Life As Theology

October 8, 2008

I feel sometimes that the admonition, “Christianity is so much larger than we make it out to be,” attempts to convey an idea that might be better expressed by, “Christianity is so much smaller than we make it out to be.” Let me explain. When people use that first phrase, I think they usually mean something like this: “I have seen that my faith can operate in places I never suspected, that if I look carefully in the dustiest, most claustrophobic corners of my life I can find cracks that open on a vision of eternity, that everything I am and everything I do is God-haunted.” In other words these people are trying to say that Christianity deals with small things–the small things that constitute daily life. They are saying it is “larger” than the space we stick it in; but sometimes we treat it as so large that it can’t be applied delicately, intimately, to our life between definitively “religious” moments.

But when other people–people who aren’t presently contemplating the same vision–hear that “Christianity is so much larger than we make it out to be,” they hear an implicit condemnation. “You are small and silly in your religion,” they hear. This may be true, but it misses the point. The point has nothing to do with them. Instead, the point is all about an unexpectedly applicable vision of God.

My Reformed community will cheer at this predictable insight. Clearly, we agree, a focus upon how we make Christianity out to be results in self-focus, in moralism and in pietism. But our agreement on this point aggravates me. It lets us lay the issue to rest. I want to move our discussion of the Christian life out of its polemical polarizations.

One of the paradoxes we miss, I think, is that to escape self-focus, moralism and pietism, we must first pay very close attention to ourselves, to morality, and to real piety. We may schematically describe the process, object and result of salvation–and that is the majority of our theology as it currently exists. But these schemas, these propositions, are so much noise and air unless we arrive at them by the God-directed experiences, of our own lives.

I don’t mean to deny the value of our theology. On the contrary, I submit that this theology is so very valuable that the tiny purses of our hearts cannot contain its precious coin. We must be trained up to understand in any significant way such things as the sinfulness of man, the providence of God, the communion of the saints, etc. Above all, the cornerstone of our dogma, the sovereignty of God, is a doctrine that must be experienced to be understood.

I consider this realization a mandate… I hope to make it clearer, to demonstrate it and propagate it.