Sublime

God is the hero of the story.

was at the Lord's Table but whether he was really present at the slave's cabin, whether slaves could expect Jesus to be with them as they tried to survive the cotton field, the whip, and the pistol.

To take a step back once more, when people write about “atonement theology,” the tendency has been to go to Paul and Hebrews and to come to the gospels only for those detached phrases that will support (or so it seems) the kind of “theological” construct that has already been culled from Paul.

Psalm 16 feels more accessible after we’ve walked closely with David.

Starting with the sinfulness of humans and the wrath of God against sin, he moves on to tell of God’s grace in salvation, which comes to us through God-given faith and not our works.

In other words, in much popular modern Christian thought we have made a three-layered mistake. We have Platonized our eschatology (substituting “souls going to heaven” for the promised new creation) and have therefore moralized our anthropology (substituting a qualifying examination of moral performance for the biblical notion of the human vocation

Abe calls God “the LORD who provides.”

Psalm 8, David marvels at God’s creation and the fact that man is given dominion over it.