Louisville Process Theology Network

A Learning Process II

Sep 04, 2009

From Page 195 -- ?“Christian spirituality is not a matter of cultivating a certain part of ourselves that we call ?‘spirit?’, or achieving a state of psychic serenity untouched by the confusion and suffering inflicted by those ?‘others?’ who surround us in the world.

It is instead it a matter of engaging, with our freedom, that which is very much ?‘other?’ to us?” -- God?’s Holy Spirit?…

Christian spirituality is gospel-centered, meaning that it is defined by the good news from God concerning what God has accomplished in Jesus, and consists in a process of learning Jesus in a manner that transforms our lives according to the pattern of his own.

The argument of this book has been that this process of learning is necessarily both continuous and complex, because it requires not answering questions about a dead person in the past but relating to the mystery of a living person in the present?…. Having a living faith means responding at every moment to the living God?…. Since faith is a response to a living Lord who presses upon us at every moment, there is no time at which we can quit without betraying the entire process in which we have been engaged.

The process of learning Jesus is also complex. Earlier I suggested that philosophical traditions in the West have tended to favor simplicity and univocal presentation. In other words, truth is connected to unity, and opinion to multiplicity.

This perspective affects the learning of Jesus in two ways: by suppressing the complexity of the learning process itself, and by suppressing the complexity of images of Jesus. This dual tendency distorts the truth of personal and inter-subjective learning?…

The desire to find, declare, and propagate a simple and univocal Jesus who ?‘matches?’ an individual believer (or some group of believers) is in this instance idolatrous, since it exchanges the difficult and challenging truth for a counterfeit version that is more comfortable.

But, by ?‘truth?’ I do not mean some other single image of Jesus that is better than any of those being proposed. I mean instead that truth is a process of personal and inter-subjective learning. In the case of Jesus, such learning is complex because it involves both textural and non-textural sources, and because each of these sources involves a variety of elements."