Whenever theology abandons the biblical notion of glory, it immediately succumbs to that venerable gnostic melancholy for which the sphere of fixed stars, the stellatum, is not the shining raiment of God cast over the heavens, but merely the final barrier through which the exiled nvEUpa or Funklein must pass in order to return to the rratjpwpa or Abgrund Gottes. This is the gnosis - with its distressingly easy leap across Lessing's ditch and, in consequence, over the world - that a theological aesthetics serves chiefly to resist; theology should take its lead from the "inauthenticity" of
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