Sublime

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.”

To be in sin, and therefore to experience the need for justification, is to be the opposite of a minister. It is pride and self-absorption (incurvatus in se) to

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.

But this prodding would no longer come from a set-apart holy man, consecrated by enchanted oil or a Yale degree. Rather, Henry’s prodding was done as “one of us.” Henry threw off any sense that he was a class above or beyond, as so many clergy embodied.

This is creative, Christian interpretation that uses the text of the Bible as something with which I “think theologically.”

in the Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Calvinist reconceptions of communion, the power of the meal was shifted from the transubstantiating thing-ness to its representation (so that God could be seen more clearly as a free actor).

Rather than a fearful huddle of believers worried about what Herod, the Romans, or those pesky liberal Sadducees might do, the early Christians appeared to actually believe Jesus when he said the gates of hell, nevermind the IRS, would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).