Wisdom and Mindfulness: Embracing Open and Relational Theology Without Succumbing to Ten Temptations

Wisdom and Mindfulness

Embracing Open and Relational Theology
Without Succumbing to Ten Temptations

Affirming the God of
Noncontrolling Love

At their best, our lives are beautiful mosaics, adventures in continual becoming, through our constant interplay with God’s love and luring. God loves to participate in the endless wonder of becoming—endless creativity, spontaneity, change, evolution, transformation, and renewal. How much more powerful and relational that is than the vision of God who is either a controlling puppet-master or a distant hands-off observer. God does not offer a roadmap that our lives, our relationships, or our community must follow. Yet, God can lure us out of exile and help us to get back home. To paraphrase Jeremiah, God has “a deeply loving desire for our welfare and not for harm, to give us a future with hope.”

Wells, Jeffry. Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology (p. 332). SacraSage Press. Kindle Edition.

While Avoiding
Ten Temptations

1. Some people have no need to deconstruct.

To forget that not all people need to deconstruct their images of God because the images they received in childhood were "open and relational" from the outset.

2. Context determines so much.

To forget that any theology has its meaning and value, not simply in the ideas, but in how they are constellated in the context of a person's life, and that some theologies thought "bad" by open and relational theologians may function in "good" ways for people relative to context.

3. God is not a concept.

To forget that God is a universal Spirit of noncontrolling love, like wind or breath, not merely the grammatical subject of a theological declaration or a focal object in the imagination.

4. Religion is more Than Belief.

To forget that religion has seven dimensions—experience, ritual and liturgy, ethics, myth and stories, community, artistic and musical, and theological-philosophical; and that for some people, the theological-philosophical dimension is less important than the others.

5. For some people, the Horizontal Sacred is enough.

To forget that some people experience "the sacred" horizontally, in relationships with other people and the natural world, even as they don't experience it vertically, in relationships with a higher power.

6. Love is Beauty.

To overemphasize the moral side of religious life and neglect the aesthetic side. To forget that beauty (richness of experience in relationships) can be as important religiously as love, and that, deep down, love is a form of beauty.

7. Language (including language about God) is a Lure for Feeling.

To forget that language, including language about God, is but a lure for feeling, and that most language about God is metaphorical, even as it may also illuminate aspects of the divine.

8. The World is immanent in God,

To emphasize God’s immanence in the world as a luring presence but neglect the world’s immanence in God, forgetting that the hills and rivers, trees and stars, are part of God.

9. God is more than a Lure; God is also a Deep Listening.

To overemphasize God as a luring presence in the world, understood as divine agency, and underemphasize God's empathic reception of the world, in a spirit of listening and companionship, such that the world is part of God's life.

10. Sometimes we can talk about God too much.

To forget that the lure of God is most effective in our lives, not when we talk about God, but when we respond to the lure. Sometimes we can confuse talking about God from being with God.