Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Does God ever call us to injure other people? Again, I think the answer is affirmative. If killing Hitler could have stopped the Holocaust and shortened the war, Bonhoeffer was right to support that project. On a much lesser scale, Jesus used violence to cleanse the temple. Whitehead pointed out that “life is robbery.” For…
“Most disturbingly, if unilateral power is the ability to remain safely unaffected by others, then unilateral power seems to be the opposite of love in one important respect. For surely, to love someone is to be affected by them. The more deeply we love someone the more we are affected by them. Their joys and…
“In the relational viewpoint you begin life as an effect produced by the many others in the world of your immediate past. But you are not simply a function of these relations. You are an emergent from your relationships; and in the process of your emergence you also create yourself. Your life as a living…
“Loomer is an important figure in process theology, a movement that contends that the universe is always growing in size and complexity, and that as the universe grows, so does God and so must we. Loomer saw the increasing complexity of creation as a glorious blossoming that God was delighted to behold. Late in life,…
This is a comment I left on Tony Jones’ blog a while back when he posed the questions: what is a “person?” Warning: I quote John Cobb (no surprise there). What is a “person?” Well, let’s start small. Multicellular organisms can loosely be divided into two categories: One type establishes order among cells through their…
The bible never says that God is omnipotent or that he created out of nothing… We get our modern ideas of Gods omnipotence from the Hebrew name El-Shaddai wich is most often translated as “the almighty” but many scholars today suggest that God of the two mountains or the large breasted one would be a…
“The Johannine narrative betrays traces of a way beyond the mirror-play of absolutism and relativism. It wells up from within, it flows between, it blows from without. But this truth is not to be had. To own the truth is to lose it. The flow of truth is in this text the movement of the…
Will you lie to vindicate God? Will you perjure yourself for him? Will you blindly stand on his side? Pleading his case alone? What will happen when he finds out what you are doing? Can you cheat him as you would a man? Won’t he judge you severely if your testimony is false? Your answers…
I am at an interesting place right now in regard to thinking about the subject of sin. After hearing sermon after sermon on the subject, reading book after book, having conversation after conversation, I’m convinced of pretty much one thing: For me, the biggest problem that human beings have with sin, is that we try…
I’m finally reading Catherine Keller’s book On The Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. It’s one that I’ve been wanting to read for a while and I am so glad that I have finally gotten to it. It is truly a beautiful work. I particularly liked this passage which gives a lovely definition of theology (page…