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

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology


Carl Jung

“Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns...The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite.” ― Alex M. Vikoulov, Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality

Poet and Author Tennessee Williams

"Life is the perpetual destruction of innocence. If we are witness to this, and if we step forward and heal the wounds of this destruction, we become human; we might even become saintly. If we share what we've seen and learned, we may create art. To do nothing is to be utterly evil."-Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom


"The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process Metaphysician


Process Teleology vs. Traditional Eschatology

by R.E. Slater


I was asked this weekend at our annual college Christmas party by fellow Christians to support their version of a "biblical" eschatology and how that "biblical truth" might be the more meaningful for living out our Christian faith as [liberal progressivism] overtakes the traditional church in an Age of Conservative Evangelicalism.

Mentally, my silent response was, "Yeah for American liberal progressivism seeking legal and civil equalities and recognitions to 'the unwanted other's' civil rights!" As versus the main church's active denial of those same rights by my Christian friends whose persuasion was the same one I've listened to all my life in their evangelical church traditions justifying their beliefs based upon their obsequious literal readings of the bible. (I will speak more to how to read the bible a bit later in this post.)

And secondly, my enjoining muted response in which I offered no further answers except continued silent response to their statements and thus preventing a predictably imminent and virtual crucifixion by my Christian friends. To speak would simply excite them to dig in and not listen. There was no purpose in attempting any truth speaking to religiously attuned ears seeking justifying responses to their own. I simply made a wise crack to relieve the tension in the room and left.

However, what I wanted to say would have been more along the lines of what I will observe immediately below. I would've stated that the only human Armageddon to come in my Christian friend's expected eschatological schemes (sic, from select passages in Daniel, the OT Prophets, and the NT such as the book of Revelation) would be by their own hands. Not God's. Nor the devil's. That end time judgments have usually come by the hands of the church itself historically. But of course, they would've decried my assessment against their own beliefs based upon a lifetime of personal and congregations readings, discussions, educational classes, and the pulpit. There was no winning this debate.

I Was but Now Am

Years ago I had entertained the very thoughts my friend's held that night based on old-timey fundamentalist teleologies and later, new-line evangelical teleologies (sic, the eschatological doctrine of design and purpose by God for creation). I too would've denounced my present self and shown by chapter-and-verse from Genesis to Revelation how to construct a biblical eschatology based upon a Reformed Covenantal reading of the bible. In fact, my graduate capstone paper for M.Div. certification centered on biblical exegetical studies proposing eleven major themes of the bible... several of which dealt expressly with teleology though I could easily make the case that all those same bible themes did so in themselves. Now realize that I was centering on major themes of the bible back in the 1980s; today, I could easily add a few more based upon current church discussions.

In that capstone project I merged those eleven themes with one another and discussed in brief what was meant by such subject matter as salvific discontinuity and continuity between the Testaments; God's Promises through the covenantal eras; the maturation of the major OT/NT Covenants across time; the various typologies of the Christ to come (sic, Messianic Christology); the movement of Salvific History through time, and etc. All this effort was done in order to complete a fuller picture of the coming future of God's inbreak into end-time human history describing God's divine sovereignty as God moved with humanity from the Fall of Adam to the Resurrection of Christ to the Salvation of both World & Cosmos. This then was the picture of redemptive eschatology I was taught would come to fruition via the "I-Thou cooperative" between God and man.

Now I still believe in these elements but am now expanding them beyond their traditional Christian basis when I speak to the more centralizing ideas of God's love and immanence (intimate nearness) with creation while lessening, or removing all together, the traditional church's theologoumenas as they are reflected by it's doctrines and creeds. When doing this, I am purposely placing my former education and theologies into a "progressive form" of evangelicalism and/or church traditions.

But when taking this step, I am also attempting to remove from my vocabulary and cultural mindset my own Western Philosophical thoughts when replacing them (as I can) with Whitehead's Processual thought structures. Which means all the Greek Platonic (sic, Hellenaic) philosophic structures describing God and man in the NT bible - or the more organic Semitic philosophies of the OT, are lifted out and replaced by Processual philosophy. Which in itself is it's own organic philosophy attuned to more similar mindsets from the ancient past. That is, Whitehead was echoed by Hegel who was echoed by earlier Semitic and Greek philosophers against Westernization's philosopher's such as Plato, Aristotle, and the rest who won out.

Thus, Whiteheadian process thought is the latest encapsulation of the past which is winning-over my own yearning to re-express my Christian beliefs in fuller, more congruent tones, to today's arising ecological civilizations and perhaps be recapture in other indigenous cultures and religions. Over the years I have gone into some depth to express all this... here, is my shorthand for observed momentous change which I see occurring across all of life's many disciplines and socio-political and economic landscapes as they each become more attuned to God's creative processual design in nature and the stars.

As an example of difference think in terms of the Greek pantheon's many Gods led by Zeus in their uncaring, unloving, greatness and power. Their distance from the world and their easy judgment upon mankind. This I have abandoned and refuse to conjoin Israel's and Christianity's God with such worthless Greek gods. When I read the bible now I am re-expressing the Christian God in terms of love, care, grace, mercy, and nearness, while also recognizing that the bible's authors in the ancient past did not separate their thoughts of God from their socio-cultural contexts as we have learned to do since the Enlightenment eras of the more recent past. And though their worship was tweaked to behave more in line with love than judgment and cruelty, still it was not fully enough when viewing Israel's doctrinal embodiments by the Pharisees and Scribes of Jesus' day. Thus Jesus ministry of indiscriminant love to the unwanted, unsightly, invisible, and oppressed. As well as Jesus' harshest words and actions against who were designated as priests of Israel's God. Even so today the church struggles with separating it's ideas of God from who God really is even as the bible narrators did in the past. Our pride and legalisms, wont for separateness, exclusion and holy "apartness," has brought a profound reading of the bible into today's civilizations. But again, I have discussed this at length over the years.

Hence, to contextually read the bible, one must read it in its cultural conjectures and teachings just as you would earlier ancient literature and beliefs. Some is fraught with goodness. Some not. Some is muddled in complexities by their own presumptions. And some more easier to grasp. And there's the rub. The ideas of the ancient past no longer translate "biblically" to the today's postmodern (er, metamodern?) world. Yes, the age-old metaphysical questions are the same of "sin and evil, God and man, purpose and reason for living." But the ways we approach such subjects must not be constricted by out-of-date Platonic, Scholastic, Enlightened, Victorian, nor Newtonian thinking any longer. With the age of (processual) quantum physics and (processual) evolution has come Whitehead and his predecessor, Hegel's, ideas of processual movement in a world which is never static, nor mechanical, nor without its own kind of processual (rather than reductionistic) teleology. In fact, we live in a processual creation/cosmos and don't even recognize it. We might call them "circles or cycles of life" (aka Disney's Lion King) but in Whiteheadian thought we may go far deeper than such simplistic statements.

What is a Process Teleology?

To Whitehead as a cosmological metaphysician who also happened to be a Victorian Christian, he observed a cosmology (or universe, or creation, or world) which was organic in its construction. He thought of it much like we do our own bodies and self-reflections moving through a world of experiences. We were not automatons any more than the world of quantum physics was, though scientists ascribed Newtonian philosophies to it. Yet, they did not work.

Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism spoke to a deeply complex, organically relational world of every changing causes and effects, where a positive evolution could evolve against all negative mutating circumstances. In these, like the biblical prophets and writers of old we would agree. When a God of love has essentially and purposely created creation from God's Self we would expect a struggle between good and evil - especially when it was created with agency, or INDETERMINANT free will, buried deep within the DNA of divine LOVE. Not by fiat did agency spawn. No, but by Love.

In time, Whitehead's ideas took shape and the generations after him recast his Philosophy of Organism as a Philosophy of Process, or, Process Philosophy properly stated. And as a progressive evangelical leaving evangelical teachings will keeping the bible ideas of "Covenant" and "Teleology" in my brain, heart, and faith, it became necessary to abandon not God but the old-line teachings of my faith. It held - and still does to some extent when not participating in White Christian Nationalism and Supremacy - a lot of good in it from many different directions. But of late, it's gotten tangled up with itself and has forgotten there is only one God and not the gods of politics appearing to my mind as the Evil Ones in Revelation.

None the less, these were things I thought but really couldn't speak to my present audience of Christian friends. They simply would not understand. As evidence of this I spoke to one of those friends who showed an interest for a time but then began to mentally wander off even as those close to our discussion moved away and spoke amongst themselves on other things they were more interested in. It is what it is, as they say in the state of New York. And you can't unmake that which is already decided and made. The best I can do is write down my thoughts and share with those who, like myself, must find another way.

From Faith to Faith, said the Apostle Paul

Which brings me to this observation: As a process Christian all the old line systematic theologies I was taught to believe - by both (i) exegetical interpretation of the Scriptures in the original languages plus (ii) eisigetical expositions from those studies - can no longer comport with the church's 2000 year hoary tradition of Westernized Christianity.

In its place, I am updating my faith through a more rigorous process of processual expansionism removing core Analytic Philosophical Westernized elements by replacing them with newer, more relationally organic elements pertaining both to my faith and civic life as a citizen of a liberal democracy eschewing any-and-all forms of authoritarian doctrinnaires and racisms as shown by the conservative church with its willful involvements in white neo-facist supremacy politics.

(Which is curious, as at one time I wrote here on an Age of Authoritarianism as versus an Age of Cooperative Participation of global communities with one another. To build ecological societies the latter must win out in displays of liberally adapted geographic global democracies against tyrannical and despotic governments of one or many. However, my shorthand at present is just to state Metamodernistic which implies these socio-economic elements and more.)

And so, when I now exegetically study the collected interpretations of God-and-life-and-faith in their orally derived and ancient/past commentaries, narratives, and interpretaive storylines of God in Scripture, I now read of them as plain admissions to theistic faiths in transition just like our own faiths are in transition today. Each historical era - whether in bible times or after - are attempts to describe a divinely loving God in their era-specific ageisms of culturally folkloric ideations of God-and-life-and-faith. Especially of a God who in many ways is "wholly-unlike us" but also a God who is "wholly alike us" in many, many other ways.

So when I speak of God I lean into the process version of God's nearness, participation, and fellowship with us, the world, and nature as versus the Platonic-Greek Hellenaic traditions of transcendency, wrathful holiness, and divine powers which Western theology has chosen to follow with its evidentiary histories of oppression, racism, and crusading inquisitions.

A God of Love is not a God of Wrath. The wrath we think we see is the consequences of our choosing not to love one another or the world about us. When ascribing to God Wrath, and Judgment, and Hell we are but describing ourselves and placing these qualities upon God. Which is why, I feel, the biblical authors had a hard time telling who the real God was and versus who they thought God was. 

These same discussions go on today in faith commentaries, books, and postings. And since divine revelation is open and not closed (sic, only found in the bible) I feel its a valid position to take that when a misapprehension of God is taken then I may call it out even when collected into the Scriptures. The biblical narratives are simply yesterday's newspapers of faithful believers gone wrong in their faith beliefs.

Reading the Bible As It Was and Can Become

Firstly, I don't read from a revelationally closed Bible but from an inspirationally open Bible by which I mean God is always in communication with us today as God was back then in "biblical" times. Whether by God's Spirit or however we wish to ascribe it along Western theological formulas and syllogistic equations.

Next, I would prefer to think of God's communication in terms of communing with us much as a parent would with a child... or a friend to a friend. To speak to one another in imagined divine fiats is one thing, but to commune with one another in divine love is another. A communion which vouchsafes God's lifelong fellowship and deeply earthy relational communion with us, and the universe, in continually intimate terms. Not in terms of a God ensconced upon a heavenly throne coming-and-going according to God's good whim much like the Greek gods had in the ancient Greek imagination.

Too, I've been leaning deeply into the process theological paradigms which teach God's nearness to us at all times in our lives. God does not - nay, will not - leave us as my earlier faith taught when teaching of a loving God beheld in idolatrous admixtures of a judging-and-condemning God. Without necessarily denying the ancient Greek idea of God's far-ness from us vis-a-vis the church's Hellenistic teachings of transcendence, a pan-en-theistic (not pan-theistic nor classical theistic) process faith better describes a God who created creation as One with God's Self. Think of this as a four-point "trinity" but in this case "creation" is the salient fourth point on the fellowship circle of Father-Son-and-Spirit. This then would describe a God who has no intentions of abandoning us because God is the kind of God who has been, and always will be, deeply, intimately, in processual relationship with us and God's beloved creation.

And to the outmoded eschatological idea of leaving this earth for a better, non-earthly life in heaven while the world burns itself up by its own hands in Armageddon-like ecology gone bad. This Christian theology as found in the NT book of Revelation seems quite un-God-like to a process Christian metaphysician. To such churchly beliefs of a distant God's impugning judgments upon a wicked, wasted earth, I would say this....

"If the events in Revelation's narratives do come about they will be wrought by our own hands - not by God's loving hands whose love forewarned us of sin and evil when we do not love one another. Nor does God pile-on when sin and evil measures our "endtime" existence.
Rather, one might say such calamities come from a polluted earth which we have corrupted to the point of its cosmic devastation. A devastation which bears consequences to our neglecting care of the earth.
So rather than ascribing to the Christian faith a judging Nether-God raging down His wrath and Hell upon us, I simply read in Revelation of unloving man's complete failures across societies, nature, and even the heavens itself. Which of course is a very processual theology which describes consequences to sin and evil and to which classic church doctrines would say anathema to in their closed, interpretive readings of God and Scripture and churchly dominionism."

A Heavenly Communion Which Doesn't Stay in Heaven

Further, when thinking of a "biblical" eschatology of predicted things to come first know God cannot control outcomes in a world God designed as generatively good in value and structure. Divine love does not control... it but persuades listening, obedient hearts against the misuse of its own agency.

And secondly, life is a procession of processual events both good and bad. "What we sow we will reap." A Loving God can never sow evil nor respond to evil in unloving, non-restorative ways of redeeming reunion.

And thirdly, we must learn to expand our minds and hearts away from the church's traditionalized teachings. It's biblical eschatology is divinely unbiblical as I have shown. But it also creates a closed cosmos whose future state becomes trapped within its own static statism.

However, if we substitute the word teleology for eschatology we then have a fully, more correct picture of a processually "uncontrolled" divine future working to rebalance its inherently redemptive structure away from deathly structures to divinely implanted transformative and generatively good structures. Structures I would better describe as organically inbuilt evidencing a teleology of atoning relationships between creation itself and its panenthiestically immanent Godhead. We might call such survivability as evolution, but a processually-based and divinely enable evolution speaks to continuing creative and generatively good evolving relationships seeking merger within its many cosmological forms.

Conclusion - We Are Whom We Are Becoming

Our conclusion? A process-based Christianity is more than progressive in its assessment of the world. It is a wholly-other construction away from perverse and unhelpful teachings of the traditional church (think gay re-education; or refugees being shipped to unready communities).

In essence, we are trading in a Fire-and-Brimstone God for a God of Love. And to the sins and evils in this life we do not blame God for them but ourselves for not humbling ourselves before one another and seeking goodness and kindness, listening and learning. God is a God of grace, mercy and forgiveness. Creation's very own teleology is one of generative goodness and valuative operation. Albeit, on its own terms, much like we ourselves likewise blessed with agency, but inherent in nature, in us, even the universe, is the Imago Dei of God.

And lastly, it is in creation's very nature - even us, ourselves - to redeem and recreate all things towards redemption. Christ did this very same in God's atoning emancipation. It is how creation's designed to work by active insemination from one redemptive effect to another. Process describes this creation process as "A process of Being which is Becoming." That is, we are, and we may move forwards towards what we may fully become as we can in this life and its circumstances. Like God Who once said to Israel "I AM who I AM"... so too we may also say, "We Are whom We are Becoming to Be."

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
December 12, 2022
partially updated January 23, 2023





Thursday, December 8, 2022

A Process Perspective of the Human Anatomy at the Nano Level



click to enlarge


​A Process Perspective of the Human Anatomy

by R.E. Slater

Years ago I watched YouTube's animation videos of our human body at the nano-scale. I was fascinated as I tried to imagine "the reality of the reality" I was seeing. It was absolutely surreal !

These vids came to mind this week when watching the movie "Strange World"... an illustration of the small and how it works together with itself and the world of the large. Without ruining the storyline let me just say I grew up in the generational worlds of my grandfather and my father who addressed life in their own ways even as I now have been adopting a newer view of life. A view which I hope I can pass down to Generations X, Gen Y (my kid's ages), and now Z (ages 14 and younger). A view which holistically focuses on the environment beyond our own.

Strange World
by Walt Disney Animation Studios


It is to the "Strange Worlds" beyond our own which I'd like to speak to here today... along with help from my online friend Jay McDaniel whose helpful process article you'll find at the end of this post. In it you'll find a far fuller discussion to what I will mention briefly here:

First, I've been replacing my Western Analytic Philosophy with A.N. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, as he named it in the early 1900s... now known as Process Philosophy (which is all the rage throughout science, theology, and eco-civilization discussions whether they know it or not). One of Whitehead's students was Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr. (now, age 98, and very active in the process communities he has been spawning). Dr. Cobb took Whitehead's ideas and applied them to the bible and to his mainline Christian Methodist faith (built upon the Arminian (Reformed) tradition of human agency). What resulted was his philosophic application of process thinking into Methodism which we might describe as Christian Process Theology. Even so, I having been doing the same to my own evangelical faith structures by breaking down its Westernized Platonic teachingss in attempting a reasonable approximation of Whitehead's non-Platonic and very rich relational organic "Philosophy of Organism" into what I have been describing as Process Christianity over these many years.

A couple things to know:

1 - Process Philosophy is an Integral philosophy which means, all other philosophies, disciplines, and -isms, are but parts of the overall makeup of the universe we live in. A process universe once might describe as a process "reality" whatever that may mean. For Whitehead, it meant a book title, "Process and Reality" which is a must read. In the topical indexes to the right you'll find many resources to help you along (sic, "Index - Process...").

2Process Philosophy speaks to the cosmos as metaphysically alive; that it operates more as an organism than as a machine. This moves us from Plato, Medieval concerns, Newtonian Enlightenment, etc into the quantum age of all things. Things which operate processually like evolution, the human body, societies, economics... even God!

3 - Since we don't live in a binary, machine-like cosmology we may confidently state that we want to have an organic processual philosophy and theology (sic, religion of some kind; here, I prefer any process-based religion such as Process Christianity).

4 - Since everything is related to everything else we may thus describe the cosmology we live in as relational and may use terms such as panexperiential, panrelational, and panpsychic to describe this living organism we know as nature and the universe.

5 - Lastly, for those Christians asking this question, my own background comes out a deeply fundamental Baptist tradition which eventually heaved up into evangelicalism. This latter has recently split since the 1980s into conservative vs. progressive evangelical readings and understandings of the bible.

As process theology in naturally liberal and progressive I have simply uplifted my Christian faith (aka, Reformed) by removing bad theologies and replacing them with better, more expansive theology.

Love is the Center. A Loving God is its heart. Jesus is still the atoning, resurrected Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit is still enlightening our beggarly hearts :) ... but rather than building on Platonic/Hellenaic/Western-American evangelicalism I've removed it as a foundation and am building upon Process Philosophy and Theology. When doing this it removes a lot of problems theologians have created for themselves over the millennia.

That's it, watch the vids. Enjoy the processual wonders of the human body. Learn to think organically, relationally, and interconnectively. Read Jay's article on the bottom to learn more. And follow through across the many articles you may find here. It's not meant to be hard but it may be helpful.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
December 8, 2022

* * * * * * * *


Human Cell, DNA, and Other Animations


DNA animation (2002-2014)
by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno
wehi.tv

Friday, December 2, 2022

Divine Processual Synchronicity is How the World Works...



Divine Processual Synchronicity
Is How the World Works...

A Process Theology of Reality
as we know it and live it

by R.E. Slater


In the theology I've been developing over the years - most recently, process relational theology - I've added concepts which were foreign to my biblical training. One of these is what I call "divine processual synchronicity" (DPS).

Here, I extend the idea of a divine miracle to be a common, everyday, moment-by-moment experience of the would. Having read Mitch Albom's book on the five stones in the river, or William Powell's "Shack," (sic, the chapter entitled, "The Garden") or dozens of other titles old and new, it finally dawned on me that not only is our God everywhere present but also everywhere experiencing and reacting to not only ours, but creation's everywhere experience of the present.

DPS is different from the classic Calvinist idea of God "causing and directing" all things in that God doesn't cause or direct anything. Rather than saying God is "in control" it is more accurate to say God is participating with a wildly "out-of-control" freewill universe in all its chaotic, random, and consequential results in exercising the being of itself.

Synchronicity implies that the Creator God Redeemer does not abandon His creation but fully experiences and participates with it in every way possible by redirecting its urges and displays where possible towards beauty, benevolenvce, and generatively loving actions. This can occur when creation harkens to its Savior Redeemer's loving calls to learn to love and become love. It requires creational obedience in the theological arrangement described as the Divine-Human (sic creational) cooperative I here redescribe as the divine, processually evolving, experience and participation of God in our lives.

Synchronicity says we are not abandoned by God but have hope in evil and harm that God is with us, working about us as God can, and that even in death we are delivered from dark meaningless to processual goodness and beauty at its zenith. It extends the idea that God is 'with' us... not simply up there in the heavens judging and dealing out wrath... but genuinely, and lovingly, with us in the fullest of senses.

Without denying divine Otherness, or divine transcendence, DPS leans into divine immanence with extreme consequences - for a creation without a present and participating God is nonsense. But an uncontrolled - and uncontrollable - freewill creation WITH a present and participating God is a miracle. The kind which surprises, which can morph itself towards divine imagination and creativity, which utilizes the Imago Dei which is present everywhere in creation as its birthright. Which may redemptively re-enrgize a freewilled cosmos by God's more recent divine atonement in Jesus stating the obvious - that we were never alone nor would be left alone. That God is remaking the world, with the world's cooperative help, into become fully what it was meant to become rather than a future fireball aka dispensational teachings.

That is, God is spiritually healing a freewill creation to become what it inherently is having been birthed by God in God's Image and divine Self. Hans Christian Andersen, captured divine processual synchronicity perfectly by his simple phrase, "The whole world is a series of miracles but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things."


R.E. Slater
December 2, 2022

The Church's Most Radical Theology is Learning to Teach and Be Love



The Church's Most Radical Theology is
Learning to Teach and Be Love
in all it is, does, and preach

by R.E. Slater


The very best biblical hermeneutic to live in our lives is also the simplest and most effective.

True, a hermeneutic is how one reads the bible. More specifically, how one interprets the bible using exegetical tools of grammatical, historical, and contextual development of ancient oral traditions collected in their recitement by the temple of Israel and the early Christian church and passed along in their generations to both the peoples of the OT (the Hebrew Scriptures) and NT (the Christian Scriptures which include the Hebrew Scriptures).

However, as studies and earnest converts to the Christian faith we live out the hermeneutics we have learned. And if we are looking for outcomes of faith it must error towards love and not simply truth.

Why? Because is a God of love first and foremost. And secondly, because what we grasp as "truth" is most often not truth but forms of folkloric traditions we believe are truth.

Many examples abound across the history of science and the church as each struggled with the other in defining what truth means to any given situation. This struggle hasn't lessened but as I have discussed on multiple occasions here, with the right kind of theology, the epistemological traps of both church and science can be overcomed. All this can be found in the science section of the topical list on the right (and in the Index lists found within the topical list).

From reading the bible we know that within it are hundreds of stories written around the word "love's" power to change things. As can truth when contextualized in its epistemological parlance. But for many faith keepers we speak best when we love. To speak truth, as we often try to do, but shows to us much of our failure in this task. Thus, as a Christian, I would wish the church lean towards love rather than use "truth" as its marker of faith. Not to discount the importance of truth but to honestly say that Christians seem to be particularly terrible at distinguishing truth from fakery, fakerers, and false teaching.

  • Now some may call LOVE radical while others hardly mention it at all as a bastion of Christianity. Yet, in the bible, as well as in the stories of the world, whole stories of redemption are written around LOVE.
  • Large words are used to describe LOVE - atonement, propitiation, expiration, transformation, renewal, rebirth, even resurrection. But all the best stories can be captured by this word's four simple letters... LOVE.
  • LOVE is the most humble of words. The most simple, most often overlooked word. 
  • LOVE can aptly be described as overlooking itself while bearing all.
  • All the best theologies are underlaid by LOVE's essence.
  • All the best faiths and churches are centered around LOVE.
  • Whole seasons and holidays are dedicated to LOVE.
  • So when entering any faith or belief remember to look for LOVE's centrality.
  • If LOVE is only a cursory subject to that faith's foundations and messaging than walk away from all such people and institutions whose own words have replaced it with other words.
  • Without LOVE as the keystone, lodestone, or cornerstone to one's life animus, life force, or life energies, no other stones are equal to its grace, power and ability to heal, or provide soul nourishing constructs.
  • More simply, LOVE is God and is of God.
  • God's imparted Imago Dei is our own inner construct however conflicted by our own lives and experiences.
  • LOVE begins when it is unlocked by God's Self through Jesus. This faith experience of Godly grace and forgiveness has gone on to revolutionize everything. Except, of course, it's very simple frame usually becomes lost around other words promising power and meaning.
  • Inside the breast of everyone man and woman can be found LOVE as displayed by our passion and zeal for the things which motivate us... both the good things in this life as well as the bad things, the addictions, the drives for money and power, the lust for power, dictate, and harm. Underneath these drives is the driving force of LOVE gone bad.
  • At the last we must learn to re-see LOVE. To recenter around it. To lean into it in all we do. For without LOVE we are but shells to life's energies. But with LOVE, it can change everything we do... beginning with ourselves.

R.E. Slater
December 2, 2022



Speaking for the Generation to Come... Why Christianity Can't Get Out of Its Own Way: "3 Short Shorts"



Speaking for the Generation to Come... 

Why Christianity Can't Get Out
of Its Own Way:

"3 Short Shorts"
by R.E. Slater

Short 1

The best of Christianity seems to lie in it's many imaginations of itself calling its deeply rooted traditions holy and beyond questioning. An acknowledgement which I, as a Christian, cannot make with my brethren in the uptake of watching present day Christianity (from the 1980s through to the Trumpian years of 2020+) blow itself up with socially unjust doctrinaires and unbiblical proposals of who God is and how God acts through its indiscriminate, myopic, literal readings of the bible.

However, like Christianity's former socio-politico histories as Philip Jenkins and other authors like him have reminded us, it is in the realm of faith imputation and impartation where we must disentangle the church's religious unGod-like core from its knotted ungodly past in order to move forward from itself.

Herein, I am finding Process Christianity the post-evangelical and progressive knot-wrangler which can best lead the world from itself to more generative healing forces underlying human social and ecological reconstruction. For more on this subject select appropriate "Indexes" from out of the topical list to the right of this blog.

R.E. Slater
December 2, 2022


amazon link

 

The Fifth-Century Political Battles That Forever Changed the Church. In this fascinating account of the surprisingly violent fifth-century church, Philip Jenkins describes how political maneuvers by a handful of powerful characters shaped Christian doctrine. Were it not for these battles, today’s church could be teaching something very different about the nature of Jesus, and the papacy as we know it would never have come into existence. Jesus Wars reveals the profound implications of what amounts to an accident of history: that one faction of Roman emperors and militia-wielding bishops defeated another.

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Short 2

I do count myself as:
1 - A conscientious objector to my inherited evangelical faith;

2 - A "positive" deconstructionists to evangelicalism's biblically strayed faith, acts, and thinking. And,

3 - Unabashedly sympathetic to the “nones and dones" who have "left" the Christian faith to wander in a wide wilderness of similarly lost sheep.
I now move within the complicated relationship of my past towards a clearer-eyed understanding of where it must go when utilizing a progressive version of post-evangelicalism as I continually revise past evangelical doctrines, beliefs and practices to become more expansive, loving, and generatively healing in all the right directions. Present day evangelical teaching is a bundle of disproportionate teachings and practices misapprehending God, mankind, and very creation itself. 

This newer version of post-evangelicalism I am describing as Process Christianity which finds me more content and eager to embrace my inherited Jesus faith once again having removed the cultural blinders from my eyes by the Spirit of God's help and assistance. I can now begin to see, hear, feel, read, and experience greater involvement with the ancient struggles for Christian faith by recovering its past in more positive directions than its past sermonic theologies had taught or are teaching today.

Perhaps the value of theology is in its loving outcome and direction. If so, I find progressive, post-evangelical, process theology the space I wish to inhabit and participate in regenerative healing efforts of race, society, and restructural post-apocalyptic world development when building a process-based Christian faith connecting people and habit to ecological civilizations and processual cultures as positive worldly outcomes.

R.E. Slater
December 2, 2022


Named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year in 2020 by the Academy of Parish Clergy
"Drawing on his own spiritual journey, David Gushee provides an incisive critique of American evangelicalism [and] offers a succinct yet deeply informed guide for post-evangelicals seeking to pursue Christ-honoring lives." ―Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Calvin University
Millions are getting lost in the evangelical maze: inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, racism, LGBTQ discrimination, male dominance, and Christian nationalism. They are now conscientious objectors, deconstructionists, perhaps even “none and done.” As one of America's leading academics speaking to the issues of religion today, David Gushee offers a clear assessment and a new way forward for disillusioned post-evangelicals.

Gushee starts by analyzing what went wrong with U.S. white evangelicalism in areas such as evangelical history and identity, biblicism, uncredible theologies, and the fundamentalist understandings of race, politics, and sexuality. Along the way, he proposes new ways of Christian believing and of listening to God and Jesus today. He helps post-evangelicals know how to belong and behave, going from where they are to a living relationship with Christ and an intellectually cogent and morally robust post-evangelical faith. He shows that they can have a principled way of understanding Scripture, a community of Christ’s people, a healthy politics, and can repent and learn to listen to people on the margins.

With a foreword from Brian McLaren, who says, “David Gushee is right: there is indeed life after evangelicalism,” this book offers an essential handbook for those looking for answers and affirmation of their journey into a future that is post-evangelical but still centered on Jesus. If you, too, are struggling, After Evangelicalism shows that it is possible to cut loose from evangelical Christianity and, more than that, it is necessary.


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Short 3

It's easy to get lost in the Christian faith as its own history has shown... today, evangelicalism has destroyed itself from within once again and in its aftermath has birthed newer, post-evangelical groups asking good questions of themselves, their history, and of the directions they are going.

I have become one of those having internally dessented by moving away from evangelicalism's unbiblical tenets of God, people, and nature; and by purposely rebuilding and sharing my post-evangelical faith towards a more vibrant form of Process Christianity across all existing forms of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christianity.

There are other responses of course to evangelicalism's breakage ranging from atheism to mysticism but in a theological processuaI world-view I can find the best of evangelicalism in acts of rejection across its many unapologetic beliefs and practices and in so doing, when applying a similar effort of expansion to its heart, missions, and gospel. More simply, I didn't have to re-create the wheel but only adjust its faith journey and direction which led quite naturally to its update form of processual faith and journey.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
December 2, 2022

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This stimulating history of early Christianity revisits the extraordinary birth of a world religion and gives a new slant on a familiar story.

The relevance of Christianity is as hotly contested today as it has ever been. A New History of Early Christianity shows how our current debates are rooted in the many controversies surrounding the birth of the religion and the earliest attempts to resolve them. Charles Freeman’s meticulous historical account of Christianity from its birth in Judaea in the first century A.D. to the emergence of Western and Eastern churches by A.D. 600 reveals that it was a distinctive, vibrant, and incredibly diverse movement brought into order at the cost of intellectual and spiritual vitality. Against the conventional narrative of the inevitable “triumph” of a single distinct Christianity, Freeman shows that there was a host of competing Christianities, many of which had as much claim to authenticity as those that eventually dominated. Looking with fresh eyes at the historical record, Freeman explores the ambiguities and contradictions that underlay Christian theology and the unavoidable compromises enforced in the name of doctrine.

Tracing the astonishing transformation that the early Christian church underwent—from sporadic niches of Christian communities surviving in the wake of a horrific crucifixion to sanctioned alliance with the state—Charles Freeman shows how freedom of thought was curtailed by the development of the concept of faith. The imposition of "correct belief," religious uniformity, and an institutional framework that enforced orthodoxy were both consolidating and stifling. Uncovering the difficulties in establishing the Christian church, he examines its relationship with Judaism, Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, and he offers dramatic new accounts of Paul, the resurrection, and the church fathers and emperors.



Conclusion

The end of the story is that we learn to support those generations coming after us in our voting, acts, behaviors, words, and deeds. I may not understand Gens X, Y and Z but I know my generation's answers have fallen far short of the needs of the young families and children coming after us.

We must learn to hear again through the eyes of the disenfranchised other and to stop listening through the megaphones of those who would keep us to all the old ills of our cultural societies.

There is value in listening and deeper value in connecting. The way is through love, peace, kindness, and thoughtfulness. None of which we do well at. Even those who claim a loving God and Savior, myself included. We are broken people who can - and must - do a better job in our faith, our conduct, and along our paths through life.

Each day must be a working day in which we seek more peaceful, cooperative solutions with one another. Solutions which may not appear readily but can come when we learn to listen and cooperate. Which, for myself, also means distinguishing my present from the future I wish to go using resistence, education, expanding my biases, and creating a wider world from which I was birthed.

This is my imagined new faith both of a loving God who is intricately involved with us and creation around us and of one another when seeking the best solutions to world needs in crisis and calamity, in peacetime and war.

Let us not give up but let us neither give in.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater
December 2, 2022