Faith Formation in a Secular Age : Volume 1 (Ministry in a Secular Age): Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness

As the self is buffered and all the little holes of enchantment and transcendence in our spaghetti strainer are filled with putty, keeping such realities out, we recognize how culture and its presumed frameworks shape us. We are indeed formed. As a buffered self, you are always coming up against the pressure of the presumptions of your family, your

Martin Luther, for instance, opposed relics not because they were inauthentic tourist kitsch but because they offered an encounter with a transcendent reality contrary to the one presented in the Bible (and particularly the Pauline Epistles).

Dominant cultural forms and religious dogma were seen as scrims that hid and diverted the authentic passions and desires of humanity.

But there was also a major theological slippage that, starting at least in the 1960s, flattened our conceptions of transcendence or revelation and more generally moved our understanding of faith formation in unhelpful directions (including manifestations of MTD).

Putting the Johannine words of Jesus together with Jewish eschatology and Old Testament strands of thought about divine-human marriage, temple, and priestly clothing, we find connections to most elements of thinking about Paul’s union with Christ.

But from the context of ministry (as a hypostatic and kenotic reality that brings forth theosis) there can be no separation between the work and person of Jesus. Work, for Jesus, is to minister to humanity by being a minister (the “although” is the “because”).

Chasing fun and excitement (being youthful) would take us into a material spiritual state where we would be free to be our most authentic self.

M). Theosis opposes deism by stating in the words of Paul that “we no longer live” but that Jesus’s being lives in and through us as Jesus shares our being by entering our person through the negation of our death experiences. Faith and its formation, then, is something radically different from a program for making our institutions effective by maki

But just as strong was my feeling of weariness, and now astonishment too, that all this earnest talk about faith and its formation had not once included God or transcendence or even mystery. What had happened to us? How have we become a people who so often talk of faith as almost completely coated in a sociological shell, bound almost entirely in m