Sublime

The “goal” is not “heaven,” but a renewed human vocation within God’s renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward.

The intellectual underpinnings of Bonhoeffer’s convictions on life in a Christian faith community can be traced to his early works Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being, which undergirded his interpretation of the church as a primary form of God’s self-revelation.

This book will aim to avoid such a prima facie weakness (the reverse, more or less, of Bultmann’s), and to demonstrate, at least preliminarily, the continuity, as well as the clear discontinuities, between Jesus and the early church.

We do not need to detach Jesus’ sayings from the rest of the evidence, and examine them in isolation. The words of Jesus in the gospel tradition have been studied endlessly without hearing the ipsissima vox Jesu any the clearer, and without resolving the enigma of the christological titles.

This

of Christian discipleship.

And recognizing such a continuity may require that we jettison some of our own modern presuppositions. Our Christian faith—and correlatively, our account of apologetics—is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral

I also believe that for the sake of discipleship it is crucial to immerse oneself in a community of practice that exhibits the reformative potential we’ve been describing. Your heart is at stake.