Sublime

A third possibility, sometimes adopted, is to take certain well-known and highly controversial passages and to attempt an exegesis based on each verse by itself, working eventually towards some kind of synthesis. This, which can look fine to begin with, actually puts the cart before the horse. It is unhelpful simply to begin with tough, gritty apho

that this obsession with youthfulness is a vice (which I believe is the condition that brings on the disease of MTD itself). The obsession with youthfulness often goes unquestioned because no institution, collective, or movement has a future without up-and-coming new members to attend to its ideas, structures, and interests.

A congregation that carries children, as Meredith’s does, is a life-community, a community not hunting resources but encountering resonance. This congregation’s life is not in its innovation but in its encounter with the concrete others whom it ministers to and is ministered by.

The life-defining norms to which we hold ourselves (God) can exist only by being embodied in our practices as individual social actors (Christ), who can live on and be recognized for who we are only through the institutional relations that we share (the Holy Spirit).

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).

men to endure the plurality of different patterns of life and to use their differences for productive and fertile developments.

I heard John Stott say that some people had been talking about “the irreducible minimum gospel.” He dismissed such an idea. “Who wants an irreducible minimum gospel?” he asked. “I want the full, biblical gospel.”

production and reproduction have fundamentally structured our social lives.

Motion is a good, but only when a higher good (Charles Taylor would call this a hypergood) conditions it.