Sublime

The crucified Christ himself is a challenge to Christian theology and the Christian church, which dare to call themselves by his name.

The longing for a society with a unified ideology, or for a unified Catholic or Christian state, continues to grow, as it becomes more difficult for

When the ‘religion of fear’ finds its way into the Christian church, those who regard themselves as the most vigilant guardians of the faith do violence to faith and smother it. Instead of confidence and freedom, fearfulness and apathy are found everywhere.

Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are member

by affirming Augustine’s inwardness and the ability of each individual to read the Bible and stand before God’s justifying action themselves, Luther rejects that some people are spiritually dependent on what other people do. What the priest and pope do is not superior in kind to what farmers and housemaids do.

Precisely because (so Christians believe) God wants every single Christian to grow up in understanding as well as trust, the Christian faith has never been something that one generation can sort out in such a way as to leave their successors with no work to do.

Ecclesiology-so often scoffed at by those who see it as merely "horizontal" rather than the really important thing, the "vertical" dimension of soteriology-is non-negotiable. In Christ there is no vertical and horizontal. Paul was not a Platonist.

I’m not calling for an idealistic anti-sustainability or a demonizing of growth—although I am challenging us to be more reflective, even offering rich theological conceptions for such ecclesial realities. Dynamic stabilization is bred with many contradictions and perils, but it nevertheless is the system we find ourselves in. There is no way to sim

is right for congregations and denominations to value sustainability. But we should also recognize that what is sustainable is determined by the goods of dynamic stabilization. More work needs to be done to think about sustainability within a very different horizon: the cruciform good life.