Sublime

And if we are going to discern “what is best”—what is “excellent,” what really matters, what is of ultimate importance—Paul tells us that the place to start is by attending to our loves.

a "low" ecclesiology, a mere individualism with saved individuals getting together from time to time for mutual benefit, were to turn out to be a denial of some of the key elements of Paul's missionary theology?

Now here’s the crucial insight for Christian formation and discipleship: not only is this learning-by-practice the way our hearts are correctly calibrated, but it is also the way our loves and longings are misdirected and miscalibrated—not because our intellect has been hijacked by bad ideas but because our desires have been captivated by rival vis

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

teachings about love offered by Fromm, King, and Merton differ from much of today’s writing. There is always an emphasis in their work on love as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world. In their work, loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the prima

But for Paul, the “although” is indeed the “because,” meaning God takes on the “although” action to justify “because” God is minister.

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

I’ll let John Baillie answer that. He was a distinguished professor who taught theology at the University of Edinburgh. He said: “What makes a man a Christian is neither his intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life.”

Thus we find the famous passage in Matthew 10, which, despite some clauses that seem to have been only temporary, can hardly have been intended to refer to a mission entirely restricted to the time of Jesus’s own ministry: