Sublime

Most who continue with a conception of God explain that they have individually chosen to keep that picket in their lives for their own individual reasons. It is authenticity that pushes and justifies them in keeping the picket nailed to the fence of their individual lives.

faith systems are usually authoritarian in their practice and self-definition and, with one or two exceptions, they tend to believe that their own version is the perfect and final word on the subject.

So to reconnect justification with faith is not to battle against the age of authenticity (as neo-Calvinists and radical Lutherans, for instance, tend to) but to embrace it—at least in part. As I’ve said throughout part 2, authenticity, while able to spin itself closed (particularly when it fetishizes youthfulness), also allows for the possibility

The first change that keeps enchantment down, and in turn delivers a meaning system beyond divine action, is the dis-embedding of God from public life (even the conception that there is something called “public,” in contrast to “private,” is a constructed reality that helps cloud divine action).

But for this core not to disappear into subjectivism, we must also recognize the experiential within personhood. To be “in Christ” is to have an experience of the person of Jesus encountering our own person. Person or personhood (hypostasis) is a distinct spiritual and theological assertion having its origins in the early church fathers, particular

Faith for Paul is not sure commitment but the experience of being found in Christ, of being found in union with him in and through the negation of the cross.

have experiences of the eternal in time?” but, “Will we lose our children to the secular space, and therefore find our religious institutions losing ground?”

But little by little the oscillations become slower, to the point of resolving themselves in mild and melancholic long waves; from this moment on all is decided, and life is nothing more than a preparation for death. This can be expressed in a more brutal and less exact way by saying that man is a diminished adolescent.

Constantine Campbell says, While the father of the Reformation held a view of imputation that depended on union with Christ, the trajectory of later Protestantism followed Melanchthon rather than Luther. Melanchthon thought primarily of the cross as a transaction and, according to [Mark] Seifrid, “the later Protestant formulaic description of justi