Sublime

The first was a young man called Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul.4 According to his own account, he was a Jew by birth who had been sent by the community to suppress the activities of the new sect of Christians, Jews who believed that the Messiah had come. On his way to perform his mission he experienced a conversion and became convinced that h

Scholars call the final editor R, for…

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The great nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to defend Christianity to his friends, whom he called “the great cultured despisers.”4 Their antagonism toward the church had become cultural (not spiritual; it was about an aesthetic of pleasure, not an encounter with the transcendent).5

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.

For a good, recent account of the various things “son of god” could have meant in the first century CE, see Peppard, Son of God.

1 Chronicles 12 The following are those who came to David at Ziklag, while he could not move about freely because of Saul son of Kish; they were among the mighty warriors who helped him in war. 2They were archers, and could shoot arrows and sling stones with either the right hand or the left; they were Benjaminites, Saul’s kindred. 3The chief was A

Jesus is obedient because God’s being is found in God’s act and this God of Israel is a minister (the being of God is revealed as minister, as one who reaches out to embrace and be with humanity—“ministry” and “minister” throughout the rest of this project will mean this act of sharing in the life of another for the sake of love and communion). Jes

Among the many problems with this so-called civilizing mission was that, well-intentioned as it may have been, it was often deliberately shadowed by a “Christianizing mission,” the principal goal of which was, in the words of Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, “nothing short of the conversion of the natives to Christianity.”