Sublime

the doctrine of transcendence must always be accompanied by the contradictory-sounding doctrine of divine immanence: the teaching that God is fully “in” the world even without being “part” of it.

God has come to be understood not as the truly transcendent source and end of all contingent reality, who creates through “donating” being to a natural order that is complete in itself, but only as a kind of supreme mechanical cause located somewhere within the continuum of nature.

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace—starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say—that gave rise to almost all of these grim

John Barton reminds us that nowhere in the Hebrew texts themselves do they