“[W]e who deconstruct begin to imagine life outside systems that confine us. We realize we make actual free choices,” co-authors Thomas Oord and Tripp Fuller contend. “So we embark on an adventure to discover a world beyond what’s expected.” Deconstruction, they explain, “can be thought of as the demolition of a house built on absolute certainty.”
“The alternative position they propose,” Patheos unfurls, is open and relational theology. This, Jim Burklo, executive director of Progressive Christianity Uniting, affirms, is “a pathway into a more sensible, compassionate form of Christianity.” It is “clearly influenced by his [Oord’s] PhD studies in process theology,” he adds. So it is that Oord and Fuller remark, “[O]ur lives and thinking are always in process,” and so we move, “moment by moment, into an undetermined and unknown future.” Open and relational theology “prioritizes ‘becoming’ over ‘being’.” It can, Patheos attests, “reconfigure faith.”
Both of the book’s authors are theologians and scholars who, in fashioning God After Deconstruction, have produced what Patheos judges “a great primer (with fantastic sources for further reading)” for those “who want a vision of the divine in harmony with what they know about themselves and the world of science, arts, and humanities.”
God After Deconstruction
By Thomas Oord & Tripp Fuller
SacraSage Press 2024