Sublime

It is the “although [x] not [y] but [z]” that makes justification central to Paul. It bears this form and plays this song; to put it simply, although [x] God is righteous, this righteousness does not [y] leave God to abandon us but [z] becomes sin for us so that God might minister to us (2 Cor. 5:21).

FAITH COMES FIRST

etsi deus non daretur,‘even if there were no God’.

Genesis 22:2

“Christopraxis,” he wrote, “is the medium through which the Christian community embodies and enacts its fundamental vision of the gospel. . . . Christopraxis is the ministry [in a congregation] of making disciples” (Anderson 48, 53).

It is not the experience of Christian community, but firm and certain faith within Christian community that holds us together. We hold fast in faith to God’s greatest gift, that God has acted for us all and wants to act for us all. This makes us joyful and happy, but it also makes us ready to forgo all such experiences if at times God does not gran

Specific statements such as these can capture the FCF that drives the development of a sermon: “When you cannot see God’s purposes, God’s promises can make you angry”; “It seems impossible to raise godly teens in a culture in which all values are relative”; or “When we know we are guilty, the gift of grace does not feel like it costs us enough.”

Schleiermacher dismissed entirely the vertical dimension of a God outside of experience summoning sinners through biblical revelation to pass beyond themselves into union with God through Christ.

It is Luther who, drawing from Paul’s words in Galatians and Romans, is credited with making justification “by faith alone” central.8 Much of Protestantism, following Luther, has asserted that the righteousness of the human agent is always a foreign righteousness.9 It comes from nowhere inside human willing or acting but is bestowed upon the human