Sublime

Since the perfection of humanity is an essential part of God’s purpose, divine demands are made in accordance with human capacity to respond.

The pastor, then, must do something much more difficult than our ancestors had to: she must contend that a personal God can act in an impersonal universe and therefore challenge the theory that the universe is closed.

The great nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to defend Christianity to his friends, whom he called “the great cultured despisers.”4 Their antagonism toward the church had become cultural (not spiritual; it was about an aesthetic of pleasure, not an encounter with the transcendent).5

community accountability alongside individual freedom.

the

Research sociologist