Sublime

his story expressed one of the unappeasable longings of the human imagination: the idea of a perfected society in which the world’s lost innocence will be restored and the Golden Age before the Fall will return.

In contrast to such limited notions, the aphorism with which Hölderlin prefaced his Hyperion will serve to recall the Christian image of the true greatness of God: “Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est” (Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest—that is divine).

The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from everyday Christian life in community [Lebensgemeinschaft] may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door.

It makes God so absolutely sovereign that man is absolutely helpless. It makes man so absolutely depraved that he can do nothing but wait on God. It sees the world as so contaminated with sin that God totally transcends it and touches it only here and there through a mighty invasion.

I want to believe in a God who will save everyone in the end. But is this what God says He will do? Do the Scriptures teach this? Despite what we may want to believe, we’ve got to figure out what God told us to believe in His Word.

state government was a vicegerent of God and His absolute law—rather than God and morality being the arbitrary tools of an absolute state (as in Machiavelli’s The Prince,7 first written in 1513).

A few more words about ‘religionlessness’. I expect you remember Bultmann’s essay on the ‘demythologizing’ of the New Testament?13 My view of it today would be, not that he went ‘too far’, as most people thought, but that he didn’t go far enough. It’s not only the ‘mythological’ concepts, such as miracle, ascension, and so on (which are not in