Sublime

But it’s much less so for persons seeking a good life, and communities of faith seeking the communion of the Holy Spirit through the crucified Christ felt as the shalom of God the Father.

Giftedness

The therapeutic—that God wants to endorse my life and keep me happy—is contrasted with kenosis, which makes life not about the therapeutic but about the ministerial.

We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself—when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it. And s

As the oft-quoted poet Robert Frost mused, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Home is a tremendously weighty word—filled with smells and sounds and memories of pain and hope.

Home is also a golden thread weaved throughout the biblical narrative. As theologian Douglas Meeks comments in his book God the Eco

Your obligation is to fashion lives and communities that reflect these commandments through the core values they seek to establish—human dignity, justice, compassion, holiness.

Gorman adds, “That conformity [to Christ], for Paul, is narrative in character, a two-part drama of suffering/death followed by resurrection/exaltation. Thus the narrative of the community in Christ must correspond to the narrative of its Lord.”27