Process Theology

It is really interesting and exciting stuff, but you cannot get from here to there on it in a hundred words or less. Our little tiny congregation church of progressive Christians had fully 14 people attend the first book club discussion on a book by John Cobb and David Griffin entitled Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition. (To give you an idea of what kind of congregation this is, on a good Sunday we will have 25-30 people attend services. So that means about half the people in the church will first of all read a heavy, academic assignment, and then come out on a weeknight for a 90-minute discussion.)

 Here's the scoop in only the most general terms: it's a 20th century attempt to apply the concepts of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy to our thinking about God. It is dense and fun stuff. Its chief progenitors are John B. Cobb, Jr. and Charles Hartshorne. And it is seminal in the thinking of progressive Christians, although most of us may not even be aware of origins, we embrace the main ideas. I'll be writing about this some more, but for now let me lay out the concepts of God that process thinking rejects. You cannot but notice that these ideas are foundational in traditional unitheistic religions. So we will not take as our starting point the following assumptions about God:

1. God as cosmic moralist, that his fundamental concern is the development of moral attitudes. Which makes such attitudes intrinsic to the basic importance of human beings. No.
2. God as the Unchanging and Passionless Absolute. God is not really related to the world, that his influence upon the world is "in no way conditioned by divine responsiveness to unforeseen, self-determining activities of us worldly beings." No.
3. God as controlling power who determines every detail of the world, even down to deciding who dies in natural disasters, finding a parking place, or who wins a football game. No.
4. God sanctions the status quo. The previous three notions set the stage for this one. Cosmic moralist = primary interest in order; unchanging absolute = God has established an unchangeable order for the world; controlling power = God wills the present to exist. Therefore obedience to God is preserving the status quo. No.
5. God is male. He is the archetype of the "dominant, inflexible, unemotional, completely independent (read 'strong') male. No.

More on all this later. As you might imagine, if you start with the rejection of these age-old notions of the nature of God, you're definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Bombs Away!

The Favorite US Solution

The "humanitarian" bombing in Iraq that our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president has declared is an obscenity. Of course, the US is not going to bomb anybody for any other reason but a noble one. Right? In this case it's to save a hapless group of people who practice an ancient religion that predates both Christianity and Islam from the murderous Islamic State militants who are overrunning parts of Syria and Iraq. They are bad people. They do terrible things, hateful things. And in this case they've run these people out of their town and up onto a nearby mountain. They are threatening to wipe them out, every last one. And the people are helpless without weapons or even the necessities of life.

The question confronting the Christian, the follower of Jesus, is what do you do? Well, you offer the suffering all the aid you can. But you do not wield the sword against their enemies. If you are going to be faithful to the gospel, you cannot do violence against another child of God. The command is love your enemies, not kill your enemies. If there's one truth that's been established by the history of our species on Earth, it's that violence begets violence. Always. It never solves a problem. It always spawns new problems, usually worse problems. Killing spawns more killing. War and its hellish fruits must be opposed. All war. Always. There's no other way I can think of that we will ever have peace. Violence must cease.

This is hard stuff. Real hard. It's impossibly idealistic, isn't it? And given our species's love of blood and war, seemingly insane. You would not have trouble finding a lot of people to agree. Pacifists and conscientious objectors are almost universally despised people. They are so far off the reservation, so at odds with the huge majority of humanity, that for that reason alone--they are that different--they must be spurned. But it seems to me there's no other way if you're going to try and model your life of the way Jesus lived his. I'm sorry. There is injustice and suffering the globe over. People are being killed everywhere because they are the wrong color, the wrong religion, the wrong nationality, have the wrong political beliefs, follow the wrong ideology, leader, or movement. Is more killing going to put an end to killing and injustice? Humans have been killing people who are different for centuries on end . . . and has it made us happier, more prosperous, more secure? If you can answer yes to these questions, then stand up a salute our reentry into war in Iraq. 

Bullets from Babylon

My (for the present) favorite blogger, Charles Kingsley Michelson III at "Some Assembly Required" has these gems this morning:

• They Made Me Do It: The fertilizer companies responsible for the explosion and fire in West, TX last year claim that the city, not the fertilizer companies, were to blame, which is a load of fertilizer. 
• Have you ever noticed that whatever happens, it's always somebody else's fault? You know what makes news? Those occasions when somebody in charge steps up and says: "It was my fault. You wanna blame somebody, blame me." Now that's news.

• Obey: NYC cops dragged a naked 48 year-old woman from her shower, through her apartment and into the hallway, subdued and arrested her - and her 12-year old granddaughter who tried to help gramma – for resisting . Wrong apartment. 
• You've heard me wax eloquent and not so eloquent at the unremitting abuse of the citizenry of the United States--it doesn't matter where you are--by the cops. There are whole websites devoted to it, with videos and all. The fact this is not happening on your nice suburban street with its daisies and lilies and people walking their AKC-approved dogs, doesn't mean that some innocent citizens of your town aren't getting the shit kicked out of them right this minute by the guardians of law and order. P.S. Want to guess what color the woman was? 

• Cookie Monsters: In Palm Beach a church had a homeless man arrested for stealing $2.25 worth of cookies. In Decatur, IL a man discovered that his female roommate had eaten the three cookies he had intended to have for breakfast, so he strangled her.
• In the first instance, lemme guess . . . it was a church that follows Jesus, who told us to love our neighbors as well as we love ourselves, right? And in the second instance, what else was the guy supposed to do? He needed those cookies to sustain life.

Peace and Stewardship

A friend of mine (thank you, Karen) from church sent me the link to this article about Jesus today. It more or less dovetailed with what our topic of discussion was this morning during adult religious ed. In short, to understand the historical Jesus is to understand that he was a non-violent person dedicated to the service of others. And to be his follower, we must be the same. And once you grasp this, it's perfectly clear why Christianity has failed. As G. K. Chesterton observed some time ago: "Christianity has not failed, it's just never been tried." It would revolutionize the entire globe if it ever were tried, but though I believe in my bones that this is what the practice of Christianity really is, I despair of even creeping a little closer to the standard myself.

Here's the heart of the article right here, carved out of it word for word:

The first great challenge to Christian faith in the future is the abandonment of the ways of violence and war. Love, peace and kindness must become synonymous with Christian faith.

The second challenge involves the ownership of property. This is a key to understanding the teachings of Jesus, who lived in a time and place of economic disparity. Jesus advocated a new celebration of the Year of Jubilee, which, according to the Bible, is the time when property and possessions were to be returned to the Temple priests for redistribution among the tribes of Israel. This massive redistribution was to take place every 50 years (though it never actually did).

Yet, there is no way we can avoid the clear Bible standard of limitation of private ownership — of land in particular and wealth in general. That was also the view of Jesus.

By Bible standards, today’s wealth gap between the rich and the poor is so enormous that it is a complete affront to the professed beliefs of those who are wealthy and claim to be followers of Jesus. The standard is clear: We are to be stewards of wealth, not owners.

It's really interesting that the heart of Christianity is not about sorrow for sin and obedience to law. In fact, to try and meet these two great challenges would require the breaking of numerous laws. If Christians ever began practicing Christianity, there would not be enough cops to contain us, enough jails to keep us off the streets.