The theological failure of the religious leadership consists in debilitating the character of God. In the old covenantal tradition, God was indeed an active agent with whom to reckon. But as the urban economy flourished, as the urban elites became more affluent and with it more intellectually sophisticated, such a notion of divine agency became less and less palatable, more intellectually embarrassing, and more politically inconvenient. Without ever being explicit, the wild rawness of divine agency simply disappeared into smoother liturgical formulation. Now the God who had been an agent who
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