Sublime

Throughout volumes 1 and 2 I’ve claimed that Jesus Christ becomes present when we give and receive ministry person to person. Bonhoeffer can claim that Jesus Christ exists as church-community because the church-community is in the form of personhood, and Jesus Christ is present in and through personhood (this is deeply incarnational).

Bonhoeffer asserts that something is fundamentally lost when the congregation evades a conception of persons. To see this again through Rosa, personhood is often obscured in the acceleration of modernity,27 where the present is compressed, the future and its newness are our aim, resources are our obsession, and dynamic stabilization is our hope.

Halakhah is a process through which we can wrestle each other to achieve some measure of consensus.

The way that this modern moral order takes shape around chosen identity makes it complicated for pastors. If the church or the pastor tries too hard to shape a person’s life, it will be a violation of the modern moral order.

the Reformers saw the liturgy as God’s action and our faithful reception of that action. The governing idea of the Reformed liturgy is thus twofold: the conviction that to participate in the liturgy is to enter the sphere of God’s acting, not just of God’s presence, plus the conviction that we are to appropriate God’s action in faith and gratitude

Liberal rabbis often become sacred social workers, mainly focused on pastoral and lifecycle moments in their communities.

A robust sense of Judaism as a living organism requires a way for its component parts to connect in dynamic integration; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That integrated whole is precisely what halakhah offers us. Without a systemic commitment to contextualize mitzvot in the evolving conversation of the Rabbis across the generations,

But from the context of ministry (as a hypostatic and kenotic reality that brings forth theosis) there can be no separation between the work and person of Jesus. Work, for Jesus, is to minister to humanity by being a minister (the “although” is the “because”).