Rudeness was so threatening because it showed that your dedication was not to God, and therefore you were far from divine action.

The affirmation of this disenchanted world wins us many gains but in turn strips away a meaning system that made divine action as obvious and formative in people’s lives as market capitalism is today.

adding to a further division between people’s imagination and divine action. Most people assume that anything is permitted as long it doesn’t violate two things.

What makes the pastoral (or better, the ministerial) remain significant, even up against these transitions, is its ability to host an encounter with personhood. It appears, both in lived experience and the tradition, that divine action comes in and through personhood.

The pastor is not the one who saves people from any or all of the impingements. Rather, the pastor is the one who reminds the community that though God seems absent, nevertheless the God who is a minister arrives right here in the middle of such events of impingement, when things seem so hard.

But the pastor can, as a primary element of his vocation, help his people be open to God arriving, even in his immanent frame.

A more faithful—and realistic—option is to simply, but profoundly, teach people to pray, so that instead of buying up their immanent attentions, we can together as a community take on a broader purview that is open to see the movements of divine action coming in and through the encounter of persons in ministry.

The pastor, then, must do something much more difficult than our ancestors had to: she must contend that a personal God can act in an impersonal universe and therefore challenge the theory that the universe is closed.

It was in this environment that the New Age movement would begin, seeking paranormal, experiential spirituality. In Edwards’s day everyone needed to conform to keep the devil in the woods, and in Beecher’s and Fosdick’s days democratic conformity could produce human flourishing. A new expressive individualism now dawned, which asserted that your ow