Sublime

The church has life only because of its relationship to the triune God. It is the body of Christ. Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ, is the church’s head (Col. 1:18). Without this head it has no life.

The relation of this God to this or these human beings comes into real relation—but only at the level of the crisis. The real dialectic of time and eternity finds that eternity is encountered in time, by Sterbet, by dying. In dying, in our experience of the crisis of dying, we find ourselves in a deep relationship with the God of eternity who bring

To speak of this God who is true God, Eckhart teaches, we must first speak in the negative, speaking of what God is not and what my self cannot know. Money, however, makes no demand that I seek something to save me from outside myself, nor that I confess that my self is not constituted to possess and own what can save me. Rather, the spectral god o

You have faith (an ultimate concern) if you are devoted to someone or something as an end in itself, being willing—if the situation so requires—to sacrifice other interests and passions for the sake of what you believe in or hold to be most valuable. In this sense, both secular and religious persons have faith. The crucial difference, however, is t

Living in a climate of deep insecurity, Jesus, faced with so narrow a margin of civil guarantees, had to find some other basis upon which to establish a sense of well-being. He knew that the goals of religion as he understood them could never be worked out within the then-established

When there is little direct connection to divine action, and no vision for something bigger, the pastor is left wondering

“Nothing is more fundamental to religion than prayer. . . . Martin Luther declared that religion is ‘prayer and nothing but prayer.’ The nineteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote that ‘to be religious and to pray—that is really one and the same thing.’ And Schleiermacher’s contemporary, the German poet Novalis, called pray

Taylor, who affirms the genius of Durkheim but turns him against himself, shows with this triad how the social function of religion adds to the opaqueness of divine action.

As the source, ground, and end of being and consciousness, God can be known as God only insofar as the mind rises from beings to being, and withdraws from the objects of consciousness toward the wellsprings of consciousness itself, and learns to see nature not as a closed system of material forces but in light of those ultimate ends that open the m