Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity after Religion
explores the tension between spirituality and religion, and experience andbelief.  Her work is more descriptivethan constructive, but it sets the agenda for Christians who wish to addresstwenty-first century spiritual challenges and not the issues of a bygone
era.  Bass notes that belief has oftenbeen a deterrent to taking Christianity seriously among the self-described “nones”and “spiritual but not religious.”  She
reflects on her experience of a baccalaureate sermon that focused on Christ as
imperial and sovereign, rather than loving, as theologically shattering.  Bass appropriately describes that sermon as an example of theology that alienates rather than joins.

In aworld of multiple spiritual possibilities, today’s seekers focus on experience
rather than doctrine, and rightly so.  In their experience, doctrine divides and deadens while experience unites andtransforms.  Still, I believe that the
example of the baccalaureate sermon and recent political events reminds us that
fluid theological understandings are more important than ever for seekers,
“nones,” and persons who attempt to be both spiritual and religious.  Humble and loosely-held theological positions, connected with our experiences of the holy, can nurture spiritual experiences and inspire mission-oriented commitments.Theological
reflection is, like all human endeavors, ambiguous, but it can be healthy and
life-changing.

First, the bad news abouttheology: certain understandings of theology have led to the recent culture wars regarding contraception, abortion, personhood, social justice,
immigration, same sex marriage, and economics. Other theological positions placed a chasm between faith and medicine,and scripture and science.  Understandings
of theology have lead to apocalyptic scenarios that have inspired followers to
be so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good and to the denial of human
involvement in global climate change.  After
all, if human behavior can destroy life on Earth, then God’s prerogative of
Earth-destruction is challenged.

What allthese positions have in common is an emphasis on some of the following

• A changeless God who establishes unchanging rules.
• Authoritarian and unilateral images of God; the image of God as primarily omnipotent and sovereign.
• An implied competition between God and humankind such that any human achievement detracts from God’s glory.
• A view of humankind as passive in relationship to God.
• Moral absolutes grounded either in an absolutist view of scripture or ecclesiastical authority.
• Revelation limited to select groups or scriptures.
• Grace as encouraging passivity rather than partnership.
• Thefuture as closed and determined in advance by God.
• Truth and salvation as limited.

Second, the good news about theology: Healthy theology can bring healing, wholeness,and unity to our lives.   While there aremany possible healing theologies, I believe a theology that emphasizes thefollowing is best suited to our current spiritual and planetary condition.

• God as lively and active in the world
• God as primarily relational, rather than unilateral.
• God as the non-competitive source of possibility.
• Godas encouraging creativity and innovation.
• Godas working through the world situation rather than from the outside.
• Godas embracing the world, and being influenced by our actions.
• Unlimitedpossibilities for innovation and creativity such that our alignment with God enables God to do new things.
• Revelationas global and touching everyone.
• Grace as encouraging interdependent responsibility and creativity.
• Ethics and doctrines that are contextual and constantly subject to transformation.
• Anopen-ended future.
• Partnershipbetween God and the world in creating the future.
• Truth as abundant and multi-faceted

We will never have a perfect and all-inclusive theology, but we can have lively,
growing, and life-supporting theologies.  My own personal preference is process theology, given its open-endedness and understanding of God in terms of relationship and love, rather than independence and power.  I invite you to consider your own theological journey – and ponder what theologies give life and what theologies deaden the spirit.

[Must-reads in introducing process theology, a short list:

John Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age

John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition

Monica Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way

Bruce Epperly, Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living

___________, Emerging Process: Adventurous Theology for a Missional Church

___________, Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed

Patricia Adams Farmer, The Metaphor Maker

Catherine Keller, On the Mystery

Jay McDaniel, Living from  the Center

Marjorie Suchocki, In God’s Presence]

Process and Emergence in Creative Transformation

Creative transformation is at the heart of process theology.  With the apostle Paul, process theology counsels us, “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing your mind.”  Healthy spirituality involves a constant process of growth and renewal, of growing like young Jesus, in wisdom and stature – in awareness of God’s presence in the small and the large; in ability to embrace as much reality – and novelty and diversity – as possible while preserving your expanding spirit.  Large theology is constantly growing, transforming, emerging, evolving, and enlightening.

Conversation between emerging Christians and process theologians invites us to innovation, growth, and creative transformation.  In the course of the Emergent Village conversation, many emergent folk challenged process theologians to speak in accessible ways and to descend from their intellectual mountaintops to respond to the hard-scrabble challenges of ministry, personal growth, and church life.  Many emergent folk challenged their process partners to move from head to heart and hands.  George Bernard Shaw once noted that “the professions are conspiracies against the laity” with their authority, power, and vocabulary.  While process theologians are seldom authoritarian professionally, the vocabulary of process often confuses and alienates even educated laypeople.  I know a pastor who preaches a full-throttle process sermon once a year: the people smile, nod their heads, and leave murmuring to one another, “Nice sermon.  But, I didn’t understand a word.  Our pastor’s really smart.  He must be, I think.”

Process theologians can take a cue from their evangelical brothers and sisters: without comprising the quest for truth, they can ask themselves “Does it preach?” when they share process theology in public settings.  Process theology is experiential and needs to honor the experiences of laypeople in its language and thought-forms.  It needs to see creative transformation as affecting its language and its relevance to global and personal change.

Emerging Christians challenge process theologians to “make it real” and touch the ground, making contact with real world situations, and transforming lives and healing the good earth.

Process theologians have something to share with the emerging church.  Often emerging Christians have scorned metaphysics and theological visions, preferring a more iconoclastic deconstructionist approach characteristic of the work of John Caputo and Peter Rollins.  While deconstruction is part of creative practice, faith lives by what it affirms not just by what it denies.  Process theology provides a fluid, open-ended, life-changing and constructive vision of God, the world, and ourselves.

Process theology invites emerging Christians to see faith in terms of relationship, dynamic change, possibility, and open-endedness.  Old theological wineskins can no longer contain the new wine of emergence.  Calvin and Barth can no longer provide an adequate theological diet for emerging Christians.  They are far too parochial, too wedded to the past, too supernaturalistic, to respond to the incarnational, sensational, and revelational experiences of emerging Christians.

Process theology helps emerging Christians understand Christ globally as well as locally.  Christ is not the possession of the church, Christianity, or any theological system.  Christ is everywhere, touching everyone in every continent.  Christ’s revelation is unique yet continuous with every other healthy faith experience.  Other faiths are not godless, but emerge from God’s revelation in a particular time and place.  Christ gives us a democracy of revelation in which all of us can become vehicles of God’s inspiration.  Despite greed and error, we live in a god-filled universe where each encounter can place us on holy ground.

Process theology provides a theological undergirding – fluid and growing – for emerging Christianity’s vision of multi-sensory, global, experiential, and grassroots spirituality.  God is sensational – omnipresence means that every sense organ is a window into grace and that human creativity shares in God’s ongoing creativity.   Together, process and emerging Christians can creatively transform each other, bringing forth a holistic and lively vision of human life, worship, ethics, spirituality, and commitment to healing the earth.  Let the conversations continue!

Emergent Village Conference on Process Theology:  Day 2

Christology is not a Disease, but a Pathway to Finding God Everywhere

“If Jesus Christ is the center, there is no boundary.”  My friend, teacher, and mentor John Cobb shared his thoughts this morning on Christology, that is, how we understand Jesus Christ’s relationship to us and the world.  This is truly a treat, to hear Professor Cobb, now 86, speak of lively, open-spirited, and innovative Christianity.  John is one of the great theologians of our time, whose work has illuminated and expanded the impact of process theology.  It is appropriate that John Cobb be speaking at the Emergent Village Conversations.

To some, Christology sounds like a medical term, and, from my perspective, Christology can be a disease – it can limit our understanding of God’s revelation and salvation to people who hold “orthodox” visions of faith, and this can exclude other Christians.  It can present a picture of God as authoritarian and domineering rather than loving.  It can define God’s nature primarily in terms of power and thus subordinate love to unilateral power.  From this perspective, God might want to love us and save us, but God can’t truly love us because God has set limits to loving us based on doctrine, creed, and confession of faith.  God might want to save us, but God’s justice requires God to discard all humans who don’t follow a particular faith statement, usually  based on a literal understanding of scripture.

Many Christologies are disease-ridden, if disease implies causing unnecessary suffering and pain, most especially if God’s light only shines in one place, leaving the rest of the world in darkness – of sin, death, and damnation. Although God is uniquely present in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ – and Jesus had a unique relationship with God – God’s witness, I believe, is everywhere.  Other religious traditions are not falls from grace, nor are they godless falsehoods, but reflections of God’s presence in a variety of cultural and social settings.  When the settings differ, God’s revelations differ.  We do not live in a God-less universe, but a God-filled universe in which God responds to each creature and culture uniquely, shaping it and guiding it, and creatures respond uniquely to God, moving God closer or further from God’s vision for the world.

Iranaeus proclaimed that the glory of God is a human being fully alive.  Accordingly, there is no conflict with the divine and human in Jesus: more divine inspiration increases, rather than decreases, human creativity and agency.  As attuned to the divine fully, Jesus’ creativity and freedom were expanded.  In being attuned to Jesus, our freedom and creativity, and – surprisingly to some people – openness to learning from other faiths, science, literature, and critics of faith.

Christ is the image of hope and health, healing and joining all of us in a wonderful journey, whether or not we are Christians, in being God’s companions in healing the earth.   This is good news for an emerging church!

Emergent Village 2012:  Process Theology and the Emerging Church, Day One

What a day of rejoicing – process theologians and emerging Christians in conversation. Theological energy was bursting forth and passion for ministry was palpable.  For a long time, I have felt that process theology is an ideal companion to emerging Christianity.  While many emergent Christians have been influenced by the deconstructionist postmodernism of John Caputo and Peter Rollins, I believe that the multi-sensory, multi-theological, community-oriented vision of emerging Christianity needs an equally dynamic, multi-faceted, relational, and imaginative theological vision.  Transformation always involves destruction, but it also involves growth and construction.  This is the spirit of process theology.

On day one of the conversation, the dialogue was lively, inspired by the insights of Claremont School of Theology’s Professor Monica Coleman in dialogue with Doug Pagitt and Julie Clawson.  During one of the breaks, a theologically inclined businesswoman, mother, active in a Northern California house church struggled with the question of divine omniscience – that is, God’s all-encompassing awareness. “I want to hold onto the belief that God knows everything in the future, but process theologians dispute that.  What’s the problem with God knowing the future?”  Her question was theologically nuanced and important.  It represented the divide between theologies that focus on eternity and independence and those that focus on change and interdependence, those that believe perfection involves completeness and those that see perfection as every growing, ever evolving, and ever expanding.

My response struck the heart of emerging Christianity.  Emergence is about novelty, about new things coming into being.  Shouldn’t this apply to God as well? A God of emergence is constantly doing and experiencing new things. Process theologians believe that a God who knows everything actual as each moment emerges is more alive and active than one who knows – and in theory, has planned – the future in advance.  Process theologians believe that God has a clear vision of future possibilities, but only as possible, not yet actualized.  God has a positive vision, appropriate to each moment, but it awaits our embodiment and unique response.

A God who knows everything in advance can experience nothing new and can change nothing beyond what God already knows or has chosen.  Accordingly, God has fewer options than we do.  For us, the future as we experience it is open, provides opportunities for innovation, and is full of surprises.  For the God who knows everything in advance, life is a perpetual Ground Hog Day – repeated over and over again; whether moments of joy or moments of trauma, genocide, and abuse.

If the world’s future is already known by God, then our prayers make no difference in shaping the future or bringing something new to God’s experience. Our actions add nothing, nor do they matter.  An open future for God and us makes room for our creativity and our role in shaping the world.  It invites us to claim our role as God’s partners in healing the world – a world which is lively, unsettled, up for grabs, yet hopeful and filled with wondrous possibility for those who join God’s movement toward planetary healing.  This is a world where emergence truly matters!

(For more on the process vision, see Bruce Epperly, Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed and Emerging Process: Adventurous Theology for a Missional Church.)