Sublime

The way that this modern moral order takes shape around chosen identity makes it complicated for pastors. If the church or the pastor tries too hard to shape a person’s life, it will be a violation of the modern moral order.

(A major issue that conservatives even today have yet to solve is how, in opposing the reductions of the immanent frame, they can avoid the perception of being against justice and mercy and can support all humans flourishing.)

Faith then is always participation in the narrative arc of Jesus’s cross and resurrection by having your person ministered to and ministering to others.

Because this has occurred, the pastor has been left with only the hope of building a vital institution and therefore winning the right to speak into people’s private lives (helping them live their best life now). It is no wonder that the entrepreneur becomes the core metaphor for the pastor. In our time, the pastor has to spend time and energy winn

Our sanctification—the process of becoming holy and Christlike—is more like a Weight Watchers program than listening to a book on tape.

Then who this God is, revealed in justification, is not an accountant or a scorekeeper but a minister who comes to your dying person with a personhood (hypostasis) that enters your death experiences as an act of ministry (kenosis) so that you might be free from serving death and be (not a clairvoyant shaman but) a minister to your neighbor (theosis

we saw in an earlier chapter, Christians believe that Jesus is the Logos that the Greeks intuited—the meaning behind the universe, the reason for life. But unlike the philosophers, Christians believe that the Logos is not a concept to be learned but a person to be known. And therefore we don’t believe in a meaning we must go out and discover but in