Sublime

But there was also a major theological slippage that, starting at least in the 1960s, flattened our conceptions of transcendence or revelation and more generally moved our understanding of faith formation in unhelpful directions (including manifestations of MTD).

so Barth had to start all over, seeking a way to speak of the coming of a transcendent God into the immanent frame of modern life.

Warren’s building, and his own style, represented an openness, even a partnership, in helping individuals find their own purpose by allowing Jesus to help each person flourish and overcome the malaise that the age of authenticity seemed to leave in the wake of its individualized freedom. Yet Warren did not do this by speaking against individualized

has so perverted Eros that it’s led us to assume that any relationship of friendship and care has a desire for sex hidden within it. We assume at some deep cultural level that human beings are not fundamentally persons needing the motion (acts) of love and participation but ultimately just selfish—Eros-absent—individuals on the hunt for something t

We have entered the age of authenticity, and youthfulness has become a central strategy to achieve the authentic. Rather than subtraction, we’ve added layers of authenticity and youthfulness, creating forms of cultural and social life where “the God gap,” for many, simply isn’t there.

The problem of secular 3 isn’t that fewer people are going to our congregations but rather that many people feel alienated. Inside that alienation, divine action becomes opaque.

authenticity were in themselves problematic, failing to recognize that the idealism of the counterculture would strip them of transcendence too, making divine action flat.

Angrily bound in the immanent frame, a group of pastors and professors decided that the only way to deal with a secular age was to destroy it. Returning to the fundamentals—to the sources (the Bible and creeds) before the immanent frame challenged them—they

is right for congregations and denominations to value sustainability. But we should also recognize that what is sustainable is determined by the goods of dynamic stabilization. More work needs to be done to think about sustainability within a very different horizon: the cruciform good life.