Sublime

Conceding to the secular age, we claim that the church must change, running faster for the sake of outracing decline—to avoid a crisis that is produced and perpetuated by modernity itself. We are very far from a sense of sacred time when we contend that the church’s own speed will determine the shape and existence of Jesus’s very body on earth.

When modernity wants this good of accelerated motion, it will take it at the cost of personhood (producing alienation). When personhood is consumed by acceleration, the motion of the world becomes something distinctly other than love. Love is dependent on persons (this is why “Person” comes before “Eros” in Yannaras’s title).

They will know us, not because we are heroes and power brokers, but much the opposite: they will know us because we are in the world as ministers, entering the death experiences of persons as the transcendent experience of love. Even against the pull of Secular 3 and the closed spin of the immanent frame, the age of authenticity leads to the strong

He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naivete at best and folly at worst. He has turned our world upside down.

Even inside our modern secular age there are ways to have a scope that reaches for transcendence.

“Marx and Kierkegaard on Alienation,”

Here is the ultimate mark of our decline. Because the church has largely lost its theological orientation in the wake of the Enlightenment and the ascendancy of a consumer culture, we have, perhaps unwittingly, redefined our God and what it means to know Him.

a modern society in which the natural sciences and bureaucratic rationality had conspired to undermine confidence in religious values and traditional sources of meaning.

upended traditional metaphysics, concerned with the existence and nature of God, in favor of an analysis of the human subject and how he or she knows the world.