Sublime

“The first and chief defense of the gospel, the first ‘letter of commendation’ not only for Paul but for Jesus, is not an argument but the life of the church conformed to Christ by the Spirit in service and

his fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.

The sociologists state candidly their basic conclusion: the congregations that reared these young people offered them no compelling reasons or training about how and why “Christianity is special” (Hoge, 13-18).

Because theologians are exegetes, they are also prophets. As prophets they must make clear that the gospel of God stands in judgment upon the existing order of injustice. This task involves, as Abraham Heschel said, the “exegesis of existence from a divine perspective,”3 disclosing that God is not indifferent to suffering and not patient with cruel

To the surprise of these researchers, the majority of interviewees affiliated with Protestant mainline denominations favored the theological perspective of the “Distant God” over the others.13

The black experience and the Bible together in dialectical tension serve as my point of departure today and yesterday. The order is significant. I am black first—and everything else comes after that.

It was Arendt who showed me that Augustine was a cartographer of the heart.