The Theologian’s Heart

Have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling as though you had won something, only to realize later that you had lost the person? Perhaps it was a discussion with a family member about faith, a heated exchange online, or a debate at the coffee hour after church. You marshaled every argument, cited every source, closed every loophole. And when it was over, you were right. Gloriously, unassailably right. But the person on the other side of the table would no longer meet your eyes.

Yesterday, someone shared with my a video from a young apologist. He was trying to articulate a very complex theological doctrine, all the while anyone who disagreed with him in his "chat," he disparaged as ignorant. He took pot-shots at actual bishops, at well-respected theologians and apologists, and basically told everyone who disagreed with him they were "idiots." And the guy was maybe 21 years old.

For the sake of argument, say he was absolutely correct. That didn't make what he was doing good or even right.

So what if you win an argument or a debate? Was the victory really that sweet? Or, did it taste like ash?

We live in an age enamored with argument. Social media has trained us to believe that theology is a spectator sport, that the goal of discourse is to “destroy” or “own” our opponents, that the sharpest tongue wins the victory.

And yet, when we open the Scriptures, we see something very different: the Word of God did not come to us as a syllogism. He came as a Person. "And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).

The Word became flesh. Not an idea. Not a proposition. Not a well-constructed argument. Flesh.

This is where all authentic theology must begin, and this is where it must end.

 

The Grammar of the Incarnation

The Greek word John uses in that verse, sarx, would have been jarring to his first readers. He could have used soma, which means “body,” a cleaner, more philosophically acceptable and sanitary term. But he chose sarx, flesh, with all its earthiness, its vulnerability, its capacity to bleed, to ooze fluids, to weep, to be exhausted.

John is telling us something profound about how God chooses to reveal Himself. God did not send a treatise from heaven, outlined with "points" to win, and counter-points to refute every opposite argument.

He sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law (cf. Galatians 4:4).

Consider what this means for the vocation of the theologian. Which is to say, the vocation of every Christian who dares to speak the truth of God's Word.

If the fullest revelation of God is a Person, then theology can never be reduced to mere concepts. It must always terminate in an encounter, and encounters happen between hearts, face-to-face, not merely in the collision of ideas.

Evagrius of Pontus, the fourth-century desert father, said this: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian” (On Prayer, 60).

He could have said, “If you are a theologian, you will argue truly.”

That's not what he said.

He could of said, “If you are a theologian, you will own all your opponents.”

Nope. Not what he said.

Prayer is the mark of the theologian, because prayer is where the human heart encounters the living God.

One caution though. This is not anti-intellectualism.

Evagrius himself was one of the most astute theological minds of his time. This is not a call to abandon doctrine, as if truth didn't matter. Doctrine matters, and matters eternally. What it is, rather, is a recognition that theology is not primarily about God as an object of study, but about God as the Subject who searches us and knows us (cf. Psalm 139:1).

 

Love as the Ground of Knowing

Saint Paul really drove this home in his letter to the Corinthians. The Corinthians were accustomed to philosophical discourse and debate. It happened in the marketplace every day. Paul was a voice among them, in fact. They were a people obsessed with wisdom, eloquence, and spiritual one-upmanship.

But Paul did not consider his debates, his arguments, to be worth anything of their own. His would should rattle every would-be theologian who thinks being "right" is the same thing as being "righteous":

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).

Ouch.

Paul is not saying that without love, our theology is less than it could be.

He is saying that without love, we are nothing.

Not diminished. Not deficient. Nothing.

Paul isn't pulling his punches here. Take away love, and what remains on your holiness ledger? A zero. A clanging cymbal in an empty room.

Why does Paul speak so severely? Because he understands something about God that we often forget. "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" (1 John 4:8).

To know God is not merely to have information about Him, but to participate in His life, and His life is love. If we do not love, we do not know Him, no matter how many theological books line our shelves.

Consider St. Therese of Lisieux. She wrote that, toward the end of her life, she benefitted little from any book apart from the Gospels and the Imitation of Christ. But today, she's recognized as a doctor of the Church. Why? She didn't write like Aquinas, volumes upon volumes of precise theology.

Because no saint before or after understood love better or more deeply than she did. Some might of equaled her. But none, so far as I can tell, loved God more than the "little flower" of Lisieux.

 

The Deception of Being Right

Here we must confront a subtle temptation. I alluded to it above. It is the temptation to mistake being right for being righteous.

Being right is easier than you would think. At least thinking you're right comes easy. But it doesn't cost much other than your time. It tends to be self-referential, built on the development of one's own intellect and mind. Being righteous, in the biblical sense, requires that our whole life (including the intellect) be conformed to the God who is Love.

And this is infinitely more difficult, because it demands not only that we know what is true but that we become the kind of person through whom the truth can flow without the poison of our pride.

Truth spoken without love rarely changes hearts. At least not for the better. Sometimes, it does the opposite. Bullied into submission, some people surrender to the most bombastic argument, and then assume the same posture.

I used to be like that, honestly. It's a hard confession to make, and I've written about it in my book Offensive Grace. But it's the truth. Once, moved by love of God, to become a pastor I soon discovered a group of "seminarians" who mocked my simple faith, my errors, and in my desire to be accepted, I surrendered. I ended up becoming like them.

It took real suffering, honestly, to put that monster to bed who'd claimed my heart. I'm glad for it. The humiliations I endured were a served up salad of vinegar. But it was what needed to happen.

A doctrine wielded like a weapon does not communicate the beauty of God. It exposes little more than the ugliness of pride within the one wielding it.

And people, being made in the image of God, instinctively recoil, not from the truth itself, but from the counterfeit truth we have manufactured by stripping it of charity.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest theological mind in history, spent his life constructing arguments of extraordinary precision. And yet, near the end of his life, after a profound mystical experience during Mass, he set down his pen. When his secretary Reginald begged him to continue writing the Summa Theologiae, Thomas replied, “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.”

He had encountered the living God, and beside that encounter, even the finest theological writing he could produce, unrivaled by any writer before or since, looked like chaff.

This is not because his writing was worthless. The Church treasures it still. It is because Thomas understood, in that luminous ecounter, that the goal of theology is not the mastery of the topics in the Summa. The goal is God Himself, and God is a fire of love that consumed everything. Even our neat, and tidy, arguments and propositions.

 

The Wound of the Word

Return to how St. John began his Gospel: the Word became flesh.

There is a wound in that sentence, if you have ears to hear it, if you follow the story all the way through. The Word did not merely become flesh in a general sense. He became flesh that could be wounded, and He was wounded. He became flesh that could weep, and He wept. He became flesh that could die, and He died, in love, for those who mocked Him, tortured Him, and misunderstood Him to the very end.

This is the pattern of true theology. It does not float above the world in a cloud of abstractions. It descends. It stoops down low. It kneels beside the person who is confused, angry, wounded, and yes, even wrong.

It speaks the truth, yes, but it speaks it as one who has counted the cost that He who is Truth itself paid. As one who is willing to be misunderstood, mocked, or even hated for the sake of the one being addressed.

"Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). The Greek phrase aletheuontes en agape is remarkable. It is a single participle, “truthing in love,” as though truth and love were two dimensions of the same act. You cannot separate them without destroying both.

 

Practical Steps Toward Becoming a Real Theologian

How, then, do we walk this path? How do we become theologians whose knowledge is warmed by love and whose love is illuminated by knowledge? Where heart and mind are not opposed, but in harmony, in peace?

First, pray before you post. Before entering any discussion about God, doctrine, or the Church, whether online or in person, pause. Spend at least sixty seconds in silence. Ask the Holy Spirit whether the words you are about to speak will build up or tear down. If you cannot pray for the person you are about to correct, you are not yet ready to correct them.

Second, read Scripture on your knees. I don't necessarily mean literally, but that's certainly appropriate, too. The point is, don't approach the Bible primarily as a source of ammunition. Don't go looking through it just so you can find some verse you can use to prove yourself right. Approach it as a love letter from your Father. When you find something that challenges you, sit with it. Let it wound you before you even attempt to use it to teach others.

Third, learn to say, “I don't know.” These are among the most sanctifying words in the English language. Real theologians are humble because they have encountered the Infinite and realize how much they don't know. There is an irony to theological study. The more you learn, the more you advance, the more you come to realize you don't know.

Think of the whole of your knowledge like a ball. What you do not yet know is whatever is just outside the circumference of the ball. As your knowledge grows, as the "ball" gets bigger, the space it encounters beyond it is even bigger than it was before. That's how it works when we are theologians. We do grow in knowledge, yes. But as we grow, encountering our Infinite God, we come to realize all the more exactly how little we really know. If you can never admit uncertainty, you are not a theologian. You are merely a debater.

Fourth, seek friendship with those who disagree with you. Not friendship as a strategy for eventual conversion, but genuine friendship, in which you listen more than you speak, loving the person before you engage the argument. You will be surprised how often the argument dissolves in the light of love, and how often what remained was not really the argument at all, but a wound that only love could heal.

Fifth, remember your poverty. Every insight you have, every doctrine you can articulate, every argument you can construct, comes from grace. You did not create the truth. You received it. The proper response to a gift is not to bludgeon others with it, but to share it with the reverence that it is not your personal possession; it is not something you earned. You can earn a Master's of Divinity, but no one can master the Divine. Rather, we must be mastered by Him; to be a steward of the truth rather than its owner.

 

The Final Test

At the end of our lives, we will not be examined on our theological library. We will not be quizzed on the finer points of soteriology or ecclesiology. We will stand before the One who is Love, and He will ask us, in essence, what He asked Peter three times on the shore of Galilee: ”Do you love me?” (John 21:17).

Not, “Did you win the argument?” Not, “Did you have the correct opinions?” But, “Did you love?”

St. John of the Cross once said that in the evening of life we will be judged on love alone.

This is what shapes real theologians. Not the applause of the debate hall, not the sophistication of a thesis or a treatise, but the question of the risen Christ on the shore of eternity. And the answer we give will not be measured in words, however eloquent, but in the shape our lives have taken, whether they have grown, day by day, into the likeness of the One who is Love itself.

The Word was made flesh. He was made flesh out of love. And every theology worthy of the name must have the same shape, the shape of a body poured out for the world, the shape of a heart broken open, conformed to the shape of a cross.

Anything less is just noise. Anything less is a clanging cymbal in an empty room.