Sublime

the pastor’s job was not to take people into sacred time or uphold the sacredness of ordinary life but to help people flourish, and it appeared that the new secular disciplines of psychology and sociology were much more helpful in this vein.

Barth recognized that what upended the closed spin of immanence was not will, practical know-how, or even resources, but rather the inability to speak of and therefore see the action of the living God moving, even in modernity and its immanent frame.

When every congregant can act as an arbiter of a church’s mission and priorities, consensus and mobilization become harder to achieve. More important, an exaggerated and unaccountable individualism is at deep odds with the lordship of Jesus Christ, the one who claimed, “I am the way” (John 14:6) and who calls his disciples to “Come, follow me” (Mat

For the pastor to think the faith inside the immanent frame, her best bet is to do so dialectically. She must place every “theological statement . . . over against a counter-statement, without allowing the dialectical tension between the two to be resolved in a higher synthesis.”

Now, an immanent frame enclosed our lives in entirely natural (as opposed to supernatural) ways of being.15 The immanent frame was being used to define as completely secular not only our ordinary lives but also the pastoral task.

there is a clear tendency in subsequent generations of believers to overdefine and concretise the original revelation.