Sublime

what I definitely believe is that the great religions, all of them and the great mystical traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, and so on, have central truths that they hold in common, and that these are a kind of wisdom that are not appreciated, unless one is brought up in a tradition that helped one see

them. And our tradition is dead against seeing

the future of the church is ancient:

What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? What if you are defined not by what you know but by what you desire? What if the center and seat of the human person is found not in the heady regions of the intellect but in the gut

I want to supplement Willard’s emphasis on the individual practice of the spiritual disciplines with what might be a counterintuitive thesis in our “millennial” moment: that the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!

The great nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to defend Christianity to his friends, whom he called “the great cultured despisers.”4 Their antagonism toward the church had become cultural (not spiritual; it was about an aesthetic of pleasure, not an encounter with the transcendent).5

In the shadow of Secular 3, faith is flattened into a natural and material realm of church participation and the willful decision to believe certain things. It can only be about affiliation and assimilation.

community. The church is the only collective in society that exists solely for personhood itself (theologically, it has no other purpose).6