Sublime

Rosa uses decay rate to explore the acceleration of our social lives in relation to technological and social acceleration. Decay rates of both technology and the norms of our social lives were once much slower. This is because the present is not what it used to be. Our present has been compressed.

Throughout volumes 1 and 2 I’ve claimed that Jesus Christ becomes present when we give and receive ministry person to person. Bonhoeffer can claim that Jesus Christ exists as church-community because the church-community is in the form of personhood, and Jesus Christ is present in and through personhood (this is deeply incarnational).

Yet what’s fascinating is that Henry upped the ante. He called for a change in the conception of the pastor. Henry claimed that the pastor is to witness to this divine

The purpose of the cultural analysis above is to show that when the good life is sped up to living multiple lifetimes (intragenerational), the decay rate is short and the present is compressed—which puts the denomination in crisis.

To lose our personhood for the sake of exponential increase in the speed of motion is to give us growth in impersonal realities at the cost of personhood. Modernity has succumbed to the temptation to choose speed and growth over personhood.

With Rosa and Charles Taylor, I’m maintaining that our shared and contested sense of the good life is fundamental to our ways of being in the world. Therefore, I agree that technological acceleration has shifted the imagination of the church.

Bonhoeffer might have argued that a true theological conception of persons that creates a community of persons allows for a resonance that is encountered as the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer asserts that something is fundamentally lost when the congregation evades a conception of persons. To see this again through Rosa, personhood is often obscured in the acceleration of modernity,27 where the present is compressed, the future and its newness are our aim, resources are our obsession, and dynamic stabilization is our hope.