Sublime

John of the Cross says, “The Father spoke one Word, which was His Son, and this Word He always speaks in eternal silence, and in silence must It be heard by the soul.”7 In the Cherubinic Wanderer Angelus

it is safe for God to give his all to Abraham. Because Abraham has grown to live and love and think like God, God's gifts will not spoil Abraham. A father cannot give an immature son his inheritance.

It has everything to do with understanding human renewal as the beginning, the pointer toward, and even the means of, God’s eventual eradication of evil from the world and the bringing to birth of the new creation itself. Thus, so the early Christians believed, God’s word was at work by the Spirit within the community, to put Jesus’s achievement in

Think again of the poems at the start of Luke’s gospel. God has fulfilled the promises to Abraham; now things can proceed in a new way.

Faith is actually to enter into Christ; it is to have our own being taken into the being of Jesus.2 Faith is to find our self bound to the faithfulness of Christ, who goes to the cross out of obedience to the Father.

When William Tyndale, one of England’s earliest Protestants, a disciple of Martin Luther, wrote about “the gospel,” he didn’t mean “the gospels”—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He meant “the gospel” in the sense of the message: the good news that, because of Jesus’s death alone, your sins can be forgiven, and all you have to do is believe it, rather

20The law entered in* so that transgression might increase but, where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more,+ 21so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through justification for eternal life through Jesus Christ our LORD.+

The red thread that is both the center of and the impetus to testify to Paul’s story is the experience of the ministerial being of Jesus. The plot and purpose of the story is to reveal the divine hypostasis encountering our own hypostasis.