Sublime

the God of Israel is an arriving, acting God, a God who is satisfied to be known in historical events—the exodus and the resurrection.

More powerful than the compression of technology, particularly for the congregation, is the decay rate of social norms.6 As the present becomes more compressed by the acceleration of modernity, the church seems not only antiquated but immoral in its slow practices of prayer, reading Scripture, and humble service, as well as in its moral sources in

These new churches in suburban America were the height of secular: no time-bending gravity permeated their walls. They looked more like Johnson & Johnson headquarters than the Duomo. But these buildings played an important part in the recasting of the pastor.

As the oft-quoted poet Robert Frost mused, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Home is a tremendously weighty word—filled with smells and sounds and memories of pain and hope.

Home is also a golden thread weaved throughout the biblical narrative. As theologian Douglas Meeks comments in his book God the Eco

It’s not that people didn’t do or create new things. They did, but they did so outside the moral horizon of innovation and the idea of the new as a fundamental good. People stumbled onto the new, even welcomed it, but there was no drive for the new as a good. It was better to trust the past tradition than to aim for the new.

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.

the age of authenticity is the search for spirituality inside this immanent frame. Locked inside this cell, we look within ourselves for something more, for a way to re-enchant. In the age of authenticity, the “re” here can refer only to something like “reenact” rather than “return.”

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.