Words of Gratitude and Challenge: In Remembrance of John B. Cobb
For all that has been – thanks!
For all that shall be – yes!
These words from United Nations Secretary Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961), who was both a mystic and global politician, express the spirit of my reflections on the life and impact of John Cobb. I had intended to share them on February 15, but they are as authentic today as they would have been in the celebration of John’s 100th birthday. My words constellate around the theme of “Jesus, John Cobb, and the Future of Progressive Christianity.”
For all that has been – thanks! And so, I express gratitude for John Cobb’s impact on me as a theologian, pastor, and person.
I have known John Cobb for over fifty years. I first met Dr. Cobb through his writing. As a college junior in 1973, I took a course in process theology at San Jose State from Richard Keady, a recently minted Ph.D. from Claremont, and student of Cobb’s. During my studies with Keady, I read both God and the World and Is It Too Late? A year later, my pastor John Akers asked me to teach an adult faith formation class on God and the World, thus beginning my pilgrimage in teaching. John was the first theologian to shape my life as a teacher as well as student. Claremont became my theological mecca, and, in the Fall of 1975, I began working on my M.A. and Ph.D. at Claremont.
I remember a conversation with two fellow young theologians, Marc Ford and Gary Bollinger, midway through our studies at Claremont in which we wondered if between the creative publications of John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, there would be anything left for us to write. There was! One of Cobb’s gifts was to awaken the imagination of his students and to guide us to our own creative adventures. He believed that we could go beyond his academic achievements and chart theological and spiritual pathways of our own. Books by my classmates and fellow Cobb students -Jay McDaniel, Catherine Keller, Mary Elizabeth Moore, Rita Nakashima Brock, Marc Ford, Sondra Lubarsky, and Rebecca Parker as well as myself – have forged new pathways in process theology, spirituality, interfaith conversation, feminist theology, and ecology. The work of next generations scholars like Thomas Jay Oord, Sheri Kling, Tripp Fuller, Andrew Davis, Andrew Schwartz, and Timothy Murphy, to name a few, also bears the imprint of Cobb’s cosmopolitan spirit and are taking Cobb’s impact to infinity and beyond. Cobb always applauded our achievements, and often wrote forwards for books, even as he made suggestions as to how we might go even further in our theological peregrinations.
Plato once said that philosophy without love is dead. In academics and life, a person’s character and work often are at cross purposes. In John’s case, his compassionate approach to theology – his own version of God’s creative-responsive love – mirrored his caring spirit toward his students. His life reflected seamlessly his faith, and he was truly a “spirit of gentleness.” He regularly enquired about my personal well-being when I was a student at Claremont, alerting me that I mattered to him and that Claremont would be a place where I could grow in wisdom and stature.
Over the five decades Cobb’s influence has enabled me to embrace my own vocation as a theologian shaping the process theology I first encountered in 1973, and in my case, claiming my vocation in integrating process theology with ministry and congregational life, healing and wholeness, spirituality and mysticism, contemplative activism, and open-spirited understandings of Jesus.
John’s influence is present in my growing concern for the role of progressive Christianity in our time of national and planetary crisis. I have come to see the importance of a robust, holistic, spiritually inspired process theology in providing a positive vision of change and activism in which progressive Christianity, often at the margins of popular Christianity, can become a catalyst in new frontiers of Christian involvement in healing the world. In which the periphery can become the leading edge, and a mustard seed can grow into an abundant tree, giving shelter and inspiration to the world.
Like John, I have come to see the importance of reclaiming the evangelical spirit of Jesus in transforming progressive Christianity, not a doctrinal or imperialistic Jesus, but a Jesus whose living presence opens us to truth wherever it is found and in partnership with the wisdom of seekers of all religious traditions and those outside the traditional wisdom paths, agnostics, atheists, the none, and done. As Cobb said in Christ in a Pluralistic Age, Christ is the way that excludes no authentic spiritual way.
As a cradle evangelical Christian, when the name meant something positive, a personal and intimate relationship with Jesus, whose faith meandered through the mystical magical mystery tour of the sixties and early seventies, to a reclaiming of a holistic Christianity committed to Jesus as an Intimate Companion and Guide, with whom “I can walk and talk,” I have come to believe that an open-spirited Christianity must reclaim the fullness of mind, body, and spirit, emotions and intellect, and contemplation and action. Faith is not merely an intellectual or activist enterprise, as is the case among many mainstream and progressive Christian leaders; it must be intimate and incarnational.
In living with Cobb’s vision, and embracing it in my own way, I have found the Infinite and Intimate, the Possible and Personal, the Theological and Tactile, are one in the Heart of the Universe, to whom all hearts are open and all desires known and who provides guidance for each moment of life and for the long haul of the moral and spiritual arcs of history. We cannot turn our backs on the historical process but must have eyes on the prize of God’s Grand Vision of truth, beauty, and goodness, nor can we forget that the universe is healed one moment at a time as we awaken to God’s aim, the best for this impasse, realistic and concrete yet aspirational and inspirational in the penultimate decisions made in our personal and political lives.
Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, in describing the prophets, that when a soul is saved, it is as if the whole universe is saved; and when a soul is lost, it is as if the whole universe is lost. In truth, the world is saved one moment at a time, incarnating the moral and spiritual arcs of our lives and history in the ambiguities of our time. And John has been a catalyst for the quest to save the world!
For all that shall be – yes! There is a great “yes,” the great yes that calls us forward to the dream of Shalom. The great “yes” of the not-yet-realized vision of process theology, the great yes of John Cobb’s vision embodied in our lives and the world, and the great “yes” of Jesus, the Heart of the Universe, who heals and empowers the Holy Adventure that inspires and motivates our adventures to come.
Thank you, Dr. Cobb, for all that has been and for all that will be.
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Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ, Bethesda, Maryland and a professor in theology and spirituality at Wesley Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), he is the author of over eighty books, including “Homegrown Mystics: Restoring the Soul of Our Nation through the Healing Wisdom of America’s Visionaries,” “Saving Progressive Theology to Save the World,” “Jesus: Mystic, Healer, and Prophet,” and “The God of Tomorrow: Whitehead and Teilhard on Metaphysics, Mystics, and Mission.”
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