, But Must

The Origin of Space and Time by John Gowan - http://www.johnagowan.org/convert.html


Mapping the History of Space & Time




Holography, Unfolding and Higher-Spin Theory, Mikhail Vasiliev







Saturday, February 9, 2013

Book Review: Ed Dobson, "Seeing Through the Fog"



Death Is For Real


Amid a flurry of bestsellers promising firsthand proof of Heaven's existence,
Ed Dobson takes a brutally honest look at the pain of terminal illness and the
 difficulties of dying well.

Review by Rob Moll
[posted 10/31/2012 8:56 AM ]

Seeing Through the Fog:
Hope When Your World Falls Apart


Seeing Through the Fog: Hope When Your World Falls Apartour rating - 5 Stars - Masterpiece
Author - Ed Dobson
Publisher - David C. Cook
Price - $12.99

I recently was reading the story of a former evangelical Christian, profiled by Tony Kriz in his new book,Neighbors and Wise Men.After growing up in a small, insular expression of the faith, he discovered a wider world outside it. In particular, this passionate believer discovered an environmental movement that spoke to his soul while his church home ridiculed the environmentalists. So, he switched his allegiances: "The Christian church has no coherent answer for earth care. And for that reason I now know I could never be a Christian."

Initially, this remark angered me. The evangelical movement has more than a few dissenters from the typical attitude toward environmentalism. They could have saved this man's faith. But as I gained some sympathy, I realized that the man's apostasy illustrates our need for faithful dissenters, insiders who stay true to the movement while critiquing its failures. These dissenters add diversity and show us new ways to be faithful followers of Christ.

It wasn't too long ago—when political evangelicalism was loud, and its hypocrisy easy to see—that I, immature and ignorant, wanted to lodge my own critiques against the church.

A faithful dissenter

Thankfully I discovered Ed Dobson, the faithful dissenter who voiced my own critiques while remaining inside the evangelical fold. Dobson was formerly a board member of the Moral Majority, a spokesperson for Jerry Falwell, and a vice president at Liberty University. Dobson had since become a successful pastor, leading a megachurch in Grand Rapids, and he remained a powerful voice in the pulpit and in his books. He was named "Pastor of the Year" by Moody Bible Institute. Dobson was an evangelical of evangelicals. He was a religious righter of the Religious Right.

And he gave me an answer to the problem of the church entwined with politics. In Blinded by Might, coauthored with fellow Moral Majority member Cal Thomas, they blame the Religious Right for that entwinement: "We have confused political power with God's power." Dobson and Thomas argue that the church has been compromised and distracted from its central mission. In 2008, Dobson voted for Barak Obama, telling ABC news that Obama "more than any other candidate represented the teachings of Jesus."

Dobson was a dissenter even during his days as a student at Bob Jones University. He turned away from, but never fully rejected, those who once nurtured him. Dobson speaks fondly of his days in fundamentalism and doesn't deride those he left behind. As Dobson has matured beyond the fundamentalist and Religious Right communities, he has simply pursued greater faithfulness and obedience to God for himself, his congregation, and the church at large.

Another kind of leadership

Now, Dobson is embracing a new role. After several years living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, Dobson is breaking the mold of the public figure diagnosed with a terminal illness. Such personalities typically retreat into private, preventing the public from seeing them in a weakened state. Or, these figures blandly assert that the disease will have no effect on their responsibilities.

As his body dies, muscle by muscle, Dobson is speaking at conferences, writing books, and is starring in a series of videos about his ALS, called "Ed's Story." Having left politics and now the pulpit, Dobson has embraced a new ministry. He is now teaching Christians to die well. Because learning to die well requires us to discover the meaning of a good life, Dobson's final journey instructs us all.

The church has always given an ear to its members who were near death. Today, travelogues written by children who visit heaven are our bestsellers. But earlier evangelicals read stories of transformation at the end of life and the narratives of faithful dying. Such stories filled religious periodicals. They weren't offered as eyewitness proof of Sunday school pictures of heaven. Obituaries never told about "battles" with illness but of abiding faith, deepened relationships, and glorious entries into heaven through the sad reality of death.

By taking his dying public, Dobson stands in this tradition. His latest book, Seeing Through the Fog: Hope When Your World Falls Apart (David C. Cook), offers the lessons Dobson has learned while dealing with a disease that kills slowly and painfully. In one of the Ed's Story videos, he says, "Every person knows that they are going to die. The difference is I feel it with every twitch of my muscles. I feel it in the very depths of my being."

Dobson writes about his fog of despair after his diagnosis, the difficulty of leaving his position as pastor, the challenge of prayer, and the constant worry when living with terminal illness. He writes about learning to give thanks—not for his disease, but for the many things ALS had yet to take away and for which he still could be thankful . Dobson writes about heaven and his powerful desire not to be there yet. He writes about his prayers for healing and the horrible things people say about faith and miracles.

To Die Well

The Christian tradition of dying well often has taught believers to hope for a slow death. It allows time for the preparation that a good death requires. Seeing Through the Fog, and particularly the Ed's Story videos, offers more than lessons in hope. It teaches the old practices of ars moriendi—the art of dying.

One Ed's Story video tells hows Dobson made a list of people from whom to ask forgiveness. Kathy had been a staff counselor at Dobson's church who was let go. The process had hurt Kathy, and she laid part of the blame at Dobson's feet. He knew she deserved an apology, and Dobson went to her, kneeled at her feet, and said he was sorry. "I found out much later that this was an event that marked her for the rest of her life," he said. "I didn't do it to mark her for the rest of her life; I did it because it was the right thing to do. I did it so that I could live my life without regret."
Dobson had intended to call Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, but he received a call from the radio host first. It is a generous anecdote that reveals a softer side of James Dobson. He had called to say he had been praying for Ed. When Ed asked for forgiveness, James asked the same from Ed. "Those few moments on the phone were incredibly liberating for me," Dobson writes.

Any serious illness will require a person to give up aspects of his life that were once considered essential. For the terminally ill, this giving up is a permanent and painful choice. Dobson shows his readers how he confronted the need to give up his lifelong role as a speaker. Whether speaking on television or preaching in the pulpit, Dobson's voice has been his life. But ALS destroys the muscles that control speech as well.

During one service after his diagnosis, Dobson spoke on giving. The offering plates had just been passed, and Dobson asked for one. He said we shouldn't just put a few of our possessions in the plate, but rather ourselves. Dobson delivered the rest of his sermon while standing in an offering plate.

In the hallway after the service, Dobson asked himself, "What am I holding back from the offering plate? ... I realized that my speaking and preaching should be in the offering plate." Dobson prayed, "I am now surrendering my speaking and preaching to You. I'm putting it in the offering plate. If the day comes when I can no longer speak or preach, I want You to know that it's okay with me."

An answer to death

I've had the opportunity to speak to a number of people who have been personally diagnosed with a terminal illness, or have known a family member who was similarly diagnosed. They're often surprised that dying today is only rarely a quick process. Most people die slowly over months and years. This is an experience that shakes their faith.

For anyone who needs to hear Christianity's coherent answer to the problem of facing one's death, or who needs a dissenter from popular narratives of near death experiences, Seeing Through the Fog is an excellent place to start. It is by no means the sum of the breadth of Christian teaching on dying well, but many readers may need to go no further than this book. The Ed's Story videos, which have received a good deal of media coverage, offer much of the same advice in a powerful, personal, and deeply touching way. I was disappointed that Seeing Through the Fog didn't evoke as powerful a response in me that the videos do.

Dobson's advice is soaked in Scripture, befitting a pastor who teaches from the Word. His generous spirit hasn't produced an upbeat book. He is brutally honest about the process of learning to die. His writing is at times stilted, suggesting the fact that he can no longer type but talks his writing using voice recognition software. Yet he writes with hope and joy of a deeper walk with Jesus.

Today, Christian's don't talk about death, but about near-death experiences seen to offer a kind of magical proof of the good life to come. For those Christians who, seeing today's bestsellers, wonder if Christianity has a coherent answer to suffering and death, Ed Dobson offers one. A faithful dissenter, Dobson offers real hope, meaning in the midst of suffering, the expectation of Jesus in the life to come, and ongoing transformation that brings us closer to him today.


Rob Moll is a CT editor at large and author of The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come (InterVarsity Press).

Editor's note: Some readers of an earlier version of this article thought it stated TonyKriz holds a negative view of evangelicals' commitment to environmental stewardship. We have edited the article to make clearer that the quote at the beginning of the review was given to Kriz by an interview subject.




continue to past articles







Thursday, February 7, 2013

Informational Resource: "Information is Beautiful"

 
 
 
 
HERE'S A GREAT VISUAL RESOURCE
 
~ samples below, web link above ~

Out of the Archives: Perriman & Mobsby on Emergent Theology

What (again) is an emerging theology?
 
by Andrew Perriman
Posted 5 July, 2006
 
The whole idea of an ‘emerging theology’ is nebulous, which is probably unavoidable and probably a good thing. But every now and again I feel the need to sketch some boundaries, contours, intentions, commitments - if only to help us keep in view the stated purpose of this site, which is to ‘assist the development of a transparent, community-driven theology for the “emerging church”’. There have been good discussions along these lines in the past: ‘Outline of an emerging theology’, ‘What is the relationship between emerging and evangelical theologies?’, ‘The marks of a renewed theology’. This is simply another personal attempt to give some definition to the phrase ‘emerging theology’.
 
So here, very briefly stated, are what I feel to be some of the leading characteristics of an emerging theology. It reflects my biases and blindspots. If people want to suggest additions or corrections, I would be happy to take them into account and republish the list as a more collective statement.
 
1. A theology for a community that is in self-conscious continuity with the biblical people of God and the calling of Abraham to be blessed and be a blessing to the nations of the world.
 
2. A theology done under the lordship of Christ.
 
3. A theology that gives priority to narrative in order both to define its core and to contextualize the content of biblical teaching.
 
4. A theology that seeks to understand the intimate relationship between text and historical narrative.
 
5. A theology that at its heart is a reading of scripture.
 
6. A theology that as a matter of methodological commitment celebrates, reinforces, and exploits community: an emerging theology is strongly relational, conversational, interactive.
 
7. A theology that is strongly aware of, and responsive to, the locality in which these conversations take place.
 
8. A theology that attempts to resist certain distortions of modernism.
 
9. A theology that is broadly  - but not slavishly - postmodern in its epistemology, wary of absolute formulations, tolerant of diversity and plurality, sensitive to the social manipulation of texts.
 
10. A theology that places a high value on intellectual and critical integrity - ‘integrity’ being, I think, the ‘postmodern’ word in that sentence.
 
11. A theology committed to the renewal of its own discourse, understood not only as speech but as the whole spectrum of means (artistic, communal, activist) by which we communicate.
 
12. A theology that fosters an open, inquisitive, probing mindset.
 
13. A theology that endeavours to integrate rather than dissociate modes of thought, analysis, and practice, that draws on the mind of the whole community of faith.
 
14. A generous theology that is inclined to discover meaning and truth outside of itself.
 
15. A theology with an eschatological orientation towards the renewal of creation - humanity within a comprehensive ecology; therefore a public rather than a private theology. 
 


 
* * * * * * * * * * * *
 
 


Ian Mobsby [Moot : London, UK]
 
Is there a distinctive approach to theologising for the emerging church?
 
[October 2005]
 
For too long the emerging church has been viewed by some as a trendy shop front to more traditional forms of church. We too have been guilty of putting the emphasis on being ‘cool’, providing slick services and using the best movie clips and multimedia environments. The danger is that some think that there is little depth or substance to what we are doing. This article aims to introduce some evidence of some of the thinking in fresh and emerging expressions of church coming out of my as yet uncompleted MA research dissertation entitled “Fresh and emerging expressions of church: how are they being church and Anglican?”
 
Whilst the traditional church continues to battle between the conservatives and the liberals, and between the catholics and the evangelicals, the emerging church has been emphasising the need for right engagement in context – or what has been called orthopraxis (right action) rather than orthodoxy (right thinking). It has avoided getting involved in this tennis match over orthodoxy. The emerging church has been focusing on ‘doing’ church in a post modern context, which is all about being and doing church in our liquid modern times, which has created a new context of a culture of the spiritually restless and spiritual searching, or the openness of many to be spiritual tourists. Many emerging churches, have sought to draw on the best of the old and reframe it for our current post-modern context, in what has been called ‘an ancient-future’. But what does this have to do with theology?
 
Well, I am arguing that the emerging church has been creating a significantly new approach to doing contextual theology, which is about living out being Christian and church in a post modern culture. Contextual theology has been defined as:
 
A way of doing theology in which one takes into account: the spirit and message
of the gospel; the tradition of the Christian people; the culture in which one
is theologising; and social change in that culture.
 
Traditionally, there is a continuum in the Church roughly defined at one end as being ‘conservative evangelical’ and at the other, ‘catholic’ which take very different views of how you do contextual theology, see chart 1 where I want to build a bit of a typology. Yes this will hold over-generalisations, but I think in essence, the following analysis stands.
 
Conservative Evangelical
v
Catholic
Redemptive theology
Incarnational theology
High regard towards God and Scriptures
Low regard towards God & Scriptures
Low regard toward Human Culture
High regard towards Human Culture




 
So to summarise, for sometime now, the Church has been largely divided into two outlooks. Evangelical and Catholic. Evangelicals have stressed personal salvation, and the need for God-centredness and personal piety, but have paid very little regard to social, economic or ecological injustice, or the sense of God’s presence in human culture and the world. This has resulted in a neglect of what is good in human nature, or the sense of God’s involvement in the world. Strong on sin and repentance, low on grace. So when thinking about the significance of Jesus (both man and God), the emphasis is on Jesus as God and his ministry regarding repentance and redemption.
 
At the other end of the continuum, is a Catholic and incarnational theology, which focuses more on the significance of Christ as a human being and the love of God. Focus of this approach is on God’s love and the call for social, ecological and economic justice not just for salvation, but for here and now. This approach therefore neglects the significance of Christ as God, and in having a high regard to the scriptures.
 
These two approaches have been battling it out for sometime, believing that one was right and the other was wrong, which has split the church catholic and protestant for centuries.
 
So what has this got to do with the emerging church? Well to start with, the emerging church tries to hold to the tension of having a high regard towards God and the scriptures AND having a high regard towards culture and being human. In other words, it is trying to hold onto a ‘both and’ scenario, on holding both an incarnational and redemptive theology simultaneously.
 
Why, because it attempts to hold onto the best of all traditions, and live with the tension and inconsistencies of this position. Why – because in the above analysis of the significance of Jesus, we have to live with the tension of Jesus being fully human and fully God. From the beginning, the Church had to live with this synthetic approach or fuzzy thinking, which it seemed to jettison in modernity, only to be refound in postmodernity.
 
So the Emerging Church, does have a distinctively new, or can I say old theological approach to what it does, modelled on a synthetic model of doing contextual theology. This model attempts to listen to culture for basic patterns and structures, analyzing culture in order to discover its basic system of symbols. Out of such a “thick description” will emerge basic themes for the local theology. At the same time, however, these themes need to be in dialogue with the basic themes in gospel and tradition, which has a mutually transforming effect. This form of emerging contextual theology, holds to a sense of “ancient future” faith worked out with a synthetic model of contextual theology.
 
So going back to the chart, the emerging church attempts to position itself at the ‘V’ point on the continuum in its attempt to ‘both and’.
 
So why is this signficiant. Well firstly, because it opens up the possibilities to significant encultured approaches to being a ‘missionary church’. To my own shock, I found a book dating back to the 1970’s that summarised a vision for the ‘Emerging Church’ which resonates with this position and outlook, and therefore I will state it in full.
 
Larson & Osborne themes (1970!)
 
Rediscovering contextual & experimental mission in the western church.
 
1 - Forms of church that are not restrained by institutional expectations. Open to change and God wanting to do a new thing.
 
2 - Use of the key word…”and”. Whereas the heady polarities of our day seek to divide us into an either-or camp, the mark of the emerging Church will be its emphasis on both-and. For generations we have divided ourselves into camps: Protestants and Catholics, high church and low, clergy and laity, social activists and personal piety, liberals and conservatives, sacred and secular, instructional and underground.
 
3 - It will bring together the most helpful of the old and the best of the new, blending the dynamic of a personal Gospel with the compassion of social concern. It will find its ministry being expressed by a whole people, wherein the distinction between clergy and laity will be that of function, not of status or hierarchical division.
 
4 - In the emerging Church, due emphasis will be placed on both theological rootage and contemporary experience, on celebration in worship and involvement in social concerns, on faith and feeling, reason and prayer, conversion and continuity, the personal and the conceptual.
 
5 - In this way, the emerging church has a distinctive approach to theology to aid it as it engages in a world and culture, which is complex, multifaceted and fluid. So there is depth and substance to what is going on…..
 
For further info on this subject and the significance of the emerging church, watch out for my research dissertation, which I hope to release in book form next year.
 
Ian Mobsby is an ordained NSM Anglican priest licensed to work with the Moot Community, an Anglican Church of England Fresh Expression of Church Project in Westminster, Central London. Ian is completing a research dissertation for the award of an MA in Pastoral Theology at Cambridge. Moot can be found at www.moot.uk.net and www.mootblog.net
 
 
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What is 'emerging church'?
 
by Andrew Perriman
Posted 22 November, 2003
 
The phrase ‘emerging church’ will undoubtedly mean different things to different people and I will only offer a tentative definition here, chiefly for the benefit of those to whom it means next to nothing. If you disagree with the points made, by all means add your views below.
 
1. Emerging church is certainly a reaction against the forms of evangelicalism that have flourished in the West over the last fifty years or so – hence the popularity of the term ‘post-evangelical. People have reacted in different ways: there has been a range of experiments in alternative forms of worship; groups have decamped from traditional church premises into public venues such as bars, cafés and leisure centres; and many Christians have simply opted out of organized church altogether (see the review of Alan Jamieson’s book A Churchless Faith).
 
2. This reaction has been driven largely, I think, by dissatisfaction with evangelical church culture at various levels – a dissatisfaction that has often been explained in terms of a perceived shift in the wider culture from modernism to postmodernism: from objectivism to relativism, from certainty to doubt, from singularity to plurality, from Story to stories. Emerging church is an attempt to replot Christian faith on this new cultural and intellectual terrain.
 
3. Emerging church is beginning to acquire the coherence of a ‘movement’, but it probably cannot yet be said to have a strong sense of its own identity and certain tensions are apparent. There has been tension, for example, between an inward and an outward dynamic: for some the motivation has been the desire to find more congenial modes of worship and community, whereas others have been attracted by the missional potential of an escape from the cultural dead-end of evangelicalism. There has been a further tension between new ways of doing and new ways of being: do we just do congregational life differently or should we abandon structured religious life altogether in favour of simply being followers of Jesus in the world?
 
4. Emerging church is characteristically postmodern in its suspicion of the controlling structures of religious life and thought: church hierarchy, dominant cultural forms, doctrinal formulations, and so on. So the life and practice of emerging church are marked by a resistance to these structures, but also by a desire to develop positive alternatives. There has been a good discussion thread on this site, for example, about the nature of ‘emerging authority’.
 
5. Considerable emphasis is placed on relational paradigms as the basis for all forms of Christian activity. In many instances this has encouraged a shift away from ‘concentric’ or ‘solid’ towards decentred or ‘liquid’ expressions of community (see, for example, the review of Pete Ward’s Liquid Church). This has also led, inevitably, to a blurring of boundaries, both between church traditions and between believers and non-believers. Emerging church is more willing to be ‘inclusive’ (the word obviously needs definition), less concerned with defining and safeguarding the boundaries of membership, than ‘modern’ forms of evangelicalism.
 
6. In place of what is perceived as the rather narrow agenda of mainstream evangelicalism, emerging church is looking to develop a more holistic spirituality and to pursue a wider engagement in the public sphere. So, on the one hand, we see a willingness to explore different patterns of Christian life and to draw upon a broader spectrum of religious traditions – Celtic Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, have had a strong appeal. On the other, we see a new social activism that is both critical and creative: mission is understood to encompass a much wider set of activities than just evangelism.