Time & Perspective Quote by Karl Lehmann

A cleric telling you to stop thinking so big can sound like spiritual anti-intellectualism. Lehmann’s line is doing something subtler: it’s a pastoral warning against the theological version of doomscrolling. “Subjects of too vast a scale” isn’t a slap at ambition; it’s an indictment of the way huge, totalizing topics (“the future,” “the crisis,” “the meaning of everything”) invite vague declarations, factional posturing, and ultimately paralysis. When the scale is infinite, no one can be held responsible for what they say.

The tactic he recommends is almost bureaucratic: make a list, name the “fundamental questions,” and “discuss only those.” The priestly subtext is discipline. In church life, the grandest claims can easily become cover for avoiding real decisions: policy questions about doctrine, governance, accountability, or pastoral practice get swallowed by lofty rhetoric about renewal or tradition. Lehmann’s phrasing suggests he’s speaking from inside committees, synods, and public controversies where people weaponize abstraction. He’s trying to re-anchor debate in examinable propositions, the kind you can answer, revise, or admit you can’t answer.

There’s also an ethic of humility embedded in the method. A “list” implies limits: finite time, finite knowledge, finite authority. That’s not cynicism; it’s a strategy to keep moral reasoning from turning into spectacle. By narrowing the frame, he’s protecting the conversation from becoming a contest of grand visions and returning it to something closer to discernment: what are we actually responsible for, here and now, and what questions would change how we act?