Does God Speak?

Does God really “speak”?  Did he speak about slavery?  Christians describe the Scriptures as the “word of God”.  If, as the ancient traditions say, “God speaks”, how does he speak?  Personally, I do not think that God has vocal chords nor does he cause vibrations that activate my hearing so that I can hear him “speak”.  If it happens, I think it happens in some other way.  And, if when we humans write or speak words that in faith we describe as “words of God”, and even in faith adopting the presupposition that they are the “words of God”, do they remain the words of God forever?  Maybe some or much of human words is mixed with God’s words.  Or maybe God’s words are human words spoken for God as best we can.  As we make better choices, the best of the past is no longer any good and “God speaks anew”.  Who decides which words are the “words of God”?  We have the preserved traditions, but I think that they fail us too many times.  I have heard all the reasons why the Bible is “FOR” slavery, and I have heard all the reasons why the Bible is “AGAINST” slavery.  If the Bible is the “word of God”, complete for all time, why would it have been so hard for someone to have it written, “Do not own another human being”?  Even assuming the traditions are true, there seems to be a thousand interpretations of every word.  Some say that the “religious authorities” decide what the “word of God” is.  The pope is an example.  Certainly the religious leaders of the US South said that slavery was endorsed and ordained by God.  Oops, I think they got it wrong or else God got it wrong.  Others say we must submit to the authority of tradition, much like the Greek Orthodox.  The Protestants say the Bible is the authority and when the problem with multiple interpretations raises its ugly head, some Protestants say that the Bible is “self evident truth” and, with passion and zeal and even combativeness, some want to impose their own version of “self evident truth” on everyone else.  Whatever the Bible meant or did not mean about slavery, many Christians in the US felt slavery was a perfectly good thing at least up until the Civil War and some persisted past that tragic history.  Others said that slavery was wrong long before the Civil War.  At least in the US, sometime around or just past the US Civil War, God finally made it clear…..Human slavery is wrong!  So maybe, a gradual building of a community’s inter-subjective consensus, periodically canonized, punctuated by individual and community crisis so strong that the old is cast aside and a new consensus emerges is a description of “God speaking”.  The emergence and creativity of the new becomes the “word of God”.  So maybe in the simplest terms, we make it up.  But for myself, I would add that in the creativity of the new that we make up, truly “God speaks”.  What took him so long regarding slavery?  Or did we take a long time to listen and hear?

CREATIVITY SUPRISE

One:                      God!  Bang? Or Bang! God?  Being Itself.  Heat, expansion, and the arrow of time starts to fly, forward it flies.  God before time, after time, God has time. God in time and more than time.

Two:                      God.  In the falling apart and the pulling together,

is there no big crunch?  God, the structure.  God in and God is and God of non-uniform density hangs the stars, the galaxies, and all the great forms of the universe.  Mystery pervades.

A grounding of all.

Hydrogen, helium, neutrinos, and photons swirl.

Protostars, black-body radiation, fusion begins, matter emerges, creativity stirs, stars are born.  Supergiants. Giants.  Dwarfs. Sub-dwarfs.  Yellow, red, hot white, black.

Elements, discrete associations, chemistry appears.  God’s cauldronic brew of quantum mechanics, electricity, and magnetism.  Everything is changing in ancient, deep time.  Do not lose patience, billions of years to go, God has time

A principle of exclusion, serendipitously, new things emerge. Great complexity. Infomatic matter, emergent of an immanent God.

Three:                   Planetismals circle the protostars, wanderers formed from disks of stardust, waiting to stagger across a great cathedral vault. Solar systems. Suns. A sun.  Emergent suprises.

Earth, our world, it melts.  Uranium and thorium and potassium are captured, boiling the core, heat flows, plates shift, continents drift.  Frozen accidents or frozen minds?

The geosphere, rocks…water….air….life.  Rocks harden, move, explode

Rocks, water, air, life!  Changing, moving complexity.  Small, hot planets with no air….escaped.  Large, cold planets with no air…compressed to liquid or solid.  Amazing earth with ice, liquid, and vapor all held in a narrow range.  Life, a reality of earth itself.

Four:                     Metabolism with unity and diversity.  Among all the chemical possibilities, why life?  Cells, multicellularity, animals, neurons and neural nets.  Noetic features deep in matter.  Behavior with purpose.  More mystery:  knowing, vocation, God.  Symmetry, cephalization.  Fish, bugs, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, hominids.  A long evolutionary process.  All with a place, a purposeful niche in which to compete.

Five:                      Primates, Apes.  Genes proceed but now learning and information and community emerge.  Biological fitness moves toward social fitness.  The bodies slow down and the mind speeds up.  Consciousness warms, grows hot, the bright flame of thought appears.

Homo sapiens survive.  Humankind.

Six:                         Transcendence’s appearance.  God spoke, but no one heard.  God speaks, humans hear.   Beginnings struggle to be understood by those who came from the beginnings.  Many knows the details, no one knows the mind of God.   Creativity races forward on a wave of words.  Good and evil, past and present, shall and shall not.  A place to choose, to fall back or to step forward, to not quite reach our humanity or to reach beyond all that we have been.

Seven:                  God rests in the temple universe.  We stand in awe of the starry vault of the heavens as we fall on our knees on the lands of our earthly home.

Spirituality and Religion

·         Spirituality without words is silent. Spirituality without acts is impotent. Religion without spirituality is false. The entire, complete experience of what is considered to be the most important in all of life is a spiritual experience that energizes the words of those that dare to speak and motivates the actions of those who act for the common good of all. Both the inner experience and the words and actions of the prophet are needed for a vibrant religious faith.

Creativity and Hope

·         49 years ago our family moved to a little town in Florida, Jupiter. We lved in a house on Pinetree Circle. In front of the house was a small hedge of Ixora under the front picture window. As I grew and the Ixora grew, I learned how to care for that little hedge. Making sure it had the right nutrients to have wonderful blooms and trimming it so it looked neat and tidy.

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·         Occassionally, I have the privilege of trimming the small Xiora hedge that grows in front of my house in Miami,FL. That simple act reminds me of the past and gives me hope for the future, ever grateful to be able to cooperate with all of the creativity that surrounds us. Join with me in celebrating the guidance of creativity that draws near to each of us and finds us in these kinds of miraculous moments of remembering andpri privilege of trimming the small Ixora hedge that grows in front of my house in Miami, FL.  That simple act reminds me of the past and gives me hope for the future, ever grateful to be able to cooperate with the creativity that surrounds us.  Join with me in celebrating the guidance of creativity that draws near to each of us and finds us in these kinds of miraculous moments of remembering and hope.

• Many different views related to sex can be found in the group of writings that we call the Bible. From a Christian standpoint, many of them would be judged to be wrong. Examples:


1. Executing those who engage in sexual intercourse during the seven days of the menstrual period.

2. Stoning for both the man and woman for adultery.

3. Toleration of polygamy.

4. Levirate marriage.

5. Endogamy.

6. Cutting off a woman's hand for touching a man's private parts.

7. Social regulations surrounding adultery, incest, rape, and prostitution considered mainly from the perspective of male property rights over women.

8. A bride found not to be a virgin should be stoned to death.

Some Christians, exercising their religious liberty and the right of personal conscience along with a Christocentric interpretation of their Christian faith, now assert that passages in the Bible related to homosexuality have either been misinterpreted or are simply wrong. These Christian may be wrong, but those that follow a more traditional view may also be wrong just as some Christians in the past were wrong about their interpretation of the Bible regarding slavery.

An Ecumenical Christian Theology?

In 1988, Hans Kung's book "Theology for the Third Millennium" was published in English by Doubleday.  He argued for a theology that served the entirety of Christianity while remaining  intent on the Scripture and the Gospel.  He called for a theology the respected tradition, theologians should be responsible in the face of history without ignoring contemporary issues.  He wanted a theology that was Christocentric, distinctively Christian while addressing the whole globe.  Finally, he wanted a theology that was occupied with teaching and truth while remaining practical, that did not ignore life, renewal and reform.

He contends that we are in a shift of paradigms from the most current modern enlightenment paradigm to what he calls an ecumenical paradigm.  Such a shift takes quite a while.  Many of us were born during the shift and the shift will continue well after we are dead.  Will Christianity survive?  What do you think?

Christian Unity and Diversity

Humans like to categorize. In many cases, we categorize based upon similarities. Apples, bananas, and oranges are fruits. Green beans, corn, and broccoli are vegetables. There is almost always disagreement about what belongs or does not belong in a particular category. Some people think tomatoes are vegetables. Others think they are fruits. We categorize almost everything: food, houses, plants, minerals, gases, solids, ideas, politics, nations, races, and people. This process helps us understand our world. Most words in and of themselves are categories. Food is something that humans eat as opposed to things we do not eat. Categories are how we think. Categorizing helps us understand our reality and communicate with other people.




Christians, by way of a long and complicated history, have attempted to define what a Christian is. How do you know if you are a Christian or not? Who qualifies to be a Christian? Christians have attempted to define the category of “Christian” and to establish the boundaries of the category. One of the earliest controversies within Christianity was over whether a non-Jew could be a Christian. Did one need to become a Jew first in order to be a Christian? Increasingly, Christians defined the category by what beliefs were necessary in order to be a Christian. If one did not believe certain things, then one was not a Christian. Christians would claim that the value of being a Christian was a happy life on earth and eternal life with God. If one was not a Christian, then life would be incomplete and eternity would be spent apart from God. For many Christians, “correct belief” was very important for how they defined the category of Christian. If one did not have a “correct belief”, then one did not receive the Christian reward.



Today, “correct belief” remains the way that many define the category of Christian. However, it is obvious to everyone that those who claim to be Christian hold a great diversity of beliefs, many of which are contradictory. With all of the competing ideas about what is “correct”, how can one ever know what is right? Is Christianity really about being “right”? Increasingly, some Christians embrace this diversity as a good thing. Beliefs result from many influences that result in our own individual perspective that is right for each individual but cannot encompass the whole truth. Our beliefs may not even be “correct”; however, our Christian perspective guides us to a life that is whole, complete, and satisfying.



Generally, when I try to express an ecumenical perspective of Christianity, I observe three basic reactions. From those who embrace diversity, I observe a resistance to any description of what is common to all Christians. I think they resist any common description of Christianity because they fear that it will be prescriptive. It is no wonder that they have this kind of fear; because, for those who emphasize unity, I observe a tendency to make Christianity exclusive to their own understanding of the faith. Orthodox Christians emphasize the authority of tradition, Roman Catholics emphasize the authority of the Pope, and many Protestants emphasize the authority of the Scriptures. Each has a tendency to use authority to enforce a particular set of “correct beliefs” which almost always results in excluding someone from the faith. Others fear that “ecumenical” means reducing Christianity to the “least common denominator.”



For myself, diversity is obvious and good. Each of us needs to decide for ourselves what is bad, good, and better. Diversity of opinion is not going away, and openness to different opinions may enrich and improve your life. However, there must be some unity or commonality to the category of Christian in order for the category of Christian to have any meaning at all. Finally, Christianity is not arithmetic. Ecumenism may emphasize commonality but it has nothing to do with diminishing Christianity by calling it the “least” nor does it have anything to do with the arithmetical concept of denominators.



So, from my own ecumenical Christian perspective:



1. A Christian SELF identifies as a Christian.

2. A Christian starts and founds Christian identity in the Jewish and Christian writings contained within the Bible.

3. A Christian experiences and reacts to reality from a life orientation of faith and trust.

4. A Christian centers life in an understanding of Jesus Christ.

5. A Christian acts for the common good of all, even in the face of hate, anger, or malice.