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On August 9, 2021 By In Culture, Scribblings

The Plague of Individualism

Christians are people of the book; we are a people of the corporate book called the Bible. The Bible was composed by men who were Spirit-led in all they wrote (II Peter 1:21). But when we read the Bible, we tend to make it an encyclopedia of our favorite life verses. “You like your verses, but I have mine,” we say as if we were making observations about our poker hand.

This is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of our day. We have come to see the Scriptures as a collection of isolated texts. We have accepted the plague of individualism under the guise of special hallmark cards. As a result, we forget that when we read John 3:16 it is true that God so loved the world, but it is only true in the context of John’s judgment-filled theology of Jesus’ coming. God loves the world, but he does this also by condemning and judging people to eternal destruction. In our day, we have decided that if John 3:16 is good enough for Tim Tebow, it’s good enough for me.

But the Bible is a corporate and contextual text. It is vastly different than the individualized approach many take to it. My own assertion is that the individualization of the Bible—the read one-verse a day Bible programs–has created a culture that practically minimizes the corporate gathering and treats the unified vision of the Scriptures as secondary in importance. Therefore, to quote James B. Jordan, “individualism means that the Bible history is reduced to moralistic stories.” But Samson, Jacob, and Ruth only make sense in union with the rest of the Bible and read in union with the hermeneutic of all Scriptures.

When we gather for the Lord’s Day worship, we are worshiping with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven and all the Christians on earth; true enough. But when we worship, we also worship in the context of the entire biblical story. We are participants in the corporate nature of the text. We are people of the book and therefore, opposed to the plague of individualism. We come to worship not as atomized creatures, but restored humanity put together in a corporate body of worshipers reading the Scriptures in all its fullness.

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On July 26, 2021 By In Culture

Friendship in an Overly Sexualized Aged

Why are we so lonely? One can begin to articulate indefinitely. But I believe that one of the major reasons is that we have over-sexualized everything. We have allowed the intrinsically failed sexual order of the modern culture to dictate how Christians should act towards one another.

Let’s say two married men while smoking a cigar add a passing but lucid commentary on the beauty of Aubrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The more pious among the Christianese universe will condemn such acts as a betrayal of our fidelity to our wives. That is sheer silliness and false piety. There is a difference between lusting and affirming beauty. A father should affirm the beauty of his daughter because beauty is an objective reality. God is a God of beauty. As someone once told me, your daughter should have heard of her beauty before the first man comes and affirms it. So too, by extension, a man’s wife should hear often from her husband that her beauty exceeds that of Aubrey Hepburn. Men should thrive in praising their wives ‘ beauty and glory.

But in our day, a simple joke can turn into an obscene narrative. Two men hugging one another can send out mixed messages. Why? Because long ago (enter whatever year you like), we decided to accept the premise that intimacy and tenderness are erotic categories reserved for the married or the immoral. We are poorer because we allowed this to become the prevailing ethos of our culture.

I remember well growing up in South America and seeing female friends walking around holding hands, sisters and brothers held hands in public also; men greeted women with a kiss, and men gave one another big monstrous hugs as a public sign of affection. I did not think twice about their masculinity or femininity. It was natural. Even now, when I return to my home country, it takes me a day or two to adjust because I, too, have accepted the strange assertion that intimacy and tenderness belong only in particular categories. And I am of the hugging-party, so imagine someone who is not.

The side-effects of an oversexualized society that is more alone than ever are that it is the most connected society that has ever existed, and yet we are the most drugged, loneliest, and the most comfortable with being drugged and lonely. If you read letters only 100 years ago between friends–let’s say Bonhoeffer’s exchanges with Eberhard– you very quickly get a sense that we don’t live in those times anymore. We are far removed from the words of affection of those two men because we do not treasure intimacy. In fact, we fear it. It is a rare thing for a man to say to another man, “I love you.” Social distancing only confirms our love for the self. In this season, we have decided that relational poverty is our mode of operation. There is much to say, but I leave only with the earnest desire that you will pursue friendship; that you will seek out the other without the fears that so often accompany our erotic-driven world. Love abundantly by not taking people for granted and by not despising their presence.

C.S. Lewis once said that if we could recognize who we were, we would realize that we were walking with possible gods and goddesses, whom if we could see them in all their eternal dignity and glory, we would be tempted to fall and worship.

If anything, let the call of charity and care drive your view of others by accepting beauty and grace where it is found. Let the world misunderstand us. In some ways, our call as Christians is to be misunderstood by the world because they reject our communion with the friend of sinners who is the most beautiful of all.

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On July 23, 2021 By In Culture

Can my Teenager Decide Where we go to Church?

Dear friend,

I am behind on a host of letters, but this one caught my attention since it’s an issue pastors deal with and that little has been said about this topic. You know who you are, so if I don’t capture the essence of your question, please feel free to correct me privately.

As I understand it, your question can be easily summarized as, “Should I ever listen to my young son/daughter about where to go to church?” In sum, your teenage child wants to go to another church because it offers certain benefits for him.

Let me tackle this in two ways:

First, assuming your child is in his early teens, it’s important to know carefully what his/her intentions are; why are these “benefits” so significant for him? For instance, if your child had someone mistreat, harm, abuse him in any way, I urge you to listen carefully to his concerns. There may be deeper issues involved where other people need to be involved. Perhaps the issue is not so much the church, but concern for his well-being. Therefore, I wouldn’t outright refuse to listen to the desire to attend another church. I would ask questions regarding motivation and dig as deep as possible, especially if the child expressed a normal attitude towards the congregation just some weeks prior. If you are part of a large church with lots of programs, I’d accompany your child to these programs to have a better understanding of his situation. Better yet, I would re-consider the overly programmatic church. But that’s a question for another letter.

Second, we trust our children on lots of things, especially if our hearts have been given to them often in their upbringing. But we do not trust children to make ecclesiastical decisions for us. Parents lead the home. Dad and mom decide things pertaining to theology and doctrine and practice and potlucks.

I will be honest: I have yet to see parents pleased when they allow their children to make ecclesiastical decisions for them. Don’t give them that responsibility. If they have 30 friends in the church next door and only two in your current church, then you need to re-orient his view of friendship to those two. Friendships, at that age, are utterly unstable. It may be that the hard thing is the better thing for your family. It may be that you stay in a more faithful church where your children are not quite fitting in, instead of going to some “happening-hip” congregation where your children fit in quite nicely.

Young teenagers don’t need to fit in at this stage, they need to stay in, so they can mature in, and grow into something greater than themselves. Do not allow young teenagers to determine from whence Christian nurture comes.

Sincerely,
Pastor Brito 

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On July 16, 2021 By In Church

Nine Reasons for Church Membership

Dear friend,

I write out of concern for your soul. You have been outside the authority of a local church for too long. And this may be for a variety of reasons, among them your ignorance about membership in the first place. So, here are nine observations concerning membership I want you to keep in mind:

1) Baptism gives you access to God’s gifts and promises anywhere. To be a member is to be formalized into a particular covenant community somewhere.

2) Membership is kingly citizenship before the Second Coming; one cannot roam alone on earth because earth’s life is to be modeled after heavenly life which is communal (Mat. 6:10).

3) Don’t expect me to listen to your interpretation of the Bible when you don’t listen to the rules of the church for whom Christ died. To take up your cross and follow Jesus is also to follow his Bride.

4) Hebrews 13 says that you are to submit to the leaders over you. When you decide to remain autonomous concerning church membership you are refusing to obey this imperative. You cannot submit to a leader when you despise the church he serves.

5) It is true that finding a church comes with difficulties. One needs to find a place where not only the creed is followed but where praxis lines up with your particular values and vision. However, this is not a reason to “shop” around endlessly.

6) When someone says to me, “I’ve looked for a church & can’t find a place,” they are generally saying, “I don’t want to find a church because it will infringe too much on my liberties,” or “I can’t find a place that holds to every little detail of doctrine I subscribe to.”

7) Membership is testing your obedience to the fifth commandment and your allegiance to a greater society.

8 ) Membership is a sign of a healthy Christian community. Those who refuse to join a local church are acting in accordance with their own creeds and symbols. Those who join are acting in accordance with the church’s historic creeds and symbols.

9) In sum, unless you are in a deserted part of the country where no Trinitarian churches exist or on brief temporary assignment somewhere, it is your Christian duty to join a local Trinitarian congregation whether it lines up with all your distinctives or not.

I pray God leads you speedily to a local body. Your soul depends on it.

~Pastor Brito

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On July 14, 2021 By In Counseling/Piety, Culture

The Uncomfortable Gospel of Elimelech

In God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis’ wrote that he didn’t come to Christianity for its comfort. Instead, he said that a bottle of Port could give him all the happiness and comfort he needed.

I have been thinking of this sentiment in our modern environment. We have lost the sense that the Christian faith is not a religion of comfort and ease but warfare is inherent to our religious convictions. We fight for things because they are needful and because they are worthy of being rescued. When the people of God leave the presence of God in exchange for comfort, they inherit all sorts of bad jujus. In the Bible, it is always a bad thing to leave the good thing.

When Elimelech left Bethlehem in the Book of Ruth,a he left not just a piece of land. He wasn’t attempting to find a better marketplace in Moab. Moab was a place of deep darkness and idolatry. This wasn’t merely an attempt to take the UHAUL down to a better place; instead, Elimelech left God’s presence and God’s people because things were hard. And when things get hard, evangelical Christians decide either a) let’s leave town, or b) let’s find a gentler God.

Now, I am not calling Elimelech a silly man. His very name means “God is King.” He failed to live up to his status as one who serves Israel’s true King. Surely, Naomi was not a foolish wife, either. But sometimes, our human natures choose the easier thing, especially as we look around the world and see so much pain and suffering. It wasn’t that Elimelech said, “Wow, we are being disobedient; how can we fight this problem in Bethlehem?!” The problem was that Elimelech said, “We are being disobedient; how can we run from this?” Like Jonah, he discovered there was no place he could go where his sins wouldn’t follow.

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  1. Some have objected that Elimelech’s departure was not sinful since it mirrors the departure of others in the Bible. A more potent objection goes like this: “Abraham left the land of promise during the time of famine and Jacob did so as well. Why can’t we say Elimelech is just copying the actions of the patriarchs? Isn’t Elimelech just recapitulating the actions of Abraham and Jacob? There seems to be no divine disapproval of the actions of Abraham and Jacob.” But this argument fails to deal with key differences between the situation of the patriarchs and the situation of Elimelech. While the land was promised to Abraham, the land had not yet been conquered when Abraham and Jacob left because of famine. Abraham does not dwell in the land as a permanent resident. He knew he was just a sojourner. And it is the same with Jacob. Both men knew it would be centuries and generations before their descendants came into full possession of the land. The sins of the Canaanites had to fill up to the full measure, and then they would be driven out of the land. Their land would belong to Israel for as long as she was faithful. But that has not yet happened in the time of Abraham and Jacob. They left before the conquest of the land and before God has set his name there. So, for the patriarchs to leave the land does not carry the same significance as when Elimelech leaves the land. But there is something else to note with regard to Abraham. In Genesis 12-13, it is true that Abraham leaves the land because of famine. But he is not blessed until he begins to turn back to the land. Then he leaves Egypt with spoil. It is as if Abraham’s departure from the land was a kind of exile. But when he turns back towards the land, it is an exodus complete with plunder from the Egyptians.  (back)

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On July 12, 2021 By In Culture

Not Weirdness, but Mereness

It’s Monday, so here it goes. Out of my four topics this week, one that I have been wanting to address for some time is the “weird Christianity” impulse of our day. In preparation for this topic, I read a couple of essays, neither of which made the point I am trying to make, so the most likely conclusion is that the writers’ fathers smelt of elderberries, and I want nothing of it.

The first pre-requisite to understanding this discussion is to keep in mind that the American youth, by and large, are fairly fed up with the modern Christian faith as is. Now, this stems from various angles. Among them is that their parents smoked a lot of weed in their day so that whatever faith they desired to pass on to their children was a tainted mustard seed and whatever that seed produced was enough for their children to reject it later on.

Another perspective is that such young adults felt the burn and went the way of all flesh, accepting Bernie into their hearts. They are probably vegetarians now and look down on people like me because of my muscular consumption of high fats. Theologically, I fart in their general direction. And if my Monthy Python quotations make you uncomfortable, you are probably a vegetarian as well and I sit in judgment of you.

Given that this is the general state of our young adults, what then are they doing? Some of them are rejecting the faith by attending your local display of effeminism. They are likely attending a local church whose pastor has a co-pastor who wears a dress. In most cases, it’s his wife. Yikes! To quote “The Life of Bryan,” “Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government!”But a whole other group has embraced a somewhat orthodox weird Christianity. This is the group I’d like to address because some of them fall in my camp, or at the very least hover around my camp.

The impulse to be weird is a natural one. Christians do breathe different air. Our ethics are quite strange from the world (Gal. 5:22-23) and our singing tends to bring fire on things indifferent. So, I am not opposed to looking different. In fact, a quick glimpse at what happens in my neck of the woods on Sunday morning will give the modern evangelical lots of topics in the drive home and the next 27 days. What I am seeking to oppose with gracious eyes is the kind of weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Much of our impulse in reaction to what we see as the onslaught of the left is to do things as wildly different than the thing the most conservative Christian is doing. Therefore, we scramble our eggs while singing verses one and nine of the Lorica, we read from one holy translation of the Bible, we put on our legal gloves in judgment of the local family who educates with curriculum A instead of option Z, and we live as if only our idealized agenda fits John’s description of the descending city in Revelation.

What I am arguing for is “Mere Christendom,” not weird Christendom. Christians, in fact, should be the most normal of all people. We should do our jobs each day with a minimal amount of complaining, we should feed our kids each day with a minimal amount of temperamentalism, we should respect our bosses, even when they are pagan imbeciles, we should watch our soccer games without getting drunk, we should go to church with one of three kids wearing something that is not utterly wrinkled, and we should laugh through it all at the end of the day giving thanks to God.

Mere Christendom is not looking for the latest trend to divorce ourselves from culture, but we should be looking for the most biblical way to make a dent in culture with a Christ-centered imprint. One writer put it succinctly when he said that we don’t need to be more weird than Christian.

The faith itself offers plenty of natural ways to be discerning and different. What we don’t need to do is add a shekel or ten to that amount of weirdness. In fact, weirdness never conquered nations. Just look at the Anabaptists of the 16th century. In fact, some of them were anti-trinitarians to the core, and I argue it stemmed from their separationism, which inculcated in them a spirit of ingenuity when it came to theology, and theology does not need ingenuity–hello Arius!”–it needs healthy and normal carriers.~~~~Many, many years ago, a visitor to our congregation came to me asking what I thought about nudist beaches. The fella had a fairly developed biblical view of the topic, arguing from Genesis that the ideal state of man is to be naked and to return to that glorious Edenic state where men walked around naked and were not ashamed. And therefore, attending a nudist beach now and then was not that bad.

Now, remember this was many years ago and our church was small enough that I had some time to give this thing a thought. I did end up responding to his insanity in a five-page paper, which did convince him. If that had happened today, I would have found the two largest guys in our church and escorted him out of the building. Not everything requires an explanation, some things simply require condemnation.

But the fact that he was convinced by my arguments against nudist beaches didn’t mean he stopped seeking after weirdness. It was just one of his many attempts to separate himself from the present culture, but also the present Christian culture, no, the present reformed culture…sorry, the present reformed, sub-culture.

Friends, what the church needs today is not weirdness, but mereness. Mere creeds, mere lives, mere wine, mere merriment, and mere Christendom. And in this, there is much liberty and various ways of growth in the kingdom.

So, three cheers for basic Christian living!

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On July 9, 2021 By In Discipleship

We are Coming for your Children: A Gay Manifesto

Our speaker this Sunday at Providence Church (CREC), Dr. Ben Merkle, recently opined that you may not be postmil and paedobaptist, but the leftists are and they are actively seeking to implement their agenda. The left has a developed view of the future and they are eagerly seeking to catechize our children with their optimistic eschatology. They also have a covenantal view that sees generational faithfulness to their cause at the very heart of all they do.

Many Christians, on the other hand, live as if the future is determined for failure and that children are future disciples; little vipers in diapers waiting to be evangelized for a proper time of discernment–paedos and credos act like this at times. We treat the entire project with triviality and give over the reign of ideological terror to the enemy and let them set the agenda while we sit back with our Veggie Tales catechism.

Take the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir who has become a national topic these days. Now, they argue that the entire endeavor was tongue-in-cheek humor and that conservatives don’t have a sense of humor. But let’s consider for a moment the heart of their anthem:

“We’ll convert your children. Someone’s gotta teach them not to hate. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children.”

Now, this kind of indoctrination is rather the explicit variety; the stout version. But any sober Christian knows that there are no neutral actions and certainly no neutral lifestyles. The national pushback is not so much pushback to the agenda–for conservatives have been too hesitant to speak out against homosexual activists– but the pushback is a reaction to the overt language. We are generally fine when the argumentation happens at a subtle level because we don’t care much about grasping logical subtleties are arguments. Nevertheless, the best agendas are comedic agendas. That’s how God created us and God has a pattern of haha-ing his way through history, especially when songs like these make the round (Psalm 2).

Of course, we are not naive. These gay men may attempt to apologize for their song, but we know that their song is their anthem and agenda. Their boldness is coming to new levels of obscenity and their postmil and paedo-agenda cards are out in the open now. That’s a good thing for us. We need more testing as Christians to sharpen our discernment skills.

Now, if Christians act as if this is some SNL skit and move on from this without learning any lessons, we are fools for it.

What we do need to see is that unnatural acts and actors of unnatural lifestyles (Rom. 1) would love acceptance and acceptance comes in the form of enculturation to norms. These norms are actualized in the songs of a culture. Even the humor attempts are forms of indoctrination. We should not panic, but we should form even greater circles of postmil and paedo-life disciples who see that Christians are deeply committed to an agenda, a form of godly conspiracy against the prideful schemes of gay men. We don’t narrow our focus on gay men only, but gay men and various other alphabet letters are seeking to build a kingdom, and if we walk around as if this warfare is only left to the halls of public schools in California, we are going to lose the near battles.

This all means that our language to our boys needs to be conspicuously robust; the kind that shows them that sweat is good and that gets them out of the house often to tackle thorns and thistles. They cannot grow up with a diet of praise choruses. They need the “Son of God Goes Forth to War” and “Lion-Hearted” theology that acknowledges that the future belongs to the Lord and our sons and daughters are marked by a divine Catechizer in baptism.

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On June 11, 2021 By In Counseling/Piety

The Abuse of Introspection: Some Thoughts

Some people dwell so much on their sinfulness that they find themselves constantly bombarding their status before God with doubt. Am I really a Christian? Am I worthy? These questions are not atypical of those who grow up in environments where internalized Christianity is emphasized. There is a healthy form of self-examination and Paul informs Pastors (II Corinthians 13:5) to encourage parishioners to examine themselves. At the same time, there is a difference between self-examination and introspection that is not often considered.

It is worth mentioning that God cares about our hearts. Out of it can flow the waters of destruction or waters of peace (Ps. 42). The repentant psalmist cries for God to create in him a clean heart and that God would restore the joy of his salvation. Here again, it is important to notice that this salvation has a face, a joyful one.

Martyn-Lloyd Jones wrote that a depressed Christian is not a good apologetic for Christianity. Whether there are physiological components at the root of this depression or not, it is still not a good presentation of the Christian faith. Depression–which must be differentiated from other forms of mental effects– is a form of despising God’s gifts and goodness. All of us are prone to it, and all of us must fight it. Schmemann once wrote that “Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy.” Joy often is not forced, though many have to work hard at it. But most often, it is the natural outflow of a heart saturated with grace.

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On June 10, 2021 By In Church, Worship

Singing Like Men

Why are men not singing in Church?

Various articles have attempted to answer that question recently. But before we can try to offer a rationale for such a spectacular question, we need to observe that some are entirely comfortable allowing this trend to continue. After all, music plays a minimal role in their worship expressions. Others find the issue of congregational singing irrelevant due to the trained praise bands that lead worship each Sunday. “Let the professionals lead.”Certain environments encourage people to hear and feel the music rather than sing it. And some groups have placed such high priority on the preached word that the very idea of a singing congregation seems secondary, if not tertiary in the priority list. But on to better things.

Fortunately, there are a vast amount of churches and leaders that still treasure congregational singing and long for a time when men return to the old-fashioned task of singing God’s melodies. The cruel reality is that we are far from the mark. In my many visits to evangelical churches over the years, the few men who opened their mouths timidly read the words like a child attempting to spell out his phonics assignment.

Timid singers make for timid Christians.

Let’s Begin with Singing Anything in Church, Shall We?

I am not arguing for a particular style of music. That would be to ask for too much. I think we need an incremental strategy. I am arguing for men to sing whether through projected song lyrics, Fanny Crosby classics, or Scottish Psalter. I am imploring for men to take up their holy charge and lead by example. Set the tone and watch the little lions roar.

There is a more insidious reason why men do not sing. One author boldly observed:

“Look around your average Evangelical church and you’ll likely see a 3 to 1 ratio of women to men. And of the men who actually do attend, you can see on about half of their faces that they’re only there because their wives want them to be there. The other half are there because they genuinely want to be there.”

We have succumbed to a kind of cowardly environment where instead of men leading the women with their voices and character and fervor, the women are attempting to make up for the lack of interest in their own husbands. How often have I encountered the scenario where women hunger to learn and grow in their Christian walk, but husbands are content with the slobberiness of impious entertainment.

Evangelical men are wanted. But they are lacking. They lack leadership and the ones who make it to church after their wives’ brave attempt to persuade them the night before, sit still in a silence resembling a preserved ritualized mummy.

Yes, there is certainly much to blame for the weakness of the evangelical man. And there is much to commend in female saints who tirelessly bring their children to church on Sunday morning while their husbands engage in their rock-n-roll fantasies. May God curse their dreams.

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On June 8, 2021 By In Church

Doing Theology with Laughter

I have always loved theological discourse. I had my share of interactions in high school and made a few of my classmates endure the cadence of my naivete. Of course, whatever I believed at the height of my 18th birthday was pure Gospel, unadulterated. From my views on the Sabbath to Supralapsarianism (the latter which never appealed to me, btw), everything I spoke was spoken with the conviction of a seasoned dogmatician. And in those days, I was not well-read, which added an additional percentage of hubris to my declarations.

One thing that permeated those early years from 18-22 was my impeccable ability to convince myself that what I argued was passionately serious and seriously passionate. It came from my deep inner being saturated with certainty.

Take, for instance, the renowned doctrine of Calvinism with its soteriological vigor. When I first embraced the soteriology of Calvinism I believed firmly that I was embracing the sine qua non of theological hierarchy. Again, I defended it fervently around my sophomore in college as if it were the highest and most significant element of Christendom. As I have written in a previous post, I had to do a repentance tour for my unfavorable debating techniques.

But I have always loved the discourse. I loved the dialogue late at night in the hallway. I loved pulling out my Greek text and looking at particular pericopes and savoring James’s words together with others. All those conversations prepared me for graduate studies both at the Masters’ and Doctoral levels. Indeed, good conversations, especially around theology, shall save the world. I still hold to that, even though I abused my place at various times.

But here is the nuance to this process, which most of us who do this for a living and the studious parishioners must consider. And it hit me again when I read it from my old mentor, John Frame, who wrote:

“Don’t lose your sense of humor. We should take God seriously, not ourselves, and certainly not theology. To lose your sense of humor is to lose your sense of proportion. And nothing is more important in theology than a sense of proportion.”

The discourse is not the end-all. At the end of a long exchange of words, friendships are the end-all. Communion is the heart and reason for the discourse. If we lose our closest allies in the process of doing theology, we lose theology at its best, which is often the result of taking ourselves too seriously; of lacking the comedy of life which makes every encounter and relationship more valuable.

A regular comment I have made to my congregation over the years is that a man can speak the truth in a thousand ways, but if love is not the companion of the truth it rarely communicates effectively. I am certain I won a thousand debates in college. I was a disciplined Bible student, but as I look back I also know I lost half of those debates because I failed to achieve the telos of human discourse, which is to lead my companion to a better understanding of God and love for neighbor.

We have lost our sense of proportion in doing theology because theology is no longer the domain of the good, but the domain of the greedy. There is all the time in the world for the righteous anger of good theologians opining against real evil. That too is a form of theological discourse. But mostly, in our unique communities, our discourse needs to happen more often with cigars and drinks in a sacred environment of peace and humor.

The present evangelical scene is already too primed for destructive interactions. To do theology well we need a sense of proportion. Not everything can be life or death, but everything should be light and best around a table. All things are best when the discourse happens around the mutual agreement on proportion.

When theology loses that sense, we fail to do it as well as it should. Theology–the study of God–is the story of everything that is good, true, and holy. When it is a tool of rhetorical pugilism, it quickly loses its appeal. But when it is a tool of discovering corporately the goodness of life, the splendor of the Bible, and the majesty of God it is then the best life offers.

If that process succeeds, more often than not, and if we can make our theologizing a source of joy, we may even contemplate our role as angelic, for the angels–as Chesterton notes–can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

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