This week I was able to attend the Emergent Village Theological Conversation, which was intended to be engagement with some of the foremost thinkers of process theology.  As a student at Claremont, the ideas were not knew to me, and I do not consider myself a process person.  Nonetheless, as I continue to struggle with questions about providence and God's sovereignty over the suicidal direction our planet and global economy seems to be taking, something from the conference did indeed take on new meaning for me that I'd like to share.  One of the main reasons I feel this way I think is because these new depths are not exclusive to process thinking but have already been implicit in the Christian tradition since Jesus's time.  It's clear that other people have recognized some of the same things.

Prior to this week in two different readings I came across the following:

"While personal concern is sustained by a continuously growing faith in the value and meaning of life, the deepest motivation [going into] the future is hope.  For hope makes it possible to look beyond the fulfillment of urgent wishes and pressing desires and offers a vision beyond human suffering and even death.  A Christian is a [person] of hope whose strength in the final analysis is based neither on self-confidence derived for [her] personality, or on specific expectations for the future, but on a promise given to [her] . . . This hope stretches far beyond the limitations of one's own psychological strength, for it is anchored not just in the soul of the individual but in God's self-disclosure in history. [The Christian life] therefore is not called Christian because it is permeated with optimism against all the odds of life, but because it is grounded in the historic Christ-event which is understood as a definitive breach in the deterministic chain of human trial and error, and as a dramatic affirmation that there is light on the other side of darkness.  Every attempt to attach this hope of visible symptoms in our surroundings becomes a temptation when it prevents us from the realization that promises, not concrete successes, are the basis of Christian[ living]." - From <em>The Wounded Healer</em> by Henri J. M. Nouwen

And at the more sophisticated philosophical level, G.F.W. Hegel says this, which I will relate to the quote above:

Without philosophical insight, the relationship of religion to the rest of consciousness is such that the two are conceived in isolation from each other.  They constitute two kinds of occupation, two regions of consciousness, between which we pass back and forth only alternately.  For our actual worldly doings, we have a number of workdays, during which we are concerned with our particular interests and our worldly goals - our needs, pleasures, and satisfaction in general.  Then there is Sunday, when all these things are set aside, when we collect ourselves, live for ourselves, i.e., for our true essence and for the essential higher nature that is within us, released from our absorption in necessary business and labor or every kind.  Free from labor and in contemplative mood, we raise ourselves above everyday life.  So pious [consciousness on the other hand] refers all purposes and objects to God as their infinite and ultimate source.

As Hegel then later puts, the task of philosophy of religion is to reconcile these two ends of life from their respective isolation from each other.  As brilliant and comprehensive of an attempt as Hegel made to do this, however, there is wide consensus today that he did not succeed.  The God's eye view as it were cannot be achieved, and the tension between these two poles of our existence remains.

What John Cobb reminded us this week was that at the end of the day, while he may not believe in God as having coercive power, it is the faithfulness of God through Jesus Christ rather than our own  that saves the world - which is the promise in which we have hope (Nouwen above) - but our job in the meantime is, while not putting trust in futile personal gain or even the success of national political projects, to strive vigorously in ways that allow for God's incredibly persuasive power to indeed work through us as we participate in the salvation of the world - literally - which is to say, in bringing about the divine commonwealth, or kingdom of God.

It's true that “we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness” (Galatians 5:5).  It's also true that we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

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