Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Middleton

Middleton is drawing a bright, almost legal line through a theological blur that his age was starting to normalize. In a late-18th-century world where Enlightenment confidence was remaking religion into ethics, sentiment, and “improvement,” he insists the Church has to sound a different note: not simply higher-minded human aspiration (immanence), but interruption from beyond (incarnation). The phrasing is deliberate: “must be” carries the snap of obligation, as if the Church’s identity depends on refusing the era’s favorite downgrade - turning miracle into metaphor.

The rhetorical engine here is a sequence of contrasts that read like closing arguments. “Incarnation from immanence” is more than doctrinal hair-splitting; it’s a warning against flattening God into the world’s processes, where divinity becomes atmosphere instead of agent. “Redemption from evolution” is strikingly anticipatory: even before Darwin, “evolution” signals the seductive idea that history, education, and gradual reform can do the work of grace. Middleton’s subtext is political as much as spiritual: if salvation is just progress, then institutions - including the Church - become optional, and moral order becomes negotiable.

“Kingdom of God from mere spiritual process” lands the punch. He’s rejecting privatized, interior religion that asks nothing disruptive of power, money, or personal will. For a politician in an Atlantic world of revolutions and competing authorities, the quote reads as a bid to protect transcendence from being annexed by modern optimism. The supernatural, in his framing, isn’t an escape hatch; it’s the Church’s last way to remain genuinely inconvenient.