Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology

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

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Book Review - The Color of Compromise

Amazon Link

The Color of Compromise: The Truth about

the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

January 7, 2020

An acclaimed, timely narrative of how people of faith have historically--up to the present day--worked against racial justice. And a call for urgent action by all Christians today in response.

The Color of Compromise is both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don't know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. You will be guided in thinking through concrete solutions for improved race relations and a racially inclusive church.

The Color of Compromise:

Takes you on a historical, sociological, and religious journey: from America's early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War

Covers the tragedy of Jim Crow laws, the victories of the Civil Rights era, and the strides of today's Black Lives Matter movement

Reveals the cultural and institutional tables we have to flip in order to bring about meaningful integration

Charts a path forward to replace established patterns and systems of complicity with bold, courageous, immediate action

Is a perfect book for pastors and other faith leaders, students, non-students, book clubs, small group studies, history lovers, and all lifelong learners

The Color of Compromise is not a call to shame or a platform to blame white evangelical Christians. It is a call from a place of love and desire to fight for a more racially unified church that no longer compromises what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.

A call that challenges black and white Christians alike to stand up now and begin implementing the concrete ways Tisby outlines, all for a more equitable and inclusive environment among God's people. Starting today.

Editorial Reviews

“My friend and brother, Jemar Tisby has written an incredible book. It’s powerful.”

- Lecrae, Grammy award-winning artist

“Jemar points courageously toward the open sore of racism-not with the resigned

pessimism of the defeated but with the resilient hope of Christian faith.”

- Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor, Anacostia River Church

"The foundation of reconciliation begins with truth. Tisby encourages us

to become courageous Christians who face our past with lament, hope,

and humility. This is a must-read for all Christians who have hopes of

seeing reconciliation."

- Latasha Morrison, author, Be the Bridge

"With the incision of a prophet, the rigor of a professor, and the

heart of a pastor, Jemar Tisby offers a defining examination of

the history of race and the church in America. Read this book.

Share this book. Teach this book. The church in America will

be better for it."

- Soong Chan Rah, North Park Theological Seminary

About the Author

Jemar Tisby (BA, University of Notre Dame, MDiv Reformed Theological Seminary) is the president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective where he writes about race, religion, politics, and culture. He is also cohost of the Pass the Mic podcast. He has spoken nationwide at conferences and his writing has been featured in the Washington Post, CNN, and Vox. Jemar is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Mississippi studying race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century.

Product Details

Paperback: 256 pages

Publisher: Zondervan Reflective (January 7, 2020)
Language: English

Catherine Keller - "I Can't Breathe"

Police and court officers stand guard in front of Manhattan Criminal Court as
protesters demonstrate against the the death of George Floyd. | Source: AP

“I can’t breathe”: The whole Earth

echoes the cry for justice

ABC Link

by Catherine Keller

June 8, 2020

Sometimes a metaphor turns into a metaforce. “I can’t breathe” — the cruelly literal words of Eric Garner turned into a metaphor for the condition of black lives in 2014. When those words were repeated by George Floyd, the repetition of the same pattern of police brutality unleashed an immediate and unrelenting national uprising, unprecedented in its global solidarity for racial justice. Its metaforce will not be contained.

Look at what the very phrase contains, working subliminally, with an eerie depth resonance: “I can’t breathe” writes itself across mass demonstrations at a moment of mass death by a disease that kills by asphyxiation. We’ve known for weeks that COVID-19 kills with an obscene discrimination — African Americans are dying from the virus at three times the rate of white Americans.

The fact that George Floyd tested positive for coronavirus does not alter the charge of murder. But the coincidence is rife with epochal meaning. It amplifies the mounting cry for a justice that would not just check police violence, but transform an economic system in which black and brown people disproportionately lack adequate medical care and live in asthma-producing neighbourhoods with polluted air, zones of greater industrial pollution and fewer trees to absorb the excess carbon.

In its specific American manifestation, but also at its origins, the virus presents not just as a medical but as an ecological crisis. Of course, at this moment the pandemic has fallen into the background of the demonstrations. The masked marchers are taking a knowing risk. But they are not being reckless; theirs is the courage of a priority. If the virus spreads from these mass gatherings, the tragedy of this epoch will be intensified. But the virus will not quell the metaforce of a race, a people, a world, running out of breath.

Do the discriminatory brutality of the police and the racial impact of the pandemic together warn of the suffocation of our very world? A global eco-asphyxia? It turns out that breathlessness is no mere metaphor for the dangers of global warming. Many of us do not realise that there is a profoundly discomfiting materialisation of breathlessness on the horizon. We may not know that phytoplankton — microscopic organisms forming the oceanic base of the food chain — produce at least half, and possibly 85 per cent, of the oxygen we breathe. The phytoplankton seem to be steadily succumbing to ocean acidification driven by climate warming. “I can’t breathe” could be the cry of the entire human species by the end of the century.

My point here is precisely not, “Never mind the issues of one race; save the human race.” It is rather that the metaforce of breath will not go away. And neither will the resistance to the systemic mechanisms of suffocation, symbolic and material, that control much of what we call civilisation. That resistance is becoming insistent. The more mindfully it can carry the intersections of race with ecologies human and nonhuman, the more powerfully the metaforce can materialise.

This does not mean watering down the message of black lives mattering. It means supporting it on all sides — in its particularity. Political changes need the clarity of this particular crisis. They do not need us to get trapped in a zero-sum game of competing issues. But the choices of priority get devastatingly difficult. As a biologist and climate expert recently wrote, in view of the fact that already disproportionately more black and brown consider climate change a crisis than white people do: “Look, I would love to ignore racism and focus all my attention on climate. But I can’t. Because I am human. And I’m black. And ignoring racism won’t make it go away.”

Being human right now will mean embracing the mattering of black lives along with the living matter of our planet. A growing mass of us must be — may already be — learning to hold the intersections, the planetary connections, in consciousness, the knowing-together that fosters a broad enough coalition, and therefore a deep enough transformation.

At this point, another register of breath appears. Call it spiritual. A lot of us practice yoga, or some sort of mindfulness meditation. We know that breath is not some airy metaphor, but the rhythm of life itself. The aching force of “I can’t breathe” can be felt in the pores of your body right now, with each inhalation, each exhalation. Slow them down. Take them deep. You may practice a yoga of world-solidarity with every breath. And in the Western traditions, there lingers still the Hebrew ruach, the Greek pneuma — both ancient words for “spirit,” which mean first of all “breath.” The old Holy Ghost comes haunting our politics.

It just so happens that the President’s posing with the Bible to sanctify policies of police brutality took place on the day after Pentecost. Pentecost commemorates the moment when, as the Book of Acts tells it, the Holy Spirit as wind blew the disciples out of hiding and into the public to demonstrate. The pneuma, instigating planetary solidarity, breathed into them every known language.

The metaforce of breath inspires and conspires. It can also expire. Is it the “Breath of Life” itself — the very life of the manifold, mattering lives of the Earth — that now echoes the cry, “I can’t breathe”?

*Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She is the author of Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public and the forthcoming book, Apocalypse After All?

A Christian Eschatological Ethos of Love

Cornell West Speaks to the Meaning

of George Floyd's Death

George Floyd protests: America is at a 'turning point',

philosopher Cornel West says

Jun 4, 2020

In an interview with FRANCE 24, Harvard University professor Cornel West said the protest movement unleashed by the killing of George Floyd had brought America to a "turning point". He said he was elated by the quantity, the intensity and the diversity of the protests, noting that it had brought people together from every ethnic and religious background. West said the choice was now either the ushering in of "non-violent revolution" to address systemic racism, or the "American fascism" championed by Donald Trump, warning that Trump was playing the race card in order to ignite strife.

The Christian eschatological ethos is to love.

To stand with those who are oppressed.

To stand against those who are oppressing.

- re slater

What is the meaning of the Kingdom of God?

It is a Kingdom of Love come to humanity.

Reclaiming this earth. Reclaiming by love.

- re slater

A Christian Eschatological Ethos of Love

by R.E. Slater

June 11, 2020

As the US Congress gathers today to consider creating new laws to promote fairness and equality to the people of America who have endured too long the racism and brutality of their police forces I am reminded of the story of outsiders taking over the passionate vision and hope of the insider.

Too often have I had the experience of forming and promoting an idea to the betterment of an organization I was serving only to see that passion taken over by the leaders, directors, or managers and reduced to skin and bones as a shell of what it could've been.

We've had on display for the past two weeks protest demonstrations against America's police forces which have not served their communities equally or fairly by institutionalizing racism and inequality against the black citizens of America. With the racist deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd the fuse was lit and policing injustice was served on a hot plate of anger around the world.

The protesting voices are the people with a vision and hope for equality and justice. It is their own vision and hope that the outsider, such as the US Congress among many others, who will now pretend to take over and try to fix. Whose organizations will create a few laws, implement a few policies, and say "There, you are free now. There, your equality has come."

But I'm sorry to say passion cannot come by establishing more laws or more "to do items" on the whiteboard of societal ethos. No. All the actions created by the outsider has only dulled the real needs of societies by making a law, or creating a committing, or reforming this-or-that. What it will fail to do is to instill that inner drive within the human breast to live and act out equality and justice in everyday lives of bitterness and racism.

I know of no law on racism that can truly stop the human heart from expressing it. There can be no law, no ruling, no acts by committee, which can ever replace the passion in the hearts of those who cry out for social justice and equitable relationships between one another. It must be a "law" written on the human heart. A law to love. This Jesus has given to us through His atonement and by His indwelling Spirit. That of the love of God which conforms our racists hearts to that of God's love of healing and goodness to one another.

As such, I submit now, that by whatever an organization does or doesn't do - whether by enacting congressional laws, or disbanding and reforming police precincts; whether by business or organisational endeavors of any sort, that it will never be enough. Outsider laws, rules, and common orders of juris prudence is only the beginning of vision and hope but never the end of learning to love one another of all colors, creeds, genders, cultures, ethnicities, and things that make people, people. We must see the person if we are to see them truly.

Call me crazy but if the Lord does not write His love upon our hearts and souls, minds and body, we simply are living outward lies to the inner souls of our being, wishing to act right without being right. It's this societal fakery and lip service we've given to our "good works" which demeans, and insults, the very purpose of our living. And yes, the white church of America has promoted racism as much as anybody else when overlooking that Jesus spoke to the religious who can be the greatest hypocrite of all.

We are to love God, each other, and creation. To live lives larger than ourselves, larger than our Constitution, larger than our Bill of Rights. To live fully devoted beyond any concept we can imagine or think which might liberate and heal another to become greater than they are when receiving an attitude of love all the time, in every place we go, and in every word and action we commit.

Jesus called out the Scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy. He understood the corruption of the soul of humanity's many empires it lives out. He saw the common as the uncommon and named everything a study of God's love needing release through us, His people, as the bearers of God's command to love.

We cannot legalize it, script it, create creeds and doctrines about it; nor can we live pretend lives mouthing words to it. God's love is what energizes societies to unbearable release and outcome because it must breathe lest it dies.

The message of BLM is that we breathe together as a society that we might live beyond those who would hold hostage our hearts pretending mere words and laws will help us live out what is unwritable, inscribable, uncodeable.

The word love means nothing without extending across our societies in every direction possible even as global protests have expanded this message of equality and justice across the world in vision and hope to live well with one another.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

June 10, 2020

White Evangelicalism At The Protest

Article Link

by Tim Gombis
June 2, 2020

The protest against the brutal police treatment of black people in Grand Rapids Saturday night was a profoundly Christian moment. People came together and walked shoulder to shoulder from across ethnic, racial, and gender lines, and from every social class. They peacefully and passionately advocated on behalf of the powerless to the powerful.

It was the social performance of Jesus’s action in the temple.

As we neared police headquarters, we saw that a street evangelist had set up shop. He stood apart from the crowd by a few feet and had a banner behind him. He was white, maybe 60.

When chants died down near him, he raised his hands to make his pitch. People ignored him and routinely drowned him out with cries of “No justice, no peace!” and “George Floyd, say his name!”

I’d never seen the man before but I know him well. I was raised in the same white conservative evangelical culture that produced him.

He perfectly embodied that culture Saturday night. It’s a culture that encounters Jesus and does not recognize him. It sees the social embodiment of Christian faith and wants to save it. It witnesses the gospel in action and stands off to the side. It waits for the cries for justice to die down so it can make its sales pitch.

Sarah leaned over to me and said she wanted to tell the man that if Jesus were here he would say George Floyd’s name.

Indeed, Jesus was there and that’s exactly what he was doing.

*Tim Gombis. Observations on biblical studies, books, movies, music, sports, culture, and anything and everything having to do with creatively and faithfully reflecting on and embodying Christian identity.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Christian humanism is not a new doctrine but an old observance from time immemorial found in the ancients, the major creeds of religions, the teachings of Jesus, and even today in BLM. It is an attitude, a behavior, a significant and important form of communication with one another. It is built around the word Love.

Too many think of humanism as replacing God. But what if it stood with God in exemplifying divine love and forgiveness? This is what is meant by "Christian" humanism. If religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were to stay to their roots of grace and peace in God one could imagine a far better world of equality and fairness.

- re slater

Christian humanism sees people for who they are, serving where it can to help and aid. Jesus didn't say to hate the world but not to be corrupted by the world, including the corruption which comes with Christian secularity. A corruption which is silent in the face of racism and supremacy. If I was to chose between the world and the church I'd rather go it alone in God's creation than fellowship with false attitudes and doctrines. The church of God welcomes and embraces all. It does not seek to brainwash, strong-arm, place guilt upon, or shout down all who differ from its inhumane silence seeking power over God's love and weakness.

- re slater

Christian humanism regards humanist principles like universal human dignity, individual freedom and the importance of happiness as essential and principal components of the teachings of Jesus. It emerged during the Renaissance with strong roots in the patristic period.

- Wikipedia

Equitable justice is the right of every man, woman and child.

If this cornerstone of civilization is removed

there will be nothing left save anarchy.

- re slater

US Supreme Court: "Equal Justice Under Law"

Mark 12:30-31 [New American Standard Bible (NASB)]

30 and you shall love the Lord your God with all

your heart, and with all your soul, and with all

your mind, and with all your strength.’

31 The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor

as yourself.’ There is no other commandment

greater than these.”

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

A Christian Eschatology of Love

Amazon Link

I would like to take Jonathan Moo's discourse on "Continuity, Discontinuity and the Eschatological Hope of the New Testament "and twist it a bit away from its rightful emphasis on an "environmental ethos" which asks of churches, together with science, in re-initiating its responsibility to care for the earth.

Alongside of this discussion, if I simply substitute another kind of ethos, that of social justice, or a societal ethos of love, in place of an environmental ethos emphasizing God's love for not only creation of all kinds, but mankind as part of creation, who is likewise made in God's image even as God did the environment, than we will get a wider appreciation for our responsibilities as Christians not only to this earth but to our fellow humans as well.

Not only this, but importantly as it relates to the Christian hope of the eschatological future in whatever form we think it may take, to understand (or add) to our hope God's love as an eschatological ethos. Importantly, and specifically, this Christian hope is to entertain the Love of God through Jesus Christ within its present day context of worship of God so that as pertaining to Christians especially, we love, and love intensely, all humanity, till that day comes of God's realized eschatology in Christ.

The completion and fulfillment of heaven and earth is that God becomes all-in-all by His vision and patient guidance of creation (including mankind) of, by, and through love always as its centering eschatological motif.

And being that under the New Covenant of Christ, and the expanded import of the Old Testament into the New Testament to continue God's love both through His Remnant of the OT and His disciples of the NT (notice how I did not say explicitly Israel or the Church?) by examples and deeds of many sorts to care for both the earth and its elements, and its people and their societies, by God's guiding, grounding, partnering examples and deeds of love through His people by their own words and deeds.

At the last, God's love is the centre of all Christian social and environmental action. And indeed, at the center of any eschatological discussion or envisioning. Whatever the future holds, we are called to love and care for the world as we encounter it. As Stephen Williams has said,

"The NT’s theology of creation is inescapably eschatological, and the wideness of biblical hope can provide both a strong impetus as well as the necessary context for the exercise of Christian love and charity."

With God's Love as the biblical center for all doctrines, including it's eschatological center of God's heart, today's turmoils between politics and real-world problems must ever be met and performed in , by, and through God's love. It resolves our strifes and conflicts; calls out those who are disobedient to God's example; and demands a higher calling to care for all people in all ways over any lesser concerns for money, power, or conscripted misuses of human sinful passion.

In this way a God of Love has always asked His remnant to follow and act in His love and loving actions in all they say and do. God's Love will be no less a theme in the future.

Both past and future are inflected by our efforts of our present context to continue God's image and practice of love. From all that flows from the past, to all that flows into the promise of the future, without interruption of that flow as expressed into our present age, God's Love is what holds all timeful events of being and becoming together.

Simply, 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

June 10, 2020

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Jonathan Moo

Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World

by Jonathan and Douglas Moo

Amazon Link

CONTINUITY, DISCONTINUITY, AND HOPE

The Contribution of New Testament Eschatology

to a Distinctively Christian Environmental Ethos

https://legacy.tyndalehouse.com/Bulletin/61=2010/2%20Moo.pdf

by Jonathan Moo

"My emphasis on NT eschatology is not meant to imply that it is only here that the biblical tradition has something to contribute to a Christian environmental ethos. Stephen Williams has reminded us that love must always remain at the centre of Christian social and environmental action—and indeed, at the centre of any discussion about eschatology.8 Whatever the future holds, we are called to love and care for the world as we encounter it. Nonetheless, the NT’s theology of creation is inescapably eschatological, and the wideness of biblical hope can provide both a strong impetus as well as the necessary context for the exercise of Christian love and charity.

"This essay seeks, then, to develop somewhat further than is often done the exegetical basis for a distinctively Christian perspective of the future that has important implications for how we understand our task in and for the created world. I propose that the diverse ways in which the NT portrays the future of the earth, taken together, provide an indispensable resource for the development of a Christian environmental ethos...."

Book Blurbs

Let Creation Rejoice: Biblical Hope and Ecological Crisis Paperback – June 2, 2014

"Let all creation rejoice before the LORD, for he comes." Psalm 96:13 The Bible is bathed with images of God caring for his creation in all its complexity. Yet in the face of climate change and other environmental trends, philosophers, filmmakers, environmentalists, politicians and senior scientists increasingly resort to apocalyptic rhetoric to warn us that a so-called perfect storm of factors threatens the future of life on earth. Jonathan Moo and Robert White ask, "Do these dire predictions amount to nothing more than ideological scaremongering, perhaps hyped-up for political or personal ends? Or are there good reasons for thinking that we may indeed be facing a crisis unprecedented in its scale and in the severity of its effects?" The authors encourage us to assess the evidence for ourselves. Their own conclusion is that there is in fact plenty of cause for concern. Climate change, they suggest, is potentially the most far-reaching threat that our planet faces in the coming decades, and also the most publicized. But there is a wide range of much more obvious, interrelated and damaging effects that a growing number of people, consuming more and more, are having on the planet upon which we all depend. Yet if the Christian gospel fundamentally reorients us in our relationship to God and his world, then there ought to be something radically distinctive about our attitude and approach to such threats. In short, there ought to be a place for hope. And there ought to be a place for Christians to participate in that hope. Moo and White therefore reflect on the difference the Bible's vision of the future of all of creation makes. Why should creation rejoice? Because God loves and cares the world he made.

Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World (Biblical Theology for Life) Paperback – February 27, 2018

From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible reveals a God whose creative power and loving care embrace all that exists, from earth and sky and sea to every creeping, crawling, swimming, and flying creature. Yet the significance of the Bible’s extensive teaching about the natural world is easily overlooked by Christians accustomed to focusing only on what the Bible says about God’s interaction with human beings.

In Creation Care, part of the Biblical Theology for Life series, father and son team Douglas and Jonathan Moo invite readers to open their Bibles afresh to explore the place of the natural world within God’s purposes and to celebrate God’s love as displayed in creation and new creation.

Following the contours of the biblical storyline, they uncover answers to questions such as:

What is the purpose of the non-human creation?

Can a world with things like predators, parasites, and natural disasters still be the ‘good’ world described in Genesis 1?

What difference does the narrative of the ‘Fall’ make for humankind’s responsibility to rule over other creatures?

Does Israel’s experience on the land have anything to teach Christians about their relationship with the earth?

What difference does Jesus make for our understanding of the natural world?

How does our call to care for creation fit within the hope for a new heaven and a new earth?

What is unique about Christian creation care compared with other approaches to ‘environmental’ issues?

How does creation care fit within the charge to proclaim the gospel and care for the poor?

In addition to providing a comprehensive biblical theology of creation care, they probe behind the headlines and politicized rhetoric about an ‘environmental crisis’ and climate change to provide a careful and judicious analysis of the most up-to-date scientific data about the state of our world. They conclude by setting forth a bold framework and practical suggestions for an effective and faithful Christian response to the scriptural teaching about the created world.

But rather than merely offering a response to environmental concerns, Creation Care invites readers into a joyful vision of the world as God’s creation in which they can rediscover who they truly are as creatures called to love and serve the Creator and to delight in all he has made.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Black Lives Matter All the Time