Sublime

It was boboism that radically changed our conception of faith formation, allowing youthfulness to mutate the transcendent call of Jesus to follow into a therapeutic pursuit of the self without divine action.

As industrialization took hold, we needed pastors to check our secular excesses and to encourage us to live upright lives, particularly now that most of us were living in new urban centers, where temptation was ripe. We needed pastoral exhortation not to keep us from hell (as Edwards would believe) but to allow us to flourish, as an end in itself.

This history of ours has been flowing on strong undercurrents toward what Charles Taylor called “the great unlearning of the languages of transcendence.”5