Sublime

The man I came to know well, over burgers and coffee and old photos and worn bible pages, was a man childlike and growing to the end, proof that the “good news” he always preached could be lived for a lifetime and remain good. His faith and life’s accomplishments did not produce a dour moralism. It did not produce a Graceland-sized ego. For all his

Because Jesus Christ is the paradigm for what the divine image is to mean for human life – the paradigm for what it means both to have the divine image for one’s own and to be transformed according to it – the Genesis discussion of human beings’ creation in the image of God can be viewed in specifically Christological terms.

Hypostasis, from the perspective of the Cappadocians,15 is a zone where the divine and the human not only

Christian culture making grows through networks, but it is not a matter of networking. It is a matter of community—a relatively small group of people whose common life is ordered by love. Love is a fragile thing that does not scale well. It seems small beside the towers of Babel and Babylon. It is like a mustard seed, tiny and seemingly vulnerable.

So for Edwards, both personally and pastorally, divine action was bound in how you do things. When everyone is concerned with how they do things, flourishing (of capital or in family life) witnesses to our nearness to God.

Paul is evangelized by the act of ministry, by a minister sharing in his broken person. Paul must give himself over to the new narrative shape of Christ; he must have faith that this new narrative is the constitution of reality—that indeed from death comes life.

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.