Sublime

human belief systems are good at absorbing contradictions into their thinking.

a unidirectional form of what he calls ‘unscrupulous optimism’.

the second distinct shape of Henry’s new mold of being pastor. If Edwards operated at the speed of learning and discipline, Henry downshifted completely, casting the pastor as no different—living at no different speed—from any other man or woman.

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.

Henry shifted the pastoral identity from learned, serious professional to your beloved uncle. The point was no longer to show your difference but to show your sameness—living at the very same speed.

have to commit yourself to the manifesto your party has adopted, usually somewhere along a spectrum that ranges, in Macaulay’s language, from reckless empiricism at one end to ignorant bigotry at the other. Or to put it in more temperate language, between those who find change and experiment seductive and those who find it repellent, the old tensio

Yet what’s fascinating is that Henry upped the ante. He called for a change in the conception of the pastor. Henry claimed that the pastor is to witness to this divine

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.

He wove the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve into Paul’s predestination theme and came up with his own version of the doctrine, whose logic went like this: because we all inherit Adam’s guilt and ‘come into the world tainted with sin’ we deserve and are destined for eternal damnation.