Process

TNT: Heaven Hell and Human Trafficking

February 25, 2013 by Bo Sanders 8 Comments

Slave Free Earth Co-founder Will Henderson stops by HBC Headquarters for throw-down about human trafficking, global sex slavery and emerging as a progressive. It is an explosive conversation.

You can join the Slave Fee Community at SlaveFreeEath.com and pledge to be a 7 community member.

Cathy and Will Henderson were on the HBC podcast last Fall. They are both deacons and ongoing sponsors of the podcast!

If you are interested in the issue of human trafficking – make sure to get our interview here and read this survivor story.

This episode is sponsored by the Subverting the Norm Conference 2 in Springfield Missouri April 5th and 6th. Thanks to both Drury University and Phillips Theological Seminary for sponsoring the conference and making it the most affordable two-day event of the year.

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Filed Under: latest, TNT Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, emerging, Global, globalism, God, history, Human Trafficking, jesus, Pastor, Process, progressive, rescue, sex slave, Slave Free Earth

It’s a Sign: Why God Talk Really Matters

August 29, 2012 by Bo Sanders 5 Comments

Two odd things have converged in my little pastoral office lately – both involve signs and they both impact how we think about God.

The first is that I was given a little daily calendar with actual church sign messages. They range from clever (rarely) to cheesy and all the way to painful.

Sign #1 says “Twenty-four-hour lifeguard on duty – see John 3:16”

Sign #2 says “God has not gone on vacation and left you in charge.”

They are interesting, though different, but for similar reasons.

Sign #1 implies the God is always on the job – an all-the-time life guard. That is not the odd part (odd as it may be). The odd part is that it references John 3:16. Now, anyone who know that passage knows that it is about something very specific. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” So the ‘life guard’ is not watching over your actual life but an eternal life that you can have IF you believe in him.

That is an odd type of ‘life’ guard. It’s not really a promise to guard your life… it is a pledge to provide you another life after this life if you do certain things.

Sign #2 is sort of the opposite message. It says that God is not all the far away and you should not act like you are in charge of how things go. The implication is that God is very present and in some way directing or dictating how things go … even if it is loosely and absentee enough that you could be under the impression that you should take up action and do something.

These Church signs kind of confuse me and I get turned around about what I am suppose to do and believe.

On a different note: we had a new visitor to our church a couple of weeks ago and they came back the next week. On their third week they told us that on their first week they know that they had found the right church. They had gotten ‘a sign’ that they were in the right place for them.

This story is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the reaction that multiple people have had to that story. It turns out that not everyone believes in signs.

The two most common pieces of feedback that I got can be categorized as follows:

“There is no such thing as signs as if God were leaving us a trail of lucky charms as we walked trough the woods leading us to the end of the magical rainbow”.

As a person studying the discipline of Practical Theology in dialogue with process thought and a pastor of 18 years, this hurts my heart. I believe in the presence of God’s Spirit in the world. Just because we don’t want to be superstitious … do we leave no room for God to work?

“Of course they did! If you loved a certain hymn and you visited a church who sang that hymn – you would say “this place values what I value” and take it as a ‘sign’ that you were in the right place”.

As a person who dabbles with post-liberal ideas about the way that language works and who has flirted with Caputo’s concept of Theo-poetics … this intrigues me.

I should mention: This is actually part 3 in a loose series this week. Part 1 was “Waiting for Superman: the problem with Christopher Reeve”. Part 2 was “The Pornography of Fundamentalism”.

Why bring up the church signs and the person who thinks they got a sign that they were at the right church? Why tie it into the problem with Superman and the pornography of fundamentalism?

The reason is quiet simple.

What we believe about God really matters. Our conception of the divine reality actually influences ( but not determines) how we live and how we treat other people. It is not superfluous or superficial. It is consequential at the deepest levels. Our construction of that which is of ultimate concern impacts almost everything that we think, do and feel.

As bad as church signs can fail – and as disparate as opinions on ‘getting a sign’ may be … this stuff matters.

What we think about God, how we conceptualize the divine reality and how we converse with others who walk a different path than we do really does impact how we participate in the world.

That is why I am so passionate about Jesus and what that life reveals about the nature and person of God. This is why I try to come at this from so many angels and in so many different ways. I am under the impression that what we believe actually makes a difference in this life and matters for eternity.

You can see then why cheesy church signs and personal projections are worth addressing. They are not inconsequential nor are they insignificant. These things matter. That is why the problem of waiting for Superman and pornography of fundamentalism are worth addressing.

-by Bo Sanders

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, media, news, politics, thinking Tagged With: Bible, cheesy, church, fail, God, jesus, prayer, Process, sign, signs, Spirit

Who Believes in Miracles? Prayer and the Practice of God’s Presence

July 11, 2012 by Bo Sanders 30 Comments

I know at least three people who believe in miracles: Marjorie Suchocki, Bruce Epperly and I do. I have written several times about holding onto the miraculous (as well as dealing with demons and skirting ‘Satan’) - both as Bible reading Christians and as ministers in the 21st century – even after we have excused ourselves from the super-natural worldview of centuries past. Bruce Epperly (who’s final session at EVTC will be released soon) looks to Marjorei Suchoki for some helpful language about prayer and the nature of God’s power. (Suchoki is perhaps most famous for many books including one on prayer: In God’s Presence and eschatology: The End of Evil).

What follows is a summary of a section from Epperly’s book Process for the Perplexed p. 58-60. I found it so helpful and so encouraging that I wanted to put it up here (reformatted as a blog of course). All the words are Epperly’s or Suchocki’s except those in italics.

Suchocki describes the intimacy of God and world necessary to the faithful practice of prayer.

If God’s power works through presence, and if God’s presence is an ‘omnipresence’, then one could say both that there is no center to the universe and that everything in the universe is center to all else … we can say that all things are center, for if all things are in the presence of God, then it is God who centers them. The earth, then, is indeed privileged and we do have a privileged history, for all are presenced and centered in God. Prayer in such a universe makes eminent sense – for God is always present.

From this perspective, God is, as a mystic once said, “the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

This allows us to affirm the wisdom of my mother’s kitchen magnet motto, “prayer changes things”. Suchocki understands prayer as “our oppeness, to the God who pervades the Universe and therefore ourselves, and therefore that prayer is also God’s openess to us. In such a case, prayer is not only for our sakes but also for God’s sake.” In a relational universe, prayer is essential to God’s work in our world and “the effectiveness of God’s work with the world.”

Prayer is intimately connected with God’s vision for each moment of our lives. God’s initial aim, or vision for our lives moment by moment, is grounded in God’s awareness of our joys, sorrows, needs, and loves.

God knows us better than we know ourselves and seeks to provide possibilities that join our lives with the lives of others in a way that bring beaty and healing to the world. God inspires us to prayer for others as weel as to act on their behalf. Surely this is an insightful way to interpret Romans 8:26-28

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And gone who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

God moves within our lives, inviting us to reflect God’s vision of Shalom and healing in our relationship with others, whether a child diagnosed with cancer, the survivors of the Haiti earthquake, or a friend who is in the process of discerning her future vocation.

As Suchocki affirms, “prayer is God’s invitation to us to be willing partners integrate dance that brings a world into being that reflects something of God’s character.” Accordingly, our prayers make a difference in terms of the intensity and effectiveness of God’s healing and reconciling work in the world.

While the intensity and form of divine guidance and activity in the present moment our lives shaped–and either enhanced or limited–by our past history, decisions, values, and the quality of spiritual devotion, our attentiveness to God in the present opens us to new costs bursts of spiritual energy.

Further, in an interdependent universe our prayers are an example of what quantum physicists describe as non-local causation: they create a positive field of energy around those for whom we pray, enabling them to be more open to God in a ruling God to be more creative and effective in shaping their life situation.

Process encourages people to be realistic, yet hopeful, in prayer for extraordinary life changes. Indeed, spiritual realism embraces both the concrete and the possible, regular causality and naturalistic leaps of energy. As Suchocki notes, “prayer creates a channel in the world through which God can unleash God’s will towards well-being.” Because each moment is unique, “miraculous” releases of energy that change ourselves can occur; but there are no guarantees, except God’s loving presence, in every life situation.

We see the occurrence of events described as “miraculous” not as violations of the laws of nature, but of intensification’s of God’s healing energy as a result of the interplay of God’s visionary power and energy, our prayers, and the conditions of those for whom you pray.

Romans 8:28 can be translated this way “ in all things God works for good for those who love God” as a representative of the holistic, relational, non-coercive, and multifactorial nature of divine activity.

I find this greatly encouraging and inspiring. We get to do this wonderful thing of partnering in prayer while no longer being required to subscribe to an antiquated metaphysic or pre-modern worldview.

Let us pray.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, prayer, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, demons, Epperly, God, healing, jesus, miracles, power, prayer, Process, Romans 8, sickness, Suchocki

This is the best that God can do?

June 25, 2012 by Bo Sanders 97 Comments

It is fascinating what happens to conversations when you take away one word. Words are like little suitcases – people put understandings or concepts in them and then carry them around as self contained units. Its so easy! They come with these convenient little handles and you can you pack so much meaning in and mean so much when you just use one little word.

This can be especially dangerous in theological conversations. That one word can take paragraphs and pages to unpack. Sometimes it can be a very liberating experience to take a word off the table. Just say ‘if you can’t use that word, how would you talk about this?’ It is an amazing excercise.

A few weeks ago I had fun asking the question “what if you can’t use the word ‘demon’ – how would you talk about these same things?” I am suspicious that we who read the Gospels and New Testament don’t mean the same thing when we say ‘demon’ or ‘devil’ as those in 1st century region of the Mediterranean did.

So it was with great interest that I had an amazing conversation this past weekend with a group of very intelligent, but non-theological folks. We were talking about God and the subject of evil came up. What was fascinating is that I did not place restrictions on the conversation, it happened organically – they just don’t use the usual words! Never once did I hear

Theodicy
Omnipotent
Kenosis

I started thinking “what if we had this conversation without those three words?” They are great words, and that is part of the problem! People assume that they know what is packed into the words and so they throw them around with ease (they come with convenient handles after all).

Here was my opening statement that sparked the debate:

God is doing all that God can do right now in the world. What you are looking at is the best that God can do. God is not holding back. God is doing God’s best to make the world a better place that more conforms to the divine will.

You can understand why that set off sparks. The questions, comments, and concerns started flowing. Is God more powerful than God lets on? Has God restricted Godself? Has God willingly emptied Godself of some of God’s power? Can God pick up that power anytime God will and God is just choosing not to?

There are specifically 3 groups that have shaped my thinking on this:

The Kenotic Crowd – Multmaniacs mostly, but more generally people who think that God is who we have always said God to be but that some ‘emptying’ (see Philippians 2) or self-limitation has happened. God is ‘all powerful’ or ‘all mighty’ but has just chosen to act this way (free-will, etc.)
The Process Perspective – Between Marjorie Suchocki, John Cobb, Catherine Keller, and Philip Clayton they have this thing covered. I thank God for Process as a conversation partner.
The Caputo Contingent - with his book ‘The Weakness of God’ John Caputo shook some of us to our core and rocked our ‘foundation’. What if God’s strength was shown in weakness?

I have become very comfortable with the possibility that world as it exists is the best that God can do. I’m not saying that I believe that – just that I am open to that possibility.

What if God is doing all that God can do in the world right now?

What if God isn’t all-powerful but only very powerful?

Or that God’s power is a different kind of power?

What if God isn’t pretending or self-limiting?

What if God is giving all that God has to the moment?

So we don’t have to ask ‘why isn’t God stopping the genocide in Africa’. God can’t. It’s just not how it works. God is doing what God can but we are not cooperating.

Now, some will say “No, God could do more but has chosen to limit God’s self” or “God has emptied some of God’s power and given it to us as co-creators and free agents – we are misusing our power. It’s not on God.”

I just want to throw out the question “What if this is the best that God can do?” I am comfortable with that.

Looking forward to your thoughts! All I ask is that you try not to use ‘theodicy’, ‘kenosis’, or ‘omnipotent’ without unpacking them.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, caputo, Catherine Keller, church, evil, God, history, jesus, john cobb, kenosis, Moltmann, omnipotent, Process, suffering, theodicy, Weakness of God, world

Evil Is as Evil Does

June 7, 2012 by Bo Sanders 28 Comments

Earlier this week I wrote about Dealing with Demons - a progressive take, and in it I mentioned that the Devil was a personification of when evil is too big and too bad for us to comprehend as a human result … we outsource to an ancient, cosmic bad guy. Many were able to track with the demon thing but some hit a snag with the Devil thing.

Then what is evil? Where does it come from? Is it real? Is it ontological?

Let me entertain the 3 suggestions that were brought up by responders to the blog: Augustine, Process and Relational Reality.

Augustine had a theory called “privatio boni”. Back in my apologist-evangelist days I would explain it like this: Evil isn’t something, it is the absence of something. Like darkness is not a thing, it is simply the absence of a thing. Wherever you do not have the presence of light, you automatically have darkness – so where God’s will is not obeyed, you automatically have sin and evil.

Of course, the problem with this is that it predicated by God being “all powerful” or omnipotent. Augustine explains:

For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present—namely, the diseases and wounds—go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance,—the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils—that is, privations of the good which we call health—are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

An alternative to that comes from Process thought – which does not see God’s power as coercive (able to unilaterally act however God wills) but persuasive, engaging the possibilities of each moment, complete the contingencies of the past, to bring forward the possibility of a preferable future. John Cobb explains in Process Perspectives II that there are many factors that create the multi-layered web of evil. Human sin is just one element. He also names

Chance and Purpose
Survival instinct
Communal Identity – and fear when it is threatened
Deep held but mistaken beliefs
Institutions
Obedience of authority

among others, as potential ingredients in the creation of evil.

I want to make it clear that the systemic evil of degrading the Earth in our current situation is not primarily the result of individual sins of unnecessary wastefulness by those who know they are falling short of the ideal. The systemic evil results from our industrial-economic system. This system came into being out of a great mixture of motives. Some of them were narrowly selfish, and some of the decisions people made in the process were no doubt sinful. But not all. Some people rightly saw that the development of this system brought prosperity to nations and eventually to most of their people…

Since I believe that to some extent we all miss the mark or fail to fully actualize the initial aim, I do not exclude sin as a causal element in the establishment of this system. My point is only that to explain the rise to dominance of this system primarily in terms of sin is extremely misleading. The evil results from a mixture of good intentions, ignorance, and sin. It is also profoundly brought about by the power of the past in each moment of human experience. (p. 135)

A third option for thinking about this is a Relational Approach. I first encountered this through reading Native American approaches to theology with my mentor Randy Woodley (who’s new book Shalom and the Community of Creation just came out).

If you go back to the story of Eden and can resist the temptation to retroject a Greek understanding of ‘original sin’ and substance into the story, you will see that it is primarily about relationship. What happens in Eden is a fracturing and a resulting alienation in 3 directions:

humans from God
humans from each other
and humans from the earth that sustains them.

As Genesis continues, the fractures stretch out and the impact of the alienation is greater and greater. Soon brother kills brother, generations are fractured … then tribes, peoples and societies.

I love this approach! Once you get away from the substance/material approach the whole Gospel reads differently! God’s relational covenant with Israel and the resulting Law, Christ’s relationship to the God and ushering in a new covenant which radically altered (and began to repaired) our relationship to God – to each other – and to the earth which sustains us (where do you think bread and wine come from?)

The gift of Holy Spirit re-connects us in an inter-related family of God. The perichoretic reality of the Trinity is about the relatedness of the Godhead and not primarily about matters of substance and matter (ousia). Evil in this picture, is that which results from brokeness and fracturing, which leads to alienation, and is then complixified through exponential increase of family systems, tribalism, social structures, societal realities and institutional frameworks … it becomes so big and so bad that it is nearly unimaginable to our mind. At this point we are tempted to outsource the badness to an ‘entity’ which is the personification of evil.

So those are three really good ways of beginning to address the problem of evil. They all have strengths and weakness – but in the end, they are better than saying ‘the Devil made me do it’.

I will end by quoting Cobb again:

The ways in which even what is good in human nature and society can and does become destructive are so numerous and so effective that the mystery is how good sometimes triumphs over it. This is where I see the need to emphasize God’s directing and empowering call to novel forms of goodness.

John B. Cobb Jr.. The Process Perspective II (p. 137). Kindle Edition which sells for $7.63

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: Augustine, Bible, book, books, church, death, demons, Devil, eden, evil, God, history, Holocaust, Holy Spirit, jesus, john cobb, Native American, Process, Randy Woodley, reality, science, sin, society, St. Augustine

The Process of Prophecy

June 1, 2012 by Bo Sanders 26 Comments

I wrote earlier that we need to be careful with developing a dependance on personal prophecy.

Q: Why didn’t God tell you the accountant was embezzling?

A: Because that is not how God designed things to work.

Having said that, I want to be clear – I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including the prophetic. I have seen some wild stuff in the past 20 years and while I no longer run in charismatic circles, I am not interested in poo-pooing on my friends’ parade nor explaining away my experience.

Process theology has given me an interesting framework with which to view the phenomenon.
I can do it in 3 simple steps!

Step out of the 3 Tiered Universe. The Bible was written in an antiquated vocabulary that was embedded in a system that had Heaven above & Hell below. We still use that vocabulary but recognize now that it is only imagery – not physical reality.
Step away from the super-Natural. Get rid of the imagery that God is ‘up’ in heaven and periodically pokes through the thin veil to whisper in your ear – if you have enough faith, or if you are a chosen vessel, or if you are not tainted by sin, or … the truth is that God is with you. Holy Spirit is a work all around you.

God doesn’t need to ‘come down, or ‘break in’ or ‘break through’. God is down, in, and through.

Be aware of and open to the reality of God’s presence in the world. From verbal cues to body language – there are hundreds of ways that we perceive and interpret other people and our interactions. The is nothing magical about your receptivity, openness or awareness of what is possibly going on with someone else. As Christians, we believe that God’s Spirit is alive and at work in the world. Part of that ministry is to heighten and intensify our already existent (by grace) ability to listen, perceive and interpret social and relational interactions.

I have done this enough to know the objections that are bound to arise. So let me just say 2 things with the space I have left:

There are several innovative definitions of transcendence (as it relates to God) that get us out of the 3 Tiered Universe but still hold that God is not just a big bearded guy in the sky that we made up to feel like ‘somebody is watching over us’ and will take care of things in the end. Both Process theology and the work of Panneneberg give us visions of God’s otherness that squash most objections to moving in the direction that I am headed: we don’t lose the transcendence/otherness of God.

I love the idea that God is the power of the future. God comes to us in each moment and provides the possibility of a preferable reality complete with contingencies of the past. That gets me out of bed in the morning!

Prophecy is a sign that is meant to create in us a greater level of faith, trust and awareness. It is not a ‘party trick’ nor is it a primary mode of decision making. If you are relying on God’s Voice to plan travel itineraries, invest in the stock market, look for your missing child, counsel people getting divorced, or predict the weather … I got bad news for ya. That is not how God designed this all to work.

Admittedly, you have to downgrade your expectations a little bit. Gone are the days of thinking that some stranger on the street is going to call out your name and tell you all the secrets of your heart – and which fork in the road is ‘God’s will’. The magic show is over. Prophecy happens in relationship.

BUT (and this is a big but) because God is relational and inside a relationship God’s Spirit can lead your friend to speak loving, kind, challenging words to you – by being open and available … that is pretty great stuff! It’s just not magic.

It’s like your sex life. One you get rid of the unrealistic expectations of porn, you can have a healthy real relationship that is both satisfying and sustainable. First, though, you have to acknowledge that the earlier thing was fantasy … or you will be perpetually disappointed.

We are going to touch on this in an upcoming TNT so I would love to hear your feedback, fears, questions, comments, concerns and pushbacks.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, thinking Tagged With: Bible, personal, Process, prophecy, relationship, spiritual gifts, theology

Occupy Theology: Marx and Whitehead

February 6, 2012 by Bo Sanders 11 Comments

In this special episode Deacon Jeremy Fackenthal & Tripp Fuller talk Marx and Whitehead at the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation for 2012.

The “Inverse Theology” that is referenced is from Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno.

Also referenced is the popular blog from last month “Undercover Boss” by Stephen Keating

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Filed Under: conversations, engaging, features, living, podcast, politics, public policy, thinking Tagged With: breakout session, Conversation, economy, Emergent, empire, Inverse Theology, Jeremy Fackenthal, Marx, Occupy, Process, Theodore Adorno, theology, Tripp Fuller, Walter Benjamin, whitehead

Jesus loves you … some more than others?

January 18, 2012 by Bo Sanders 3 Comments

In recent weeks both Tim Tebow and Marc Driscoll have been hot button topics of conversation in my circles. The whole thing peaked this week when Tebow was knocked out of the playoffs and Driscol was interviewed on a popular British radio show.

In t he Driscoll interview (he was going after the host because his wife is a pastor) he said something that is hugely troubling about its implications for the value of certain types of people. Driscoll was asking about how many young single men have come to Christ in the past year. Not how many people, but how many of them were men. Still not satisfied, he asked about what kind of men they were – were they strong men?

Do you see the sequence? (some might call it a pecking order)

He asked not about numbers of people who came to Christ, not about Church health or the British context (ie. implications of having a Church of England)

How many were men … specifically young single men.
Not men in general, but a specific type of man (strong)

Some may want to simply dismiss this as an eccentric fascination of an isolated mentality. I beg to differ. I see this as a ongoing, if below the surface, mentality that is pervasive in the North American Protestant-Evangelical-Charismatic camp (also known as ‘my people’).

I have written recently that we may worship success more than any God – and I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about the fallout of the 20th centuries rejection of the Social Gospel or the inherent downside of anti-intellectualism that is still widely pervasive – what I am saying is that Driscoll’s views and Tebow’s fans are not an anomaly. They are the logical end expression of an underlying belief about who God is and how God works.

The Driscol-Tebow controversies are merely the public manifestation of an underlying theology surfacing in examples that bring to the public’s attention to what is always bubbling just below the surface – or behind the closed doors of the sanctuary.

The Gospel as it is configured in some quarters is surprising to those who are outside this stream. Does Jesus love everyone? Technically, yes. Is there a type of person that Jesus loves more … or a part of that person (soul, gender, etc.) that Jesus is more interested in?

If this concept is completely foreign to you – I may need to come at this a different way:

I had a chance to talk to a faithful saint who suffers from a chronic degenerative disease. She found a piece that I wrote about why we need to move away from old understandings about curses. She had undergone more than a decade of people ‘discerning in prayer’ that someone had placed a curse on her when she was younger and then attempting through intercession and deliverance to break the enemy’s power over her.

She was intrigued by my insistence that God was not picking and choosing who to intervene for and which situations to interfere in. She had heard last week’s interview with John Cobb where he said that we believe that God is doing in every situation all that God is able to do that in situation.

This is a radical assertion and a sharp departure from the common belief about how God can and does work in the world.

I told her about an old interview that Tripp did with Bruce Epperly where Tripp paraphrased him by saying “God does not hold out or run out”. Think about the implications of those two statements:

In every situation God is doing everything that God is able to do

God does not hold out or run out

I love this view of God. Some people get really upset because God is not as powerful as the Zeus-Caesar (theos) character they have been told lives up in the heavens watching us all and intervening/interfering according to ‘His’ will. But we are actually saying that God is powerful – its just that God’s power is a different kind of power from the unilateral and coercive power that has classically been ascribed to the Divine Being.

In this past week’s TNT I said that I thought something really positive came out of the pushback we got from our cross-efforts with Rachel Held Evans and Kurt Willems. It became clear that Process-Relational thought really is saying something quite different than classical theologies based on Imperial assumptions and Greek metaphysics.

This is not a simple tweak of the existing system (like Open theology). This is not a program that you just download and install into your already in place operating system. It is not a patch that employ to get rid of the bugs and kinks in the classical program. Relational thought is a different operating system (to use the fun Mac v. Microsoft Windows analogy).

I am excited about the upcoming Theological Conversation Jan 31-Feb 2 between the Emergent Village and Process-Relational thought. I am not under the impression that P-R is for everyone or that many folks will ‘convert’. But I am hopeful that we can engage, in a significant way, the ongoing and persistent glitches that (while they may rarely come to full blown Driscoll-Tebow levels) are perpetually just below the surface.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, latest, news, prayer, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, British, Bruce Epperly, curse, evangelical, God, in ministry, jesus, john cobb, Justin Brierley, Marc Driscoll, marriage, men, open theology, prayer, Process, rachel held evans, radio, saved, theology, Tim Tebow, Tripp Fuller, Women

The Limits of Language: Lindbeck and Whitehead

January 17, 2012 by Bo Sanders 9 Comments

Part 1

I like reading Linbeck.* I used to say that I love Lindbeck but I ran into two snags:

I had no idea what people did with Lindbeck. I did not realize that it often led to retreat into a neo-Catholic expression.
I did not (and still do not) fully understand that there is some inherent wrinkle in his idea that language creates our religious experience that implies a one-way limitation of language – not allowing our experience to change language and that somehow limits God. Like I said, it is a philosophical wrinkle that is a bit technical for me.

Having said all that …

What I am a big fan of is his critique of language. He has a riveting analysis of the way that religious language functions in our communities and personal experiences. I was prone to like Lindbeck because of my deep appreciation for Nancey Murphy’s book “Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism”. I was primed for what Linbeck brings to the table.

To become religious–no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent–is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with the religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor is that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways. p. 35

Then I found out that saying you appreciate the post-Liberal approach is like saying you cheer for the New York Yankees in Boston. I get the concern with the descendants of Lindbeck’s work … but I am still suspicious that he is right about how language works in our faith communities.

Fast Forward: I was reading some stuff to get ready for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation and I stumbled onto a section of Whitehead’s thoughts on religious language.** I got to a section called “Doctrine and History”. After dealing with the fact that language does not have a one-to-one correlation and that all language thus requires interpretation, the author explains:

“The language of a tradition and the central doctrines that reflect and support that language are the prime turbulence of the particular mode of existence characterizing that tradition. Furthermore, as human existence is shaped in specialized ways during the course of history, experiences occur that are not possible to persons shaped by other traditions.”

I resonate with the idea that a person is shaped by the language one is groomed and conditioned by – and that would both empower and naturally shape the experiences that one has and the interpretation of those experiences … even (or especially) the religious experiences.

It just makes sense that because religious in a communal endeavor – one is always a part of a community that has a tradition and set of practices/beliefs – that it determines, at some level, both the types of experiences one has , can have and how one translates or interprets those experiences.

This is a vital assertion for the 21st century! We no longer live in the monopoly of Christendom or the frameworks of the Colonial Era where one tradition imported and imposed foreign expectations and alien interpretations on another.

With works like “The invention of world religions” by Masuzawa and “God is not One” by Prothero (among many others) we are entering a time in world history (and thus church history) where we need to come to terms with two things that both Lindbeck and Whitehead are pointing out:

Language is both inherited and powerful in shaping our experiences and subsequent interpretations of those experiences.
Language used in doctrines like ‘the Church’ and ‘Eucharist’ actually facilitate the ability to have certain experiences that are simply not available to those outside the community or language game. Practices like Yoga or Ramadan would be the same for those in different traditions. That is why North American Christians who do yoga are not having the same experience as those in India.

We live in an era where the realities of inter-religious education, cross-denominational communication and trans-national citizenship are going to challenge all of our inherited traditions and conceptual frameworks.

If we are unwilling to do so and insist on simply repeating the same rote answers week after week under the misguided impression that we are being faithful to the tradition … we are in danger of an irrelevance that leads not only to extinction but ultimately failure to accomplish our great commission.

* George Lindbeck wrote “The Nature of Doctrine” and along with Hans Frei (author of “Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative”) is credited with starting the Yale School of thought. One of the most famous proponents of which is Stanley Hauerwas famous for his books like “Peaceable Kingdom” , “Resident Aliens” as well as other things.

** Alfred North Whitehead was a 20th century philosopher who is credited for helping to come up with what became Process-Relational thought.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, conversations, engaging, latest, thinking Tagged With: book, books, Cobb, experience, Hauerwas, Language, Linbeck, Murphy, Process, Prothero, religion, Stanley Hauerwas, tradition, whitehead

TNT: Prayer and Process reaction

January 15, 2012 by Bo Sanders 6 Comments

In this half-hour, Tripp and Bo chat about last week’s:

It is a wild and woolly 30 minutes as they prepare for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation. You have two week to sign up and get yourself to Southern California.

p.s. it was 76 and sunny here yesterday*

* previous results do not guarantee future success

Standard Podcast [ 35:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, features, latest, podcast, prayer, random, thinking, TNT Tagged With: Bible, book, books, Calvin, calvinism, evangelical, God, jesus, john cobb, Kurt Willems, Paul Capetz, prayer, Process, rachel held evans, theology, TNT, Tony Jones

Claremont School of Theology