Sublime

To know or encounter this living God made known in Jesus Christ is to know him in the flesh of humanity. The enhypostatic union claims that flesh—real and lived humanity—is the location of relation between God and the world.

just as the recognizability of the Word in history is bound to the humanity of Jesus, so the recognizability of Jesus in the world is bound to the visible community insofar as it is constituted by turning and returning to the foundational and sustaining act of Christ.

When every congregant can act as an arbiter of a church’s mission and priorities, consensus and mobilization become harder to achieve. More important, an exaggerated and unaccountable individualism is at deep odds with the lordship of Jesus Christ, the one who claimed, “I am the way” (John 14:6) and who calls his disciples to “Come, follow me” (Mat

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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

no longer content with the genre Theology of the New Testament, might yet practice “theology with the New Testament.”

Here is the insight embedded in these verses. The only answer to one culture is another culture—not just a concept, but a counterculture. A church should offer the world such a counterculture, a living embodiment of the gospel. The culture we live in is “a pillar and buttress” for many false gospels. For instance, one of the destructive lies that i

We are treating as ultimate what is only penultimate; we are heaping infinite, immortal expectations on created things that will pass away; we are settling on some aspect of the creation rather than being referred through it to its Creator.