Sublime

We—whom Lincoln once called God’s “almost chosen people”—did

A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense.

ministry. The Samaritan is transformed and called “good” because he ministers to the beaten man, sharing in his personhood by entering his death experience as an embodied kenotic act.22 He is not good, righteous, or holy because he does the right thing and is a good (right-behaving) boy; he is holy because he allows the Spirit to transform him into

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg