Sublime

“The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,” writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson, who observes that many of us spend our lives “preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own.”

The long and short of it appears to be that an entire ministerial enterprise dedicated to meeting felt needs, supplying biblical advice, and providing top-notch production values has quietly become a huge success at drawing crowds but a huge failure at what the Bible actually calls the church to do.

We’re called to love people more than we love being right, but being right theologically rather than being in right relationship with our neighbor has become the defining identity of the church.

Here is the ultimate mark of our decline. Because the church has largely lost its theological orientation in the wake of the Enlightenment and the ascendancy of a consumer culture, we have, perhaps unwittingly, redefined our God and what it means to know Him.

heart”—modern evangelicalism finds it hard to articulate just how or why the church has any role to play other than providing a place to fellowship with other individuals who have a private relationship with God.

Practical antinomianism has many forms today.