Here We Still Stand-David Zahl

Culture and the counter cultural cross

• Our crisis today is not that we are losing religion but we are more religious than ever.
• religion is the justifying story of your life. religion is your preferred guilt management system. religion is about “enoughness”
• We have never been more pious.
• Thesis 2 and 3 from Heidelberg Disputation
• No matter how close we get, we never arrive at enough. 
• Fresh targets have become our focus of enoughness (food, exercise, work, parenting, politics, romance)
• Seculosity-religiosity that is directed horizontally rather than vertically. 
• We have created a million different religions to secure our righteousness.
• They maintain all the demand.
• These things are not bad, but they cannot bear the weight of making us righteous.
• Theology of Glory-It’s up to you.  Performanicism. 
• The Good Place—our attempts to secure righteousness actually go backwards because of our motives
• Real love does not recoil at weakness, it is where it begins. Real love is not something we fall into, it’s something we fail into.
• Self-righteousness is more poisonous to the soul than self-indulgence.
• The church has often become another way to establish our enoughness.
• Thesis 28 of Heidelberg Disputation-The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is lovable. The love of man is made up of those things which it loves.