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What is Open and Relational Theology?

What is Open and Relational Theology?
You may have heard the phrase Open & Relational Theology more these days, but maybe you aren't sure what it's all about.  The following is a good summary of Open & Relational Theology based on the ideas of Thomas Jay Oord. It also does an excellent job of Oord’s solution to the problem of evil.
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Love Is and Why it Matters

Love Is and Why it Matters
ometimes, what we generally accept as the loving thing to do (with the best of intentions) can, in fact, be unloving. When we start with what love is, it helps shape the ways we choose to love.
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Agape: An Evolution of Love

Agape: An Evolution of Love
Agape is an interesting Greek term. Ask five people; you'll get seven different definitions. Most agree that it is a unique kind of Love. However, a survey of the New Testament and one soon discovers that Agape wasn’t the special word it would later become. Agape (and its conjugates) were used in various contexts and…
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God Must Love

God Must Love
Today’s post explores the Big Idea of Essential Kenosis and what it tells us about the nature/character of God.
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Still Becoming: Renovation

Still Becoming: Renovation
Open and Relational Theology has been a life saver for me, To be able to engage God and the world in ways that are consistent with my experience and intuitive sense of the God-who-is-love via the new eyes of good history, scripture, anthropology, philosophy, science and cosmology. It is affording me a way towards a more whole, very human life in the ongoing journey of becoming love.
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Helplessness of God’s Love

Helplessness of God’s Love
“What does the helplessness of God’s love mean for us? Simply, that divinity is no longer a power over us but now within us. God’s love becomes the human power to love, and this power to love, welling up from within, can face all obstacles, including the fear of death, because one no longer fears…
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The Heart is Deceitful? Not so Fast

The Heart is Deceitful? Not so Fast
The scriptures speak from many voices with different experiences and different contexts.  So we need to be careful when we build a cornerstone of our theological worldview on a single verse.  One such example is Jeremiah 17:9. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Is the heart deceitful?…
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The Dark Night

The Dark Night
We are raised to work harder, strive, stretch, brutalize the flesh and get what we want. Activity, or more accurately, productivity has become a sacred virtue in our culture.
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Two Parades. The Lie of Sacred Violence

Two Parades. The Lie of Sacred Violence
It was the beginning of Passover as Jesus and his friends headed to Jerusalem for the to celebrate Israel's liberation from Egypt.  Word spread that He was on His way to the city. People ran out to meet this Jesus who was taking the land by storm, with his radical teachings of love; turning the…
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The Slap

The Slap
Rock’s ‘joke’ at Pinket Smith expense prompted her husband (and that nights Best Actor winner) Will Smith to leave his seat, walk onto the stage, and slap Chris Rock. Returning to his seat, Will Smith told Rock in no uncertain terms that he was to stop the cruel jokes at his Jada Pinket-Smith’s expense.
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