Sublime

Because the woman’s illness is the result of impersonal forces, the pastor, somewhere deeper than she can admit, wonders whether to pray for a personal intervention.

The church loses personhood, and resonance (becoming alienated from life), when its relations are made into instruments for acquiring resources. And relationships that are made into instruments can be used only for accruing resources.

Rather, a larger, deeply substantive moral tradition leads her into a sense of practice, delivering a very different fullness than that of busyness through speed.

Ministry creates an ontological event of sharing; it is ministry that brings union to hypostasis.

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.

At the end of the day, the prayer leader is a functionary, whose role is to facilitate an experience that wouldn’t happen without her: making a group entreaty to the Divine Presence.

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.

King was drawing from the wisdom of the biblical texts and the practice of Gandhi, claiming that persons were more than just material and natural realities but were bearers of inherent worth as those who encounter and seek transcendence.

Catherine Keller, “After Omnipotence: Power as Process,” in On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process