Sublime

As industrialization took hold, we needed pastors to check our secular excesses and to encourage us to live upright lives, particularly now that most of us were living in new urban centers, where temptation was ripe. We needed pastoral exhortation not to keep us from hell (as Edwards would believe) but to allow us to flourish, as an end in itself.

If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them. 26If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; 27for it may be your neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep? And if your neighb

15But I will not take[30] my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you.

While the others were laughing and settling the terms of the wager, Alexander ran straight up to the horse, took him by the bridle, and turned him to the sun; as it seems he had noticed that the horse’s shadow dancing before his eyes alarmed him and made him restive. He then spoke gently to the horse, and patted him on the back with his hand, until

“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. . . . But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers” (Psalm 1:1–3).

But as we’ll see, both needed to take on particular visions of divine action next to their pastoral practice, embedding their own personhood in these visions to clearly lead their people into divine action.