Divine Transcendence and the Culture of Change

David H. Hopper is the James Wallace Professor of Religion Emeritus at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. His other books include A Dissent on Bonhoeffer and Technology, Theology, and the Idea of Progress.

“An excellent guide through the sixteenth-century Reformation in both its historical development and its present-day reception.”
— Steven Ozment
Harvard University

“This book should be read by any who suppose that the Reformation has run its course and by those who want to renew its essential vision of God’s grace and glory. Hopper’s critique of pure tolerance on solid Reformational grounds is tonic for the mind and soul. It aims to help us recover from the dreary domestication of transcendence in a way that will connect Christ anew with the needed transformation of culture in the West.”
— George Hunsinger
Princeton Theological Seminary

“David H. Hopper has a fascinating and provocative argument about historical and practical connections between, at one end, the Reformation’s insistence that the presence of God in the suffering and weakness of the cross brings with it a this-worldly, world-affirming concept of divine transcendence and, correlatively, a this-worldly, world-affirming concept of the life of faith, and, at the other end, the eventual rise of modernity as a culture of change, a culture that nurtures and values change that is oriented to promoting the common good especially through science and technology — with the downside that when consciousness of God’s inner-worldly transcendence fades as the context of scientifically and technologically driven change, the culture of change becomes dangerous because it loses an awareness of its own finitude and pursues change for its own sake.”
— David H. Kelsey
Yale Divinity School