process musings

This Trinitarian pattern…keeps alive an obsolete, parochial perception of cosmic history in which humans were created shortly after the beginning of the earth and the Christian experience of Christ is at the center, with a couple of millennia to go before the “end.” What does this mean when we now know of an eighteen-billion-year process of cosmogenesis and a five-billion year gestation of the planet earth, in which homo sapiens occupy a tiny, recent moment of only some 100,000 years? What do beliefs such as that humans are the sole “image of God” mean in this vastly enlarged perspective?
~Rosemary Radford Ruether

Any theology that seeks to answer any questions today must be willing to take into account the various other disciplines as talking partners in the development of a postmodern or post-postmodern theology. If so, theology just becomes arrogant, precisely because its statements are void of interaction with the rest of the world. It seeks to give answers which are not to the questions humanity is asking. Theology springs from the interplay of life realized and reflection of it in the religious life, strengthening or even changing religious dogma. In the quote above, we see just this. Reuther inquires about the the starting point of theology as well as how theology should be discussed in light of new findings in science, history, etc., etc.

For some this would be an atrocity, rethinking theological dogma. But if it no longer applies to the realities of the present world, then what shall we do? If it stifles religious life in which develops life itself, then what is its purpose (Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 137)? It creates evil rather than good.