Quotes & Sayings


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, June 16, 2017

Readings on the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther


Martin Luther before the Courts








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Martin Luther’s Burning Questions
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/08/martin-luthers-burning-questions/

by Ingrid D. Rowland
June 8, 2017

Reading Suggestions

Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation
an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, October 30, 2016–January 15, 2017
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Anne-Simone Rous, Katrin Herbst, Ralf Kluttig-Altmann, and others
Dresden: Sandstein, two volumes, 998 pp., $69.96

Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation
an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, October 7, 2016–January 22, 2017

Law and Grace: Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach, and the Promise of Salvation
an exhibition at the Pitts Theology Library, Atlanta, October 11, 2016–January 16, 2017

an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 20, 2016–March 26, 2017
Catalog of the exhibition by Jeffrey Chipps Smith and others
Prestel, 239 pp., $49.95

by Lyndal Roper
Random House, 540 pp., $40.00

by Andrew Pettegree
Penguin, 383 pp., $29.95; $18.00 (paper)

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Klassik Stiftung Weimar
'Martin Luther as Junker Jörg,' the name under which
Luther  went into hiding in 1521 | woodcut by
Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1521–1522

On All Hallow’s Eve of 1517, Martin Luther, Augustinian friar and professor of theology, posted a broadsheet on the faculty bulletin board of tiny, provincial Wittenberg University in the German state of Saxony (which happened to be the door of the church attached to the local lord’s castle). The poster was no Halloween prank; it proclaimed, according to academic custom, his willingness to debate a series of propositions in public. Although he also sent copies of the same broadsheet to important statesmen, churchmen, and academics outside Wittenberg, no one seems to have taken up his challenge to a formal discussion. His propositions were too explosive for that; in blunt, forceful language, they questioned the basic beliefs of the church to which, as a Hermit of Saint Augustine, he had vowed his obedience.

Luther would say that his life’s turning point came two years later, when he had a sudden revelation about the nature of Christian salvation. For his contemporaries, however, the posting of his ninety-five theses in 1517 set off the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation, and the Reformation in turn marked a fundamental stage in the forging of a collective German identity. To mark the event’s five hundredth anniversary, the Federal Republic of Germany has sponsored a series of Luther celebrations at home and abroad, which began in the fall of 2016 and continue throughout 2017. They include an ambitious series of Luther-themed exhibitions in the United States: major shows in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, with smaller versions of the Minneapolis extravaganza in New York and Atlanta, all providing a fresh, insightful view into Luther’s life and times and the vast, unpredictable forces his rebellion unleashed.

The exhibition catalogs—two impressive five-hundred-page volumes shared by Minneapolis, New York, and Atlanta, and a separate work for Los Angeles—cover a vast range of topics: Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Martin Luther’s latrine, Lutherans in North America, Luther in Communist East Germany, the unintended consequences of the Reformation. The intensity of their focus is relieved by clever, colorful charts and a bountiful complement of illustrations. It is impossible, given our own recent past, to ponder the Reformation without also pondering its darker legacy of religious warfare, anti-Semitism, and lingering mistrust between Catholics and Protestants, German East and German West; and these are issues the catalogs face head-on.

Yet what drove the friar and his contemporaries to their drastic actions were ideas of transcendent beauty, including the profound inner music behind the cadences of Luther’s oratory and the stirring hymns that set his spiritual armies on the march. To understand this complicated, superbly talented man, and to make the most of the Luther exhibitions, it helps to have a good biography on hand, and Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet provides expert and spirited guidance. So, in a more specialized way, does Andrew Pettegree’s Brand Luther, a fascinating study of Luther’s pioneering relationship with the printing press that is especially helpful for understanding these exhibitions dedicated in large measure to books and other mass-produced printed works.

The Protestant Reformation took hold where it did and when it did for a variety of reasons, beginning with the blazing personality of Martin Luther himself. Strictly speaking, he was not a monk, though he is often described as one: he was a preaching friar who belonged to the largest Catholic religious order of his day, the Hermits of Saint Augustine. Rather than spending their time, as monks did, in secluded prayer in a monastery, the Augustinians lived in cities and moved from place to place. They trained to communicate the Christian message in what for the time was a revolutionary new style: borrowing techniques from the orators of classical antiquity and from contemporary preachers who gave sermons in colloquial languages rather than Latin, they appealed openly to the emotions of their hearers.

Friar Martin focused his ire (and most of the ninety-five theses) on one particular practice of the institutional church: the sale of indulgences. These papal dispensations, confirmed by paper certificates, grew out of a traditional medieval conviction that prayer, repentance, good works, and pilgrimage could atone in some measure for sin. It was even possible to do penance for someone else, as Luther did during his stay in Rome, kneeling on the steps of the Holy Stairs at Saint John Lateran to earn an indulgence for his grandfather. Giving alms or endowing a church could also earn remission from sins, reducing the amount of time a person would need to spend after death in the uncomfortable realm of Purgatory, where, in late medieval Christian belief, human souls were gradually cleansed of their iniquities until they were pure enough to enter the Earthly Paradise, there to await final admission to Heaven on Judgment Day. By the late fifteenth century, however, remission from sins could simply be purchased from a papal agent, for oneself or for another person, whether alive or deceased.

The sale of indulgences became an industry only in Luther’s own lifetime and in his own lands, put into place by the “warrior Pope” Julius II and the Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger. After 1506, pope and banker directed the revenue from German indulgences toward the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s in Rome. “Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation,” a monumental exhibition that took inspired advantage of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s spacious galleries, and “Word and Image: Martin Luther’s Reformation,” a scaled-down version of the Minneapolis show tailored to the intimate spaces of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, displayed specially-made “indulgence chests,” iron-bound coffers with handy coin slots, the equivalent of immense, armor-plated piggy banks.

These heavy wooden boxes with their multiple locks demonstrate the extent to which the German states were exporting huge quantities of metal to Rome and receiving printed slips of paper in return, exchanging material wealth for the equivalent of checks that drew on the currency of heaven rather than earth. Jakob Fugger took a 3 percent cut—in coins, not release from Purgatory—on every shipment south. Is it any wonder that the man who finally pulled the plug on this improbable trade knew a thing or two himself about the value of metal?

In later life, in one of his famous dinner-table conversations, Martin Luther claimed to come from modest origins, and indeed his father, Hans Luder, ended his life in financial trouble. But in 1483, when Martin came into the world, the Luders were a prosperous family of copper smelters living in the foothills of the ore-rich Harz Mountains. Archaeological remains excavated from the family compound in Mansfeld, where Martin spent his childhood, tell a tale of affluence.

The exhibitions in Minneapolis and New York included fine glassware among the beer steins, as well as gold sequins and other ornaments from the Luder girls’ dresses, buried, perhaps, when plague struck the city in 1505 and killed two of the Luder boys. Dorothea Luder, Martin’s sister, had to sacrifice a monogrammed gold buckle along with her belt for fear of contagion. The family’s rubbish pit also yielded copper slag and an abundance of pig and goose bones, further signs of the household’s prosperity. Hand-rolled clay marbles may have been Martin’s own, along with bowling pins made of knucklebones with a metal weight sunk into one end.

To a remarkable extent, as these exhibitions reveal, Luther’s world, and Luther’s Reformation, revolved around metal. The silver, copper, lead, and iron mined from the Harz Mountains and smelted in small-scale factories like Hans Luder’s copper works took up only a corner of an international market in which Jakob Fugger was one of the most aggressive participants. Fugger may have been shipping coins by the cofferful to the pope in Rome, but metal was also flowing into his own treasury from his silver and copper mines in Tyrol and Bohemia.

Almost every aspect of these impressive exhibitions intersected with metal somewhere. Friar Martin, for instance, probably stuck his theses to the Castle Church door using glue or wax rather than expending precious metal to nail them. German expertise with metallurgy was so renowned in Renaissance Europe that Italian jewelers sought technical advice from their German colleagues.

At the same time, German artists absorbed lessons in style from Italians, so that Hans Reinhardt and Wenzel Jamnitzer became as internationally renowned for their gold- and silversmithing in the early sixteenth century as Albrecht Dürer was for his copperplate engraving, all three of them joining incomparable German craftsmanship to Italian-inspired flair. The metal typefaces that broadcast the arguments of Reformers and Roman traditionalists back and forth across Europe originated among German metalworkers, and so did the glittering weapons and guns that would soon be carrying out the butchery of new and vicious religious wars. The first treatise on metallurgy was written by an Italian, Vannoccio Biringuccio, but he gained his experience with lead and silver at the Fugger mines in Tyrol.

And metals, of course, meant money. Between 1508 and 1524, Fugger’s firm not only managed the business of indulgences for the German states, but also struck the coins produced by the papal mint in Rome, as Luther may well have learned (or known already) when he visited that city in the winter of 1510–1511. He certainly focused on money in his forty-fifth thesis:

Christians are to be taught that he who sees a needy man and passes him by, yet gives his money for indulgences, does not buy papal indulgences but God’s wrath.

And his forty-eighth:

Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting indulgences, needs and thus desires their devout prayer more than their money.

And his fiftieth:

Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence preachers, he would rather that the basilica of Saint Peter were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.

On an epic scale in Minneapolis, an expansive scale in Los Angeles, and an intimate scale in New York (I was unable to see the exhibition in Atlanta), the aesthetic refinement and technical mastery of German metalwork stood out in all its dazzling virtuosity. Hans Reinhardt’s intricately layered, delicately textured medal depicting the Holy Trinity is probably the most complex example ever created of this popular Renaissance art form. Albrecht Dürer’s triumphant series of engravings from the first decade of the sixteenth century—The Knight, Death and the Devil, Melencolia I, and Saint Jerome in His Study—use black lines on white paper to suggest every possible nuance of light and shadow, along with the dense fur of Saint Jerome’s contented lion, the loose, mangy skin on the ribs of Death’s skinny horse, sunbeams streaming through the glass panes of Saint Jerome’s window, and the ambiguous sunrise in the distance beyond a dark-complexioned Melancholy (Greek for “black bile”). Los Angeles displayed an opulent casket by the Jamnitzer workshop, an enormous piece of jewelry in itself: enameled, engraved, studded with saucy sphinxes and tiny lions, gleaming in silver, gold, and royal blue, with pull-out drawers.

German artists excelled in other media as well. Los Angeles displayed two wooden sculptures by Tilman Riemenschneider of Würzburg: a tender Virgin Mary and a Saint Matthew whose sensitive hands make one wonder what the sculptor’s own must have looked like. (The story that Riemenschneider’s hands were broken by Lutheran iconoclasts is a nineteenth-century myth, one of many vicious rumors spun by both sides of the Reformation.) Priestly vestments of wool and damask (a mixture of wool and silk) hung in elegant folds in New York and especially Minneapolis, embroidered in wool, silk, and metallic wire of silver and gold. Minneapolis and Los Angeles displayed whole suits of armor, the wasp-waisted corrugated panoply of Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt-Köthen standing out among breastplates forged to accommodate multiple chins and beer bellies.

What drove Friar Martin to post his theses, however, was a spiritual insight, a realization so overwhelming that it prompted him to alter his name from Martin Luder to Martinus Eleutherius—“Martin the Free.”*

*Because “Luder,” the family name, could mean “loose woman,” the ninety-five theses already spell Friar Martin’s name as “Lutther.” When, after a few months, Martinus Eleutherius reverted to a more normal name, it was to our familiar “Luther.”

The Christian hope for eternal life, he had come to believe, was a divine gift that no human being, no matter how virtuous, could ever deserve—there was no penance for sin that could truly merit divine indulgence. Salvation, therefore, was not a reward, but an outright gift from God, bestowed out of the sheer abundance of his love for his creation.

For years Friar Martin had chafed at the idea of a judgmental God who lay in wait to punish sinners. But now a phrase that had always irked him, “the righteousness of God,” struck, as he would later say, “like a thunderbolt”:

It is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteous [person] lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel…with which the merciful God justifies us by faith…. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me.

His thirty-seventh thesis asserted:

Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.

He posted his theses, as the broadsheet declared, “Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it.”

Luther’s message swiftly found followers, especially in the German states: on the spiritual level with his doctrine of justification by faith, and on the practical level with his attack on the alliance between religion and capitalism that had turned remission of sins into a commercial enterprise. He survived the religious and political firestorm he ignited not only because of his courage and eloquence, phenomenal though they were, but also because the local sovereign, Elector Frederick III of Saxony, decided to side with his renegade friar rather than his bishop. Nicknamed “the Wise,” Frederick was as shrewd as he was pious. Over the years he had amassed a staggering number of saints’ relics, some 18,970 by 1520, which he displayed once a year in Wittenberg Castle, each one lovingly installed in an opulent, beautifully wrought metal reliquary (several of which were on view in Minneapolis).

Pilgrims flocked to see the collection and left their offerings of coins and valuables, ensuring that metal continued to flow into Wittenberg rather than Rome, and keeping Frederick free, unlike his bishop (and his nominal liege lord, the Holy Roman Emperor), of colossal debts to Fugger. Frederick the Wise never entirely sided with Luther’s revolution (he remained Catholic), but neither did he oppose it. And at one crucial juncture in 1521, he saved Luther’s life by hiding him away in Wartburg Castle disguised as a bourgeois layman named “Junker Jörg.”

Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
Lucas Cranach the Younger: Double Portrait of Martin Luther
and Philip Melanchthon, sixteenth century

Luther’s bishop, Albert of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, was one of his first and most powerful detractors. Albert received one of the first copies of the ninety-five theses and reported on them to Pope Leo X. The archbishop had good reason to worry: he was responsible for the sale of indulgences in his metal-rich diocese, and he was hopelessly in debt to Jakob Fugger, who had financed his campaign for office. The pope, duly informed, summoned Friar Martin to Rome to answer for his actions, but it was soon clear that the renegade had no intention of playing into the pontiff’s hands.

Eventually an interview was arranged in Augsburg in 1518, in conjunction with the meeting of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, the very German statesmen who faced the spreading religious rebellion among their citizens. From the papal point of view, Cardinal Tommaso de Vio da Gaeta (usually known as Cajetan, “the Gaetan”) must have seemed like the ideal man for the job: the former head of the Dominican order and one of the most influential prelates of his era, he was also a trained inquisitor under instructions to make Luther recant or to arrest him and drag him back to Rome.

The meeting between the friar and the cardinal took place in Fugger’s Augsburg house. Cajetan was a master of Scholastic reasoning, the elaborate medieval system of theology, thought, and rhetoric that had developed with the first universities—the very system that new universities like Wittenberg and orders like Luther’s Augustinians were dedicated to overthrowing for new kinds of inquiry and expression. Luther hated Scholasticism and its pedantry at least as passionately as he hated the mixing of religion and business, and few people have ever hated with Luther’s white-hot intensity. Gaunt, ailing, and urgently aware that he might be risking a death sentence, he stood his ground against the cardinal, who lectured him about a few of the theses and let him leave Fugger’s house untouched. The cardinal realized that it was too late for an arrest to solve the problem. Luther already represented a movement. He was not an isolated heretic who could be whisked away in secret.

If he had written little before, now Luther went into overdrive, proclaiming his theology in torrents of prose and poetry in both Latin and German, and spreading his ideas as widely as the printing press could reach. He forged two indispensable partnerships, one with his colleague Philipp Melanchthon, the professor of Greek at Wittenberg, and one with Elector Frederick’s court painter, Lucas Cranach. Melanchthon gave the burgeoning movement its intellectual rigor, and Cranach, together with Luther, turned tiny, remote Wittenberg into a center for publishing; his own workshop became the crucible of Lutheran art.

Cranach already managed a sizable enterprise from his house in the center of Wittenberg, producing portraits, altarpieces, allegories, and history paintings for private patrons as well as for Elector Frederick and his family. His state portraits show that Luther was supported throughout his life by a series of imposingly large men: Frederick the Wise, his brother and successor John, and John’s son John Frederick, whose wife, the slender, cat-eyed Sibylle of Cleves, captivated Cranach. One portrait displayed at the Morgan Library shows the veins beneath her porcelain skin; in another painting, of a hunting expedition that never happened, Sibylle, in her pearl-studded dress, shoots off a massive arquebus with the aplomb of a Renaissance Annie Oakley.

As the Reformation took hold, Cranach continued to work for Catholic patrons as well as Lutherans, but his efforts for Luther were inspired and revolutionary. Quickly the painter and the friar devised a standard format for their publications: quarto books (the size of a large modern paperback) with titles in crisp Gothic letters above a large woodcut image from the Cranach studio, tailored to the new Lutheran vision of heaven and earth. (One popular theme was the contrast between life under the old law and life under the rule of grace, where the old law is both Jewish and Catholic.) Even before Luther’s impassioned words could sink in for readers of his tracts, the black-on-white clarity of their visual presentation already cut as sharply as a sword.

At the same time, Cranach worked on the image of Luther himself. His first portraits of the Reformer show a thin, clean-shaven friar with hollow cheeks, an Augustinian tonsure, a sunburst behind his head, and a look of blazing concentration. As the years go on, he grows in bulk and authority, culminating in the deathbed portrait of a man finally at peace.

Satires, cartoons, and broadsheets followed closely on the stream of tracts and Luther’s translation of the Bible for the first time into German (illustrated by Cranach), with the Protestants almost always striking a clever blow one step ahead of their adversaries. There was nothing refined about Martin Luther’s sense of humor; if he called the world a sewer (cloaca) in Latin, in German he called it (and many of its phenomena) a pile of shit. Freed from his Augustinian vows (which had never included poverty), he continued to live in the same convent in a bachelor’s chaos until 1525, when he married the runaway nun Katharina von Bora.

Luther soon discovered the range of his wife’s talents: she cleaned up the sprawling house, brewed excellent beer, set up a pig farm and a hospital, entertained a host of students at dinner, bore him six children, and cared for four orphan children besides. Archaeological excavations of the Luther household reveal glassware from Venice, broken beer steins, and an abundance of pig bones. For his part, Cranach developed an image of Martin and Katharina as the ideal Christian couple through a new series of portraits, small enough for faithful Lutherans to keep at home, complemented by huge, less expensive, paper images of Luther and Melanchthon that could be posted on walls, presenting both the portly Reformer and the weedy professor as Titans.

Roper’s biography and the exhibition catalogs squarely confront the legacy of Luther’s searing hatred, of Jews especially, but also of papists, Calvinists, and anyone else who failed to see the truth as he did. But what these impressive exhibitions show most of all is an inspired man with an earnest mission in a complex world of money and alchemy, sublime art and music, and burning questions about how faith should fit into a society that had burst its immemorial boundaries.


Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Catherine Keller - Parenting & the Uncontrolling God


Catherine Keller on the Uncontrolling God
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/catherine-keller-uncontrolling-god

Guest Post by Catherine Keller
November 15th, 2016

A friend describes a process she learned as a mother: “I never did try to control my kids, there were too many of them to do that. I had three children in two years, and it became very clear early on (such as day one), that control was not possible. Instead of getting in their way and trying to run their play, I had to arrive at some other mode of being with them as they are.”

So she invited friends over for them to play with, and chaos mounted. But this is what she observed: “If I were willing and able to let the four or five very young children jostle, master round, explore for about 45 minutes-with the ground rules of not hurting each other or the home-if I just let them go through whatever procedures they needed to go through, they would come up with something that they loved to do together. They would arrive at some game, project, make-believe… That would keep them positively, joyfully engaged for up to three hours. All of them.”

This is a humble parable of creation from chaos. It illustrates uncontrolling love.

Parents and all who relate in love have to “let be.” So do good teachers, pastors, and leaders. As Elohim italicized “Let be” the light? John McQuarrie defines “letting be” as something much more positive than just leaving alone: “as enabling to be, empowering to be, or bringing into being.” Thus our experience of “letting be” may serve as an analogy of “the ultimate letting-be.”

Love does not control. It opens up the space of becoming. The space is not without protective boundaries, not without rules.

The healthy parent is not merely permissive, but constantly teaching ideals of fairness, cooperation, and creative development. This space comprises neither rampant disorder nor imposed order. It opens at the edge of chaos, without plunging into the abyss. It supports the free play of relations — and satisfies desires of both parent and children. This uncontrolling care empowers the children to construct their own “complex self-organizing system.” At least temporarily!

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If I may push our parable a bit further, the desired into play is not about a private “me and my God” relation but I love open and out into a fuller sociality. “Two or more gathered in my name.” In the communality of genesis things are risky, noisy, messy. But fresh order continues to emerge from the chaos. And while its equilibria do not last forever — “love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8).

Does God just choose not to interfere with our freedom? The so-called free-will defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence tries that middle road: God permits, but does not cause evil, and so leaves us our freedom. This is close to the chilly deism Calvin railed against.

But usually those who hold this reasonable view also hold out for occasional special or miraculous interventions on God’s part. But then: Why didn’t God manipulate the vote just a bit so that Hitler would lose the election? Or, for that matter, heal my friend’s little sister’s leukemia? Or excise that bad gene in the first place? Or all bad genes?

The free-will defense only works if held consistently. But that is hard to do. To say God “permits” evil for the sake of our freedom implies that God could step in at any time, and as far as history demonstrates, just chooses not to.

The alternative to omnipotence lies in the risky interactivity of relationship. It does not toss the creatures into a deistic void, chilled but autonomous. It continues to call them forth, to inviteThe power of God, if it is response-able power, empowers the others – to respond. In their freedom.

In what sense then is the divine powerful? It can perhaps even be called all-powerful, if that language for the biblical God seems indispensable to some, in this sense: God has “all the power” that a good God, a God who fosters and delights in the goodness of the creation, could have or want to have.

But the point is that this is not the unilateral power to command things to happen out of nothing and then to control them under threat of nothingness. It is another kind of power all together, a qualitatively different power — a power that seems weak when dominance is the ideal.

The metaphor of “power perfected in weakness” tried to make comprehensible the difficult alternative to coercive force: the contagious influence that flows from a radically vulnerable strength. Two thousand years later, we have made limited collective progress in its realization. Perhaps experiments in social democracy, in which persuasion is favored over coercion, and care valued as a supreme public strength, hint at the alternative. Perhaps experiments in gender equality and nonviolent parenting are also advancing, here and there, our metaphoric reservoir.

The One who calls forth good even from the ashes of evil, a good that requires—indeed commands—but cannot coerce our cooperation. A power that makes possible our response.

---

From On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process pp. 88-90 copyright © 2007 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission. For a more complete treatment of the subject consider purchase of the book, which may be found at the following link: http://fortresspress.com/product/mystery-discerning-divinity-process

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at The Theological School of Drew University. She’s the author or editor of more than a dozen books, her latest being Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.


Saturday, June 3, 2017

Thomas Jay Oord - God Can’t Stop Evil Singlehandedly




Thomas Jay Oord - God Can’t Stop Evil Singlehandedly
May 9, 2019


IanRamseyCentre
Wed 1 May 2019, 5:00pm – 6:15pm

God Can’t Stop Evil Singlehandedly
Thomas Jay Oord

Blackfriars Main Aula, Oxford
Nearly everyone wonders why a good and powerful God doesn't prevent evil. But the usual answers are unsatisfactory. In his best-selling book, God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils, Thomas Jay Oord offers an answer to solve the problem of evil. This solution has five aspects, including a rethinking of God's relation to humans, other creatures, and all creation. Drawing from science, personal experiences, scripture, theology, and more, Oord lays out the heart of his solution in this lecture.

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. Oord is a best-selling and award-winning author, having written or edited more than twenty-five books. A twelve-time Faculty Award winning professor, Oord teaches at institutions around the globe. A gifted speaker, Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, and the implications of freedom and relationships for transformation.





Friday, June 2, 2017

Matthew Burdette - Reflections on Theological Training


article link

The presumption that theological education is for some practical end is perhaps
also related to widespread biblical illiteracy and poor catechesis. It is difficult to
prioritize teaching the Christian faith when the implicit assumption is that its
content is inconsequential. - mb

Matthew Burdette
May 15, 2017

This academic year, in preparation for ordained ministry, I have been studying at General Theological Seminary. As I anticipate ordination, I have been reflecting on my experience of formal theological education over the last thirteen years, and thinking what it will come to mean in ministry.

The purpose of theological education is not obvious. While some academic institutions and most churchly ones continue to offer ostensibly theological education, many of the Church’s members and clergy nevertheless do not acknowledge that theology has much of a purpose. A few days ago, a priest whom I had just met congratulated me for studying at GTS, which, she alleged, thankfully prepares “worker priests” rather than “scholar priests.”

In the 20th century especially, theologians were perhaps tacitly acknowledging that theology was soon to be haunted by the specter of obsolescence when so many of them dedicated so much attention to theology’s starting point and method, often spelled out in lengthy prolegomena. The only real consensus that emerged was that nothing is pre- or non- theological (including the opinion that theology is a pointless academic exercise). No matter where you start, or where you claim theology is going, or what theology is for, you are already making a theological choice — and you could reasonably have chosen otherwise. But particularly, Christian theology is not [in] such an infinite range of choices, and to choose otherwise than what the Christian faith warrants is to transgress the boundaries of what the Church is about — to commit heresy (hairesis, “choice”).

What interests me is the contested purpose of theology and theological education, in juxtaposition with the concept of heresy. The explicit language of heresy and orthodoxy need not be deployed in debates about theological education for the concepts to be fully operative. For a few decades, theological education has increasingly moved towards the “practical” and the ethical, and away from the doctrinal and the abstract. What is implicitly said is that what matters is that ministers can offer pastoral care and lead communities in improving society. In this landscape, “theological theology” — to use John Webster’s helpful and polemical slogan — is, by its very nature, outside the bounds of this orthodoxy.

A useful illustration of this dynamic is the centrality given to pastoral care, the current conception of which is a 20th-century innovation. Prior to this time, pastoral ministry was generally conceived of in moral and sacramental terms, rather than in therapeutic (and therefore medical) terms, which is currently dominant. It has become a widespread requirement for ministers of different faiths to undergo the training of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, usually in the context of hospital chaplaincy. One of the stretching and beneficial characteristics of CPE is that ministers work with ministers of other faiths, as well as offer pastoral care to people of other faiths. Beneficial as interfaith learning is, a question does loom over the whole process: If I can offer the same pastoral care to a patient as the imam, and if I think that pastoral care is at the center of ministry, then what is the significance of those doctrinal matters that separate me from the imam?

The question is a serious one, and my own suspicion is that there is a correlation between the pervasive focus on this model of pastoral care and the implicit Unitarianism espoused by many clergy in mainline Protestantism. The same question emerges from the focus on social justice. When a parish’s or cleric’s social vision is indistinguishable from a party platform, and when the Church’s message is said to find its telos in that social vision, one must wonder why anyone should bother with the religious baggage. Again and more pointedly: When pastoral care or social action are assumed to be the goal of theological education, then the particular matters of doctrine that are the content of the Christian faith become irrelevant and distracting; focusing on them deters from what theology or ministry is allegedly about.

I do not intend to say that pastoral care or ecclesial social action do not matter. Of course they do. The question is how they matter. When such things become the very goals of ministry, such that theology is in the service of these goals, what we face is, by the actual norms set out in the Church’s tradition, operant — if not espoused — heresy. In other words, if every Church practice conveys a certain implicit or operant theology, then surely certain modes of practice imply a heretical theology. Theology as a means to some other practical end necessarily puts the Creator in the service of creatures, and treats creation as a self-existing and self-justifying project, rather than, with Christian orthodoxy, conveying the creation’s obligation to utter dependence on God. Nor is this a theologically conservative observation. For a somewhat random example, Paul Tillich’s work represents exemplary liberal theology, committedly interested in matters of justice; yet even for the politically-radical Tillich, politics was not of ultimate concern, because the polis is not that which concerns us ultimately. (Tillich might be accused of other heresies, of course.)

The presumption that theological education is for some practical end is perhaps also related to widespread biblical illiteracy and poor catechesis. It is difficult to prioritize teaching the Christian faith when the implicit assumption is that its content is inconsequential.

As I anticipate life in ministry, I consider these things in the awareness that my theological education, which was largely philosophical and doctrinal, sets me up in some ways as a “heretic” of the ecclesial culture in which I will work. In my limited experience serving in parishes, I have found that the Church’s members desperately crave to learn the faith, even when it is abstract and not obviously applicable to their lives. The Christian faith claims to introduce them to the true God, their Creator and their End. The knowledge of him is its own end, which cannot be wielded for some other purpose.

Theological educators and those who administrate theological education ought to deal seriously and explicitly with this dissonance between “theological theology” and the culture of ministry, with its implicit theological assumptions. Either the theology - or the culture - ought to be identified with orthodoxy, the other as heresy.

- mb

Recommended Book Reads




What does an open, process-driven theology mean? Especially in the expression of a God who is timeless when He may be more earth-bound than we lend credence too? And if so, where then can this "earthy" God be found if not everywhere abounding? Was He intimately involved with the creation of mankind? And if so, how is it then when the science of evolution persuades us otherwise? Or is God the God of evolution who put its processes into place and "pronounced it good"?

Must a moribund Christianity always be moribund or can we look at God and the bible through the lens of the 21st Century to discover what we thought we knew may not be fully true, or not true at all? And if so, whose fault does it lie with? God or His many interpreters "looking through a glass darkly" dispelling fictions with facts, half-truths with cultural biases, or with a studied ignorance that does not enlighten?

If the theology of God has died in this past century than the fault lies with the guardians of its faith refusing to allow it to react and counter-react to postmodern discussion. The apostles of apology who give a defense of their faith do to that faith a great disservice when refusing to listen to the contemporary theologies providing more relevant fundamental orthodoxies unperceived by the Ancients, the Greeks, Medievals, and Modern day saints.

Theology must challenge as much as console, stand up to the vagaries of human sentiment and politics, and redirect our attention to the very God who is our life, breath, redeemer, and guide. And so we must read challenging theologies because they must challenge in order to break down old line thinking that is no longer orthodox or helpful.

To be missional is to be relevant. And to be relevant is to be willing to be challenged in past cherished beliefs and faiths. Jesus' theology did just this and if we are to be prophets of God than we must learn how to speak the old truths with the new, the new turths with the old, in ways that are beneficial, liberating, and gracious.

R.E. Slater
June 2, 2017

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The End of the Timeless God

Amazon Link
The claim that God is timeless has been the majority view throughout church history. However, it is not obvious that divine timelessness is compatible with fundamental Christian doctrines such as creation and incarnation. Theologians have long been aware of the conflict between divine timelessness and Christian doctrine, and various solutions to these conflicts have been developed. In contemporary thought, it is widely agreed that new theories on the nature of time can further help solve these conflicts. Do these solutions actually solve the conflict? Can the Christian God be timeless? The End of the Timeless God sets forth a thorough investigation into the Christian understanding of God and the God-world relationship. It argues that the Christian God cannot be timeless









Stars Beneath Us

Amazon Link
In ways both confident and gentle, Stars Beneath Us brilliantly shows God's presence in the ever-evolving cosmos. Relying on his upbringing as a Baptist, his doctoral work in experimental nuclear physics and gamma-ray astronomy, and his ordination to the gospel ministry in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Paul Wallace weaves a book unlike any other in faith and science literature. Instead of engaging the debates of natural theology or proofs for the existence of God, this is a call to courage for those who fear a true encounter with the cosmos will distance them from God.

With a winsome mix of compelling personal narrative and insightful biblical analysis, the author calls into perspective the scale of the cosmos and our place within it. Relying on a theology of openness to the world, Stars Beneath Us will inspire readers to engage with the natural world in new ways and find God, as it turns out, everywhere.











The End of Adam and Eve

Amazon Link
Today’s science is changing the way we see ourselves. We know now that Neandertals were not primitive brutes but that they interbred with our ancestors. We also know that interbreeding between ancient human populations played a key role in shaping humanity today.

The End of Adam and Eve grows out of the conviction that good theology takes the latest science seriously. The most recent findings, like interbreeding with Neandertals and the re-dating of the first tools and cave art, are brought together here in a strongly Christian theological vision of humanity created through evolution for unity and completion in Jesus Christ.

This book summarizes the science but also builds upon it to offer an updated Christian theological interpretation of human beings as created in the image of God and made into one new humanity in Christ. A brief excerpt from the final chapter…

"As a flowing stream is separated by an island and then rejoins, human communities separated, changed, and then came back together genetically. To ask which group is human is to ask which branch is the stream." Diverging, we became many things. We became Denisovans, Neandertals, and many other unknown ancestral groups. By being them, we became us. Converging, we are still on our way to becoming one thing, one unified global human community. For Christians, our hope for one unified global human community has a concrete form. It has a name. It is Jesus Christ. Faced by all the racism and xenophobia that still work their violence and evil in our world, Christians defiantly and faithfully proclaim that Christ makes us all one."

Science and Christianity

Amazon Link
Science and Christianity is an accessible, engaging introduction to topics at the intersection of science and Christian theology:
  • A philosophically orientated treatment that introduces the relationship of science to Christianity and explores to what extent the findings of science affect traditional Christian theology.
  • Addresses important theological topics in light of contemporary science, including divine action, the problem of natural evil, and eschatology.
  • Historically oriented chapters and chapters covering methodological principles for both science and theology provide the reader with a strong foundational understanding of the issues
  • Includes feature boxes highlighting quotations, biographies of major scientists and theologians, key terms, and other helpful information
  • Issues are presented as fairly and objectively as possible, with strengths and weaknesses of particular interpretations fully. discussed





Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Introduction to Free Will, Determinism, Compatibilism, Incompatibilism



Before we begin Tom's article let me pass along several charts and links which may be helpful references to the discussion on free will vs. determinism. This is a complex subject and has been framed by as many viewpoints, theologies, and philosophies as there has been human minds to concentrate on this subject.

It is important to note that regardless of where one lands on this topic I always like to ask the larger question of ethics v morals or pragmatics v results. As example, if a theology is without mercy, love or forgiveness does it by neglecting those virtues qualify it as a worthy belief/religion? Or similarly, if a philosophy cannot give to humanity a method of just and equatable community is it ultimately a worthy philosophy to follow?

For myself, the results of reasoning and belief are just as important as the contents of a theological belief or philosophical subscriptions. Its all well-and-good to discuss large ideas and complex semantics but if it cannot be lived out into virtuous lives than can it be an idea which can hold any value?

I suppose this gets back to the ancient Greek idea of living the virtuous life by asking the question what makes life worth living? Asked differently, can knowledge form humanity towards wisdom or does it detract from this high ideal? If it does then what internal or society power seems to motivate a person or a society towards living out virtuous constructs in human relations with one another or with one's self? Or more simply, we've entered upon the age old question of the meaning of life - what gives to life its value, morals, ethics, and internal engine which drives it forward?

To speak to the idea of free will or determinism must be to ask all these questions and more. It is not a simple topic to enter into and much effort has been given to discovering how we might live in light of our reflections. All too often the results of bad acts have been based on once worthy-and-acceptable insights bastardized to accommodate human greed and empowerment. High, superfluous religious (sic, Christian, Muslim, et al) or philosophical ideals have resulted in their respective degeneracies to the enslavement and death of whole generations, cultures, and societies.

So then, it is not enough to speak a correct theology or philosophy but a virtuous theology or philosophy which can inspire and motivate humanity to its best practices rather than its worst. This is the value of knowledge... that it shows mercy, love and forgiveness to one another. In a word, it is the story of Jesus retold innumerable times through the many accounts of lives seeking by their-turns-and-in-their-ways the grace, peace and divinity found in God and in the best of humanity. The Jesus-way seems to be the answer to the ancient Greek academicians question seeking for the meaning of life. Peace, my friends.

R.E. Slater
May 31, 2017



















* * * * * * * * *



9 Reasons to Believe Humans Have Genuine
but Limited Freedom

by Thomas Jay Oord
May 29th, 2017

A few neuroscientists are saying human free will is an illusion. They base their views on a few experiments. For many reasons, I believe they are wrong in thinking this. And the experiments don’t come close to disproving human freedom.

I was recently honored to participate in a conference on neuroscience and free will at Loma Linda University. (Thanks to Jim Walters and Philip Clayton for inviting me!) Conference participants varied in their academic expertise and interests, although I believe all self-identified as Christian.

The group is putting together a collection of essays on neuroscience and free will. I’ve been writing my own essay for the book. I explore briefly the neuroscience arguments against free will, pointing out their flaws. I’ll post some of that material in a later blog essay.

I offer below a portion of my essay for the book (and part of my plenary address at the conference). Here are nine reasons why we should believe humans have genuine but limited freedom:

We should affirm human freedom because…
  • Belief in freedom fits the data we know best: that we are freely choosing selves. We all presuppose in our actions that we make free choices and we know this from our first-person perspectives. We have better grounds to think human freedom is genuine than think it is not.
  • It helps us make sense of other creatures, especially humans. This argument fits nicely with what philosophers call “the analogy of other minds.” I think of it often when I consider how parents raise children. Nearly all parents believe their kids have some degree of freedom, at least sometimes, and they reward or discipline their children accordingly.
  • Belief in freedom seems necessary to affirm human moral responsibility. This is an obvious reason why we should believe humans are free. Without freedom, humans seem neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. Moral responsibility requires free response-ability.
  • It’s a component of love. When it comes to humans, it’s difficult to think we can make sense of love if we think humans are not free in any sense. Robots may do good things, but unless we define love in an odd way, we don’t think robots can love. Love requires genuine but limited freedom.
  • Belief in freedom seems necessary to affirm that we sometimes intentionally learn new information. Insofar as students choose to be educated, this choice presupposes free will. Insofar as we all seek to learn, we act freely.
  • It accounts for intentional actions to reject the old and welcome the new or reject the new and return to the old. Conservatives appeal to freedom when calling us to return to past ideas, and progressives appeal to freedom when calling us to embrace new ones. Intentional change presupposes free will.
  • Belief in freedom is part of what motivates many people to choose good over evil. Those who believe their negative urges are beyond their control typically fail to resist those negative urges. And those who encounter evil are unlikely to resist it if they feel nothing can be done. After all, why try to combat antisocial behavior if we’re not free?
  • It is necessary for believing our lives matter. If all life is predetermined, it makes no sense to think our lives have meaning or that what we do ultimately matters. If all comes down to fate, we make no real contribution to what has already been decided.
  • Belief in freedom is most compatible with believing God loves us. This is not only true if one believes a loving God would give freedom to creatures. It’s also true for rejecting the view that God praises or punishes creatures who are not free. A fully predestining God has no grounds to judge predetermined creatures.


The final reason I list for why we should believe humans have genuine but limited freedom refers to God. In the second half of my essay, I explore what God’s freedom might be like. But I believe descriptions of divine freedom will be inadequate if we don’t also explore the relationship between God’s love and power, creaturely freedom, and evil in the world. So I explore those ideas as well.

Am I Missing Something?

There may be more good arguments to affirm that humans have genuine but limited freedom. I’d love to hear your suggestions. If you come up with a reason I ought to consider, please post it below…


Comments

Curtis Holtzen
May 29, 2017

This may be an expansion of #3 and 5 but it seems to me truth and rationality depend on free will. It seems the determinist wants us to believe determinism is true, but that would require we investigate the subject. Perhaps gathering enough information and assessing enough arguments to finally believe determinism is true (assuming here the trust of direct involuntary doxasticism). But the investigation presupposes freedom, otherwise why praise those who affirm the truth of determinism and chastise those who deny it? I guess all this rests on Kant’s “ought implies can” and if I ought to affirm determinism that implies I can affirm or deny its truth which seems to suggest I am free.

thomasjayoord
May 29, 2017

I like it, Curtis! Thanks!


Sunday, May 28, 2017

Teaching the Bible in Public Schools - A Post-Evangelical Perspective of the Pros and Cons




Teaching the bible can be a very enlightening endeavor but for many it ends up being a way to enforce old prejudices and errant ideologies. Certainly the theology waiting to be discovered can be affective on every level of human undertaking but it seems the more certain that without objective rigor the degree to which personal beliefs come to play upon its many subject matters can be quite the reverse of what the Creator God had intended..

I'm all for religious doctrine and tradition but both must be critiqued, if not in parts abandoned, for contemporary living, community, industry, and progress to grasp the import it reads and thinks it understands.

This past season of Christianized politics shows how deeply darkness pervades across broad stretches of the conservation "Christian" church. The acclaimed illumination of the bible seems to have adversely motivated Christianized perceptions of humanity towards its further bondage and inequity rather than its love, acceptance, respect, service, or liberty.

This is a deep shame which God's earnest emissaries now must bear by the falsehoods they preach to their eager congregation's awaiting hearts and ears. So often, to study the bible is to study ourselves, and that without naivety or ignorance which is normally placed upon its pages held too long in modernised romantic views teaching a Greek Hellenized and Medieval experience of a God and His Gospel that has grown up beyond our current conception of His contemporary salvific force, work, and purposes for this world we live in, and work, and serve.

Unless the God of the bible affect how we relate in our societies, communities, and fellowships with one another we study and preach all in vain. Does not the Apostle Paul say we preach in vain if we do not preach God's love? If we cannot take a bible story and understand why its there - nor its distorted meaning for that society of believers at that time in their lives - we fail to grasp its relevance. Too often those bible stories show us the paucity existing within religious communities in grasping the revelation it thinks it hears by then regulating horrific chains of inhumanity upon itself and those outside the "holy" endeavors of their enclaves.

It would be better if a man or woman learn to walk humbly with their God showing mercy to all than to pretend that enforcing rules and regulations is the way to divine enlightenment and godliness. Jesus condemned such a system - and all such systems purporting to teach the bible in this way are condemnable too.

Thus the problem of teaching the Bible without grasping its contents especially in the hands of religious enthusiasts refusing outside interference, education, or redaction. Shunning all but their own words as their only acceptable interpreters and advocates of a Scripture which eludes them. A pax then upon all such systems as unholy and unworthy of the great God we affirm when choosing such unenlightened and abominable conclusions to a God who sacrificed his life for us. Christianity, if anything, is a life of sacrifice, honor, respect, and love - this above all things! Amen and Amen.

R.E. Slater
May 27, 2017

* * * * * * * * *





(Wade Payne/For The Washington Post)

May 26 , 2017

A West Virginia public school district has decided to suspend weekly Bible classes for elementary and middle school students for the next academic year while it reviews the content of the lessons.

Mercer County has offered “Bible in the Schools” as an elective during the school day for decades, and the classes are widely popular. But the program has come under fire from opponents who say it violates the Constitution. The Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit in January with two parents of district students in calling for the program to be discontinued. The case is before Judge David A. Faber of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of West Virginia.

The Mercer school board voted Tuesday to suspend the classes, enabling a thorough review with input from teachers, community members and religious leaders, Schools Superintendent Deborah S. Akers said in a statement. The district also announced a new Bible class for high school students. The class will use “The Bible and Its Influence,” a curriculum in hundreds of public high schools in 43 states. Its publisher bills the textbook as “the only First-Amendment-safe textbook that supports academic study of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.”

Hiram Sasser, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute, representing the school district, said the purpose of the review period is to ensure that all instruction complies with Education Department guidelines and with The Bible and Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide, a 1999 report from the Bible Literacy Project that was endorsed by an array of religious leaders and legal experts.

“The school district is committed to following the law,” he said. “The goal is to offer an approved curriculum. We take our constitutional responsibility very seriously.”

Lynne White, a former Mercer school board member who had called for the end of Bible in the Schools, said she was happy with the decision.

“I think this is an important first step, and I hope the board will now work to publicly prioritize how our scarce resources are best used for all academic opportunities,” she said.

Although the Freedom From Religion Foundation said it was pleased that the Bible classes were halted, it said it will continue to pursue all legal options to have the classes permanently removed.

“The Supreme Court has spoken directly on this type of public school indoctrination and has ruled that public schools may not engage in it,” Annie Laurie Gaylor, the organization’s co-president, said in a statement. “Religion in schools builds walls between children and leads to ostracism of minorities — as experienced by our plaintiff Elizabeth Deal, who had to remove her child from the school.”

Deal, a parent who transferred her daughter to a neighboring district last year, said Friday she hopes the classes will be discontinued for good. “I don’t think there is a way to teach the class in a historical or literary manner to elementary age children,” she said. The teachers, she added, are “biased toward teaching the Bible and their denomination’s interpretation of it as fact, and I cannot see a solution to that issue.”

Some religious education experts think that Bible in the Schools will have a hard time surviving a court challenge. Charles C. Haynes, founding director of the Religious Freedom Center at the Newseum in Washington, says that it is particularly difficult at the elementary level to have Bible classes that meet constitutional demands because students are too young to differentiate between historical fact and religious belief.

The lawsuit against the district will continue, said Patrick Elliott, a lawyer for the foundation. The next hearing is set for June 19.

---

Joe Heim joined The Post in 1999. He is currently a staff writer for the Metro section. He also writes Just Asking, a weekly Q&A column in the Sunday magazine. Follow @JoeHeim

Thomas Jay Oord - Where Do Open and Process Theologies Blur?




[Where Do] Open and Process Theologies Blur?
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/open-and-process-theologies-blur

by Thomas Jay Oord
January 7th, 2015

[*res - edits/insertions/images by R.E. Slater]

Open and process theologies have much in common. But differences also exist. The future of open theology, in my view, will be largely shaped by ongoing conversations between the two theological perspectives. But I expect them to draw closer and their boundaries to blur.

Open and process theologies have much in common. But differences also exist. The future of open theology, in my view, will be largely shaped by ongoing conversations between the two theological perspectives. But I expect them to draw closer and their boundaries to blur.

 


In a previous blog essay, I talked about the future of open theology. I looked briefly at the present state of open theology, as I see it, and speculated about what the future might be.

I’m especially interested in the future relationship between openness and process theologies. In Evangelical circles, openness theologians have primarily argued with or against theologians informed by the Calvinist theological perspective. In those discussions, open theologians have often worked hard to distinguish themselves from process theology on a number of points.

The formal conversation between open theologians and process theologians began not long after the publication of the groundbreaking book, The Openness of God. In 1997, the Center for Process Studies brought together for discussion self-identifying openness thinkers and self-identifying process thinkers. The several days, semi-private meeting was intriguing on many levels, with about 30 participants involved.

I was a graduate student at Claremont during this time, and I was invited to participate. What I remember most from those meetings was the common Christian piety the process “liberals” and openness “evangelicals” shared. Several process thinkers shared personal stories of growing up in Evangelical traditions only to feel that they needed to leave upon finding open and relational ideas attractive.

The following year, in 1998, many openness thinkers returned to Claremont for the Center for Process Studies Whitehead conference. Papers given at the subsequent conference by David Griffin, William Hasker, Richard Rice, Nancy Howell, and David Wheeler comprised the book, Searching for an Adequate God (Eerdmans), edited by Clark Pinnock and John Cobb.

The Future of the Openness-Process Conversation

The authors of The Openness of God have generally sought to distinguish their view from process theology. And many openness thinkers from Evangelical communities continue to make these distinctions today. In fact, there is often immense political pressure in Evangelical communities to avoid being associated with the “process” label.

My hunch, however, is that the future of openness theology will involve blurring of lines between the two theological perspectives. I doubt the open theology and process theology will ever entirely collapse into one perspective. But I expect the overlap and hybridization to increase among those pursuing constructive theology in the general open and relational theological tradition.

 


Here are five reasons I think the lines between open theology and process theology will continue to blur in future years:

1. Essence? – It is difficult to identify the “essence” of open theology. As a number of internet communities dedicated to openness theology have discovered, significant diversity abounds among self-identified openness thinkers around important issues like Christology, eschatology, ethics, biblical inspiration, and divine power.

The closest thing to an essence in open theology is a rejection of the classical view of divine foreknowledge and insistence that the future is open even for God. Openness thinkers themselves have alternative ways of talking about God’s omniscience and relation to the future. Alan Rhoda and William Hasker, for instance, are both prominent openness philosophers with different views of how to conceptualize God’s omniscience.

Likewise, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find an essence of process theology. Leading process theologian, John Cobb, insists there is no essence. By contrast, David Griffin identifies ten “core doctrines” of process theology.

Incidentally, very few outside the process camp define process theology in ways that most self-identifying process thinkers define it. When someone says to me, “process theology is unorthodox,” I often ask, “What do you mean by ‘process theology.’” Nine times out of ten, the definition they offer is very different from the definition most self-identifying process theologians define process thought.

2. Cross-Self-Identifying – The second reason I think open and process theology lines will blur pertains to how theologians self-identify. Some self-identifying process theists – such as Philip Clayton and Joseph Bracken – affirm views of original creation (creatio ex nihilo) and divine power that some self-identifying open theologians think distinguish open theology from process thought.

Some self-identifying open and relational theists affirm views of original creation and divine power that some process theologians think characterize process theology [(creatio ex continua or the newer perspective (2017) of creatio ex creatione sempiternaliter en amore - res)]. Consequently, on these key issues, the boundaries already blur.

3. Nimble and Open – The third reason I think the lines will blur between open and process theology is probably more of a recommendation. Christian history suggests that those who make it their goal to define and then protect the essence of a view often find their view to lose influence. Whitehead is right when he says the pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.

Protecting and promulgating a concise set of propositions can be effective in the short term and with those whose basic orientation is to conserve. But a theological tradition is better served to promote a few basic intuitions that might capture the imaginations of young and emerging theologians who are creative, passionate, intelligent, and activist-minded. Vital theological traditions are nimble and open. I think Openness of God author, David Basinger is wise when he says he has “no interest in trying to preserve a set of core essential openness beliefs.”

4. Post-Evangelicalism – The fourth reason I think open theology and process theologies will blur pertains to a phenomenon many call “post-evangelicalism.” A shrinking number of young Christians raised in the Evangelical tradition want to self-identify as Evangelicals. They still love Jesus and still think theology and the Church are important. But their reluctance to self-identify as Evangelical stems for a variety of social, cultural, and political reasons.

Post-evangelicals are more open to blurring boundaries, pushing envelopes, and coloring beyond the standard Evangelically authorized lines. Many are dissatisfied with the Evangelical status quo. Many gravitate toward openness and process thinking and don’t see the need to distinguish the two sharply.

5. Theodicy – The final reason I think open theology and process theologies will blur pertains to a substantive issue: theodicy [("the problem of sin and evil" - res)]. Although the theodicy offered by the authors of The Openness of God sounds far better than conventional theodicies claiming God foreordained and foreknew evil, many openness thinkers admit their view doesn’t resolve the problem of evil like process theology can.

William Hasker, David Basinger, John Sanders, Greg Boyd, and Richard Rice have done work admirable in this area. John Sanders’s book, The God Who Risks has been especially influential. But they admit that their view of God’s power cannot solve the problem entirely.

The theodicy issue has been the focus of some of my own work, and I’ve offered a solution I call “essential kenosis.” I offer this solution based upon understanding God’s power in light of God’s love in my books, The Nature of Love (Chalice) and Defining Love (Brazos). An even fuller defense of the essential kenosis theodicy in light of randomness and evil comes in my forthcoming book, The Uncontrolling Love of God (IVP Academic). I also explain it in my contribution to the forthcoming God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views book on theodicy (IVP; Chad Meister and Jamie Dew, eds.)

Conclusion

Of course, I could be completely wrong about all that I have said in this essay and the previous one.

In fact, that’s one strength of open and process theologies: they fit our experiences of reality, including the experience of being wrong about our predictions about what might occur. But even false predictions can become resources God might use when calling us into our moment-by-moment, open and relational existence.

May God bless us all – no matter how we self-identify – as we seek to follow the Apostle Paul’s admonition to imitate God, as beloved children, and live a life of love as Christ loved us… (Eph 5:1)