Studying God is intimidating. If it isn’t intimidating, then a study in humility might be a better use of our time—at least at first. Since God is ever present, perfectly loving, all creative, all knowing, all powerful, and sovereign in all things including love, grace, justice, and truth, it seems futile for us in our finite minds to even try.
But we must grapple with theological ideas. We must go to the depths to try to understand because the difference and reason for studying God in the first place is grounded in a relationship where God can and will reveal his character, story, and hope as we grow in relationship to him.
The source of our study is a living, God-breathed revelation of who God is and what God is about (the Holy Bible). So, while we’ll never nail down everything, we are able to know and understand more than we could ever ask or imagine if we would simply dive into the relationship and the Word with expectation and malleability.
With that said, to communicate the story of God—to study him and offer ways of understanding God to others—we ourselves have to be rooted in Scripture. Not only do we need to be rooted, but we need to be built up in it with openness to the Holy Spirit guiding us as we read and respond to it. No person, no matter how brilliant or enlightened, can study the one true living God without having a relationship with the one true living Word—which became human and made his dwelling with us (John 1:1).
When you look at the account of Jesus’ life on earth, you see theological lessons everywhere. I asked a local hero (our pastor) what he thought about communicating theology in a simple way, and he referred to Jesus constantly telling the stories of God by telling the people to “do this,” and when this happens because of who you are or because of who I am, then “do that.” Jesus gives us how-to stories as he lived among the people. It was in how he lived his life that he expressed who God was and is today.
We’ve got to teach the story of God by telling it—not just with our lips but also with our lives. We also have to be living with our eyes open to teaching moments and be prepared to record them, repeat them, and use them to teach with zeal as Jesus did.
Another method for studying God is to get people to learn the story by telling the story. When people get involved in the text and learn how to tell it on their own, they become involved in it, and that involvement leads to connecting points for them individually.
Dan Boone, a friend, pastor, and preaching professor told me, “Understand the issue from the depths. Write it down in academic language that would be acceptable to a solid theologian. Then translate it for an eighth grader, test it on an eighth grader, ask the eighth grader if there are any words or concepts that are confusing; then rewrite it and tell it from memory.”
In his book Preaching the Story that Shapes Us, he helps us understand how to exegete the group we are speaking to. “The biggest mistake we make with theological ideas is that we stop with getting it said and do not work equally hard on getting it heard. The message is in the ears, not on the lips.”
How will your listener hear the idea? How will it be received? What is it like to feel it being said? This is where we should spend our time after understanding the idea “at the depths” then translating it.
Our three-year-old is getting a lesson in theology every day, when we teach her the stories and words of the Bible, when we apply them to the little things in life that she can understand, and when we model to her a sensitivity to God’s voice and to the needs of others as we live it out in front of her. I think we can do this in all areas of life and ministry—teaching theology by living out the story and making connecting points for people to grab onto and learn on their own.
For me it’s about…
* Being rooted in God’s Word
* Remembering that the knowledge of God, a heart bent in faith, and the practice of our beliefs work together
* Translating the story of God in contextual ways
* Applying the Word of God each and every day to our own lives, until illustrating it and modeling it becomes first nature to us again….
God is not through with any of us yet, and it is in us and through us that Christ is being revealed. It’s exciting to think and know that each and every day we have an opportunity to become more like he is; to be transformed by the renewing of our minds; to understand who we were meant to be all along; and then to find ways to teach that to others along the way is our gift and responsibility.
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The only way to make theology simple is to ignore it.
Theology is to be lived, not merely comprehended. Simple means easy, straightforward, effortless, etc. To make theology simple for others, in my opinion, is to teach a sleeping faith.
Concepts of God may be made understandable, but mere ideas of God are just that—static thinking. Theology is to be a dynamic activity that moves past a mental understanding and toward soulful expression. Theology is most effectively taught and learned in application, not simply in suggestion.
To make something simple is to make it minimal. Do we really want to reduce God to the smallest most reasonable reality? Or do we wish to explore and explain a big God who is more complicated than simple and more dynamic than static?
I’m tired of inviting people, and I’m tired of other people inviting people into a simple faith. I want to invite people into a complicated faith; a faith marked by density, doubt, and disorientation. That is a faith worth teaching and learning—not a faith made simple.
I realize that people need things brought to their level in order to understand. I have three children, ages 11, 7, and 5. They have a hard time wrapping their minds and hearts around theology, practical or otherwise. However, honestly, I don’t really want to help them develop a simple faith. I don’t want them developing a predictable and controllable faith; I want to invite them toward discovering a difficult faith that more closely resembles the realities of life—complexity and perplexity.
When I teach my children stories about God, I don’t make them seem easy by reducing them to their minimal concepts. Instead, I make them what they are—adventurous, demanding, and so big that their imaginations have to work to even remotely give them a chance at connecting.
This is why we have so many unconvincing Christians populating our churches. They don’t know a God other than the simple one they had passed on to them, in a clean, easy-as-pie, mild, smooth, simple-as-ABC kind of way. I hope my kids never say, “I get it” when it comes to God. When we say, “I get it,” what we are really saying is, “I’ve mastered it,” and that is not at all what a working theology is.
Too much time is spent trying to make theology simple, and not enough time is spent wondering. I’m ready for a shift in our approach to teaching. I’m ready for an approach that proves the vastness and fullness of God rather than the triviality in which God is usually taught. I’m ready to be invited and to invite others into a theological journey so filled with risk, danger, openness, and uncertainty that it elicits fear and inspires astonishment as opposed to being comfortable and relaxing. Frankly, I am done with the simple. God cannot be fathomed.
What is our infatuation with making things simple? We do this so people can worship a God they can understand? That seems like a very small view of God and also a small view of man. How about, instead of caring how to make theology simple, we care more about how we make theology what it really is—a deep, eternal, unfathomable abyss of wonder. Let’s face it, theology isn’t simple and can’t ever be simple unless we ignore it, which unfortunately is what a lot of people choose to do. Sadly, much of the church is asleep in its faith.
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I have a friend who sent me a manuscript for review. He said he had written it for “laypeople.” He wanted to make some difficult philosophical and theological subject clear to laypeople. He tried. He tried hard, and he told stories, and I had to tell him what John Ortberg once told me about something I had tried to write for that every evasive audience, the “layperson”: Not even close.
Theology can be complex. The Trinity, which I consider so foundational to so many doctrines and ideas—like what love is or how fellowship is designed—is as complex as it gets. Great theologians have pondered Trinity with terms like person and have had to resort to great Latin or Greek terms to make things clear—like hypostasis or perichoresis. Indeed, it can get incredibly complex, and a theologian friend, LeRon Shults, sometimes speaks of things like “absolute futurity,” and most of us are left baffled and wondering what the in the world such an expression might mean. And many, because they are driven to a lack of understanding, resort to Who cares? or, It must not matter, or it would be clearer. I don’t think anyone questions the reality of the complexity of (this sentence structure! or) theology.
The issue is how to make great ideas clear so the ordinary person not only grasps them but can live them out.
I’ve done more than my share of thinking about this because so many people have asked me about it, and they’ve asked me because I have some success at doing this. The success I’ve had relates primarily to two people: my wife, Kris, who reads my stuff and tells me with straight-shooting language whether it’s clear and meaningful (and they are not the same thing); and John Ortberg, who simply told me that my stuff wasn’t close but that I needed to keep working. And he encouraged me so much that I kept working.
First, read those who do this well. Three names come to mind, and you may well think of others. Mortimer Adler, whatever you think of his Thomism or his theories of education, could write so clearly that many learned philosophy from him. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, though dated in language and form and even ideas, is perhaps the single best piece of popular theology and apologetics written in the 20th century. And N.T. Wright is unquestionably the best writer on biblical subjects alive today.
Second, focus on the forest without the trees and only later bring in the trees. Get the big picture in mind and keep it in mind. Avoid building a case through the accumulation of details and then drawing a conclusion. One of my editors said to me that I needed to learn that lay folks don’t read a book unless they trust the author, so just believe they do and write what you think is true and forget trying to prove everything. I counseled a young author who was trying to make the jump from academic writing to lay folks with those words, and it made a huge difference for him. It is too easy to get trapped in the approach—methodical, abstract, accumulation of evidence—of scholarship and thinking that clear prose in that mode works for laypeople. It often doesn’t.
Third, let significance shape your writing. Until you know why your subject matters to ordinary people in their ordinary lives, you aren’t ready to write theology at a simple level. But once you do, everything can fall into place. I use The Jesus Creed as an example. I could have written a book on the Jewishness of Jesus, which quite frankly is interesting but doesn’t really “matter” to my mom or dad. Instead, I baptized the Jewishness of Jesus into the waters of significance: how to live the Christian life in accordance with how Jesus understood it. That turned the book from “history” to “significance.”
Fourth, learn what subject matters really matter. A friend of mine wrote an 800-page book “for the average reader.” He’s a very good academic writer. I told him that the “average” reader doesn’t want 800 pages on any theological topic. Any! The point here needs emphasis: Not only do we need to learn to let significance shape our writing, but we need to learn what length is needed for the layperson for what subject. The layperson isn’t (generally) interested in a 600-page (even if clearly written) book on the Pharisees. Strive for two pages. That’s about all that is needed.
Fifth, develop a pace that permits comprehension for more readers. The wildly successful The Purpose-Driven Life, by Rick Warren, had a trick: one simple idea in each chapter. One idea leading to another. That’s the secret. Scholars tend to have 10-15 ideas in a given chapter, and sometimes five quick points in one paragraph, each important and each needed but not drawn out enough for the average layperson to grasp what’s going on. It doesn’t matter how clear of a writer you are if your pace is too fast. Slow down. One idea per chapter. Save the other ideas for another day.
Finally, read your stuff aloud to someone, asking for feedback, until it all makes sense at the auditory level. I can’t emphasize this enough. Make the prose so clear that someone can sit and listen to you and enjoy what you are reading. Until that happens, you need to keep writing because it will otherwise be “not even close.”
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Comments
Also, to understand is not to master. I understand gravity... but I have not mastered it.
Complexity is neither more godly nor more intellectual than simplicity. In fact, the more one understands a subject, the more one can break it down into simple concepts. The higher the degree of comprehension, the more easily one can disseminate those concepts to others.
So, Chris, I think your argument is not with simplicity, but with complacency. And, if that is the case, then I wholeheartedly agree with you. Remember, though, that people can't obey and live what they don't understand. And it is our job to help them do just that. To leave our writings, our speeches, our music, our films with such a new way of thinking that it directly impacts their behavior.
Also, you communicated to me and the other readers of your post the vastness and complexity of God. It caused me to think deeply about his complexity, the fear of being in his presence, the wonder of unanswered questions, but you did it in a fairly simple and direct way. I hesitate to compliment you on this point fearing that you wouldn't feel it is a compliment at all.
Having been a pastor for over 20 years, I understand your angst. I simply (haha) don't believe that making God more complex and mysterious is the answer - you would agree that he is already as complex and mysterious as he will ever be. But, like an adventurous archeologist traveling with a documentary film team, we scratch around at the hints of who God is - never removing the sense of adventure of even the idea of God - and people see our wonder as we describe our new discoveries. We must describe our findings in ways that the uninitiated would understand.
I enjoyed and was provoked by your writing. It will inform the way I communicate. Thank you for your effort.
I wonder if we think Jesus' teachings were more simple than his actual real-time hearers?
I'm actually not trying to push for an more intellectual faith (complexity vs. Simplicity) but a more realistic one. I honestly don't remember when my faith was ever simple. It's been complicated from day one. I understand concepts about God but not because of the teachings of others but because of my experience with the concepts.
I'm not sure God doesn't get more mysterious and complex. The more I seem to live into the intended was of God the more it seems to expand my view of God which increases the scope of my inability to completely fathom God.
Great insights, Lance. Thanks for the dialogue. I still think the only way to make theology simple is to ignore it. The more I engage the less simple it seems to get. Maybe it just happens to be where I am at right now.
Since I don't believe we will grasp the complexity of God even in heaven, we will have eternity to discuss this at length. :)
Since I don't believe we will grasp the complexity of God even in heaven, we will have eternity to discuss this at length. :)