Don’t go to the woods. Go to church.
Christianity Today recently published a good essay on Rules of life from Myles Werntz and a review of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder.
While Myles and I share similar concerns about the rule of life trend he also brings the wisdom of St. Benedict and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to bear on the topic in helpful ways. But it suggested a different place where I sense rules of life might lead us astray. When I read Practicing the Way I came away with the feeling that the Rule of Life was more baseline for who you were than your entanglement with reality. Others might be able to read and see Rules like that as a musical scale from which we improvise from, but they turn the elements of the ordinary into distractions from living the Rule. On top of that I have also listened to Comer enough to hear his advice mirroring that of the self-optimization advice of Andrew Hubermann or Joe Rogan but in more minimalism therapeutic way than those figures. You can even get a Masterclass from Comer himself on The Way Of The Teacher. At the start of the review Myles connects some of the rule of life to recent trends but I have a hard time not seeing it the way Freya India describes some of modern life in this interview with NS Lyons:
Human connection is messy, it’s unpredictable, we fall in love in weird and incommunicable ways. And sometimes it’s not a perfect, rigid routine that makes you productive—it’s the messy, unplanned morning waking up next to someone you love. Sometimes it’s the chaos of your kids clambering into bed with you that inspires you to be better, not the morning breathwork or perfectly timed caffeine shot to activate your adenosine system. I saw a tweet recently that was the perfect example of this. This young guy shared his Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine: journaling, red light therapy, breathwork, meditation, gym, ice bath, sauna, reading, all in perfect silence. No interruptions; no spontaneity. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but it’s just not the kind of lifestyle you can have with other people around. Watching it, my first thought was, wow, if this is the ideal, no wonder young people are delaying marriage and having children. We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient…and alone. And eventually, you end up seeing other human beings as distractions, as annoyances. Other people become obstacles. For women, men become obstacles to our healing and mental health. For men, women seem like obstacles to their ambition and self-development. Or vice versa. It all seems like an avoidance strategy to me, everyone trying very hard not to be vulnerable and get hurt.
Other people can become such obstacles to our rules and the rule itself can numb us into going through life as a kind of machine. But here there’s also a connection to the Living in Wonder review and book by Dreher. The author summarizes the book and advice at the beginning and the end of the review as:
First, put down your phone, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Next, begin to pray. Don’t pray just anything; recite the Jesus Prayer, preferably hundreds of times. Now you are positioned to begin your quest. The object of the quest is beauty. Seek to behold divine glory in the work of the Lord’s hands, whether in his creation, icons, or saints. If you have eyes to see, each of these is a mirror reflecting the light of Christ in a dark but not forsaken world.
And at the end:
Maybe you should consider giving his advice a try. Get offline. Go to the woods. Bring a Bible, a candle, maybe an icon. Say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing. Ask for a sign. Ask for the Lord. Ask for power. Then wait—and see what happens next.
My copy of Living with Wonder is coming today so I cannot speak to the content of the book yet, but it seems in both these threads there is an element of get away. Organize yourself, organize your life, go the woods alone, have your own personal sabbath. The review of Dreher’s book stresses that this book might be more of what we need than what in his previous book, The Benedict Option which I think was completed in the follow-up Live not by Lies. While the author sees those books as concerned with sex and politics, it seems to me those books are more grounded in the communal and the togetherness of the church and boundness amid raging floods. I would agree that enchantment and wonder (and rules of life) will be a more popular message but in the end I do not they will us through the flood because we will find we need each other than we can know.
Last time part of my counsel was not to get a rule, get a church. So, this time my simple advice is: Don’t go to the woods. Go to Church.
cannot be explained but only shown.
Jake Meador has two posts up at Mere Orthodoxy worthy of a response, but I will just focus on one here. [1] I never met Tim Keller but due to a friendship with Jake I was once able to be a small zoom call with him where he responded to younger writers and leaders thoughts about his recent work. Because I was determined to be that annoying guy, I read to him the Hauerwas quote Jake shares here to get his thoughts. At the opening of a sermon on doubting Thomas, Hauerwas writes:
Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So, we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained. As a result, we end up saying more than we know because what we believe—or better, what we do—cannot be explained but only shown. The word we have been given for such a showing is “witness.”
When I first heard this quote on audio from Duke chapel, I wrote it down and thought about it constantly. To me it sounded like where things have gone so wrong for the church today and with the word, Witness, how we might become the church again. I once downloaded the sermon to my Zune and because the audio was off the voice of Stanley Hauerwas blew out the speaker our Jeep Cherokee as I played for my wife.
Given that in my limited reading so much of Keller’s apologetic work was precisely making sure that we believed could be properly explained and that if the secular person might hear that they would be open to faith I wanted to hear his thoughts on a quote that formed the bedrock of my ministry.
Because Tim Keller is infinitely kind, he let a small church pastor from nowhere stumble through reading the quote and ask him what he made of it. I do not remember clearly what he said because of time past but he asked which book it was in and challenged that showing was enough. He pressed that if he had more time, he would give examples of how words worked on some the most controversial subjects Jake talks about in his post. But I would disagree with Jake that Keller took this into his later project. He continued to believe that the battle between ideas was one of convincing and explanation and narration. He gave his life and time to work of the local church but it was the community of showing that often seemed missing from his apologetic.
I am grateful for the life and work of Tim Keller as someone far outside his circles. I am grateful for the time he gave young leaders and writers during the pandemic. But we need to be honest that his public apologetic project diverges from what Hauerwas describes as witness here and as we look forward to the future consider the path might look different than it did in the past. Or to put it another way, I’m not sure the solution for today is to be found in doing what Tim did, as Jake argues.
[1] The other is one misjudging what might be gained by exploring the connection between John Mark Comer and Rob Bell.
Repair
A church that relearns how to repair would still have sins in need of exposure, wounds in need of debridement, errors in need of deconstruction. But for every thesis we nail to the door, we might fix a broken hinge or putty an old crack. We might be known less for our mutual antagonism and more as repairers of broken walls. With time and faithfulness, maybe we can pass on to future generations a hard-won tendency toward repair.
Thus ends a essay on repair by Bonnie Kristian at Christianity Today.
While I’ve yet to write the official post launching what I hope to be the ongoing project of this blog it will be something adjacent to the idea of repair she writes about but with a different sense of the devastation the church has/is going through. The concept of repair reminds me of something like Tim Keller’s How to Reach the West again (which to be honest to me sounds like How to Make America great again.) These seem more like nostalgia, a longing for better days, than a willingness to grapple with the actual reality that stands before. The title for blog/project comes from Jonathan Lear’s classic work Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, which follows the story of how Plenty Coups and the Crow people navigated the end of a world. While I have read and listened to the book several times it has not become clear to me what type of world Lear that would be facing but the book has the overarching theme that world Lear and we inhabit is going to face its own cultural devastation. We can each pick our own prophets for what this cultural devastation might look like but whoever we pick it is not clear what to do next. Repair, the way Kristian writes about, could be the path for the church in this coming collapse but to me it looks more like putting a bandage of a flesh wound and cannot see how the things we might repair lead us to crisis in the first place.
losing my grip on reality
This past week I attended the Doxology gathering held by the Eugene Peterson center for Christian Imagination and it was overall a blessing. I’ve read about every book by Eugene Peterson and deeply throughout his recommend list of books in Take and Read. I’d like to write more about the tone of the conference and how it often tilted so far into a ‘Christianity of care’ that it lost any sense of a ‘Christianity of struggle’ (concepts I’ve taken from NS Lyons) as well as a bit where the pastoral life of Eugene Peterson is (not) found today.
But an unexpected treat was hearing Daniel Nayeri, author of Everything Sad Is Untrue, who brought humor and insights to writing and life. At the start of his talk he shared this quote from Eugene Peterson that I’ve been thinking about ever since that captures much about what I hope to write above and where we failing to hold our grip on reality.
Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.
deep roots
Some of the laity, in their desire to participate in the Church's liturgy on a more continuous basis, adopt features of the priestly and monastic life and prayer, and recite the Office in whole or in part. But a greater understanding and a more developed spiritual freedom is generally evinced by those who, in the freedom of contemplative prayer, allow the life of God to take deep root in them and become their light. There are exceptions when the former practice can be recommended, but in most cases, it is a mistake. The normal way for those who are capable of it is the encounter with God's word in contemplation; in this way they unlock the treasures of sacramental life within them and grow in receptiveness for the sacraments.
As I have been reading Prayer by Hans Urs von Balthazar the call to the listening of the Christian life continually beckons. In our age we are offered plenty of ways to be busy in the spiritual life, to adopt rules, mechanisms, and techniques to deepen our faith, but for many these efforts will fall short. At some point I would like to write about what I call the Bible Project-ing[1] of American Christian life, the continual need for podcasts, apps, and videos to give us content, but that is a different day. Having a to-do list or series of habits or a podcast library for your faith will be fulfilling for a time as it feels like progress but separated from the listening life, we will find ourselves checking things off but still in silence. While I think these things can become cultural jigs for us to improvise and find ourselves drawn to what he calls taking deep root of God in us often they are presented as ends in themselves. What Balthazar advocates as spiritual freedom and becoming our light I take to be an offer to carry the fire into our daily lives and grow in the reception of the sacraments that ignite that flame within us and stand at the center of our communal life in baptism and the Lord’s supper.
[1] The Bible Project is great, but it seems to have started a way for us to be continually getting information about the Bible without being transformed by God.
Carrying the fire
There is a well-known story of when Eugene Peterson asks one of his grown children how the new pastor is at is their church is doing. The child responds that he has not found his sermon yet. Eugene was initially thrown off by this but comes around to accepting pastors find their one sermon and it becomes a theme of their preaching and call. This is a story about mine that I will continue to write about here.
The night before Easter Sunday this past year I went to bed thinking I had finished the sermon, prepared for the next day. But as I laid down my mind was captured by a 'carrying the fire' phrase from the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It had been a while since I had read the book, but it possibly came to mind as we were planning a bonfire for the morning before church. But the phrase captured what I had been trying to say can happen to us as we come to this empty tomb that proclaims an absence before it proclaims a presence. It also happened the Easter text was from Luke which continues to the road to Emmaus Easter evening in which the disciples on the road say, “were not our hearts burning within us.”
World we are in
To consider what it would mean to ‘carry the fire’ I had to think of the challenges the church faces today, both from within our walls and outside. As I could not sleep my I kept returning to this quote from Pope Benedict
The Church, too, as we have already said, will assume different forms. She will be less identified with the great societies, more a minority Church; she will live in small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith. But precisely in this way she will, biblically speaking, become the salt of the earth again. In this upheaval, constancy — keeping what is essential to man from being destroyed — is once again more important, and the powers of preservation that can sustain him in his humanity are even more necessary.
There are many different ways to describe and lament the late modern world we live in. While some may seem more fanciful, or fear driven than others, one needs only to be awake to see how things are being pulled apart. Above Pope Benedict see what we are living through as 'upheaval' and how the mission of this smaller vital church would be keeping what is essential to us from being destroyed. For much of the last century it seemed the call of the church was to go out and build something and change the world. But what if now is the time we retain something, to continue to remember something, to conserve something.
The Road
As the father and son travel the road a phrase that is essential to the son is that he his father 'Carry the fire.' It is one way they know they are the 'good guys.' As one conversation makes clear the darkness of the world they live:
We would not ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we are the good guys.
Yes.
And we are carrying the fire.
And we are carrying the fire.
Yes.
Okay.
As an image there are several things that have aided me but here are two. The first is we are not the fire. The fire is something that can be kindled and carried but it does not form inside of us naturally nor is it our genius that makes it. It is rather something received from outside. The second, is it gives knowledge of when we do not carry it. The church, and I, will be full of moments where we will confess, we failed to carry the fire in those places. This is not a reason for despair but an awareness of the challenges and times through which we are living.
To be witnesses
My one sermon would be an attempt to articulate what Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard says clearly here,
“To be a witness of God does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
Being a witness the benefits of a scriptural and theological history. But if we are willing to read The Road hear its despair as a parable of our world and its despair and emptiness, we come out the other side with a hope that has seen darkness yet still clings to the light. More than rules of life or missions or calls for reenchantment or podcasts and bible reading plans will fall flat. That the church needs now is an existentialism that calls forth to us to live lives that do not make sense if God does not exist.
new data
Final post I’m moving over from previous projects. What I’m naming here could easily be the exact way you might feel about my project.
Several years ago, I remember seeing Rob Bell speak about his newest book and him telling a story about the content. He was sitting with a friend who was a data engineer of some sort and Bell said he was not sure he should publish the book because “there wasn’t anything new in it.” His data engineer friend tells that in his field that if you have found a new way to order in present the data/information at the end you have created new data/information. “These things might have already been in the world, but they have been presented through you yet.”
When I finished reading Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer, I came away thinking the same. John Mark has taken a lot of quotes and ideas and stitched them together in a way that is unique. He has in many ways created new data/information, new content. But the question remained what kind of content it is. In my last post on this I mentioned how the primary bones of this book are the Willard (Baptist)/Foster (quakers)/Ortberg (mega-church) and that is why something like church can become community and why the traditional sacraments of baptism and Lord’s supper are not primary. Here it is helpful to see how John Mark pulls from the Christian tradition, but the form of his content (the Spiritual formation movement) is driving how he uses and collects material along the way.
At the end reading the impressive and expansive list of quotes and thinkers he pulls together I could not have but wondering how much different the book would like if the bones were from a deep reader of Calvin, a catholic, or Stanley Hauerwas. If these became the bones over Willard et all it would be a much different book. And that’s part of the problem. The content and quotes aren’t quite making a whole. My frustration in the end is that the quotes seem to come as prooftexts for the shape he already has decided on. My hope is that a different thinker might be able to express the content of thinkers and quotes that it seems like they have bearing and are helping created the project rather than being summoned to support an idea in search of quote.
In ordering and presenting them as such John Mark has created something ‘new’ but I am just not sold we will hear the voices behind it and miss the message that otherwise might emerge.
Is it all the phone?
A post from when I was thinking through these bestsellers.
This part month two different books on teen or gen z mental health were released. One, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and two, Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier. Both are good books and I hope they’re widely read but my feeling Haidt’s book will gain a wider audience and following while Shirier’s book will be ignored outside of more ‘conservative’ media. As a couple of reviewers note her book isn’t written in a way that might off putting to those unconvinced, I don’t think much will be convincing for those unwilling to see. (And it is clear those reviewers don’t share in concerns about SEL and therapy). But there’s also the divide that Haidt is an academic and Shrier is a journalist so that will give him more legitimacy with people. My concern is that while Haidt’s book tackles the surface level problem head on it misses what’s below the surface.
In Haidt’s own words these are action steps he hopes his book produces.
No smartphones before high school
No social media before 16
Phone-free schools
More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world
These are great, I hope they are widely adopted. But if I had to guess idea the first three will gain traction while four on independence and free play will struggle. There’s a lot of reasons for that but ideas 1–3 are about protecting your kid while the fourth one is about lowering parental anxiety and protection. The first are pulling on the lever of concern while the fourth suggests there is a better way.
This is where Shrier’s book is better equipped to help parents and teens. Instead of taking to narrow a look at the problem as Haidt does (all phones and social media) Shrier looks more holistically at the world we’ve created. Her book lacks a clear goal like Haidt’s but it narrates the upside-down nature of what we’ve done and the world we’ve created that is producing damaged young people.
If you have time read both books. But if you only read Haidt’s you might begin to think the problem is only removing phones and not symptom of a larger crisis. This review from Mary Harrington is a wonderful place to start at seeing the larger picture.
(A flaw with both books is the assumption that adult mental health is fine. Haidt unleashing the hounds at 16 and Shrier’s assumption that adults are capable of controlling the relationship to therapy both are naive. The world we’ve made for our young people is the one we inhabit as well and health needs to start from above.)
2 Quotes
Another intro post from a side project I’m letting go of or subsuming into this one.
Before I get too far into this work I want to share two quotes, one from the theologian Stanley Hauerwas and the other from Wittgenstein.
The first is one of those quotes that altered my life. I remember first hearing when listening to sermons delivered by Dr. Hauerwas from Duke Chapel. Hearing it read in his raspy Texan voice made me pause and rewind several times for I knew within it came something deep. Long before the quote was published in a collection of his sermons I committed into memory. (Funny enough the audio also blew out the speaker in my car when I shared it with my wife) At first, I just loved that we are people of witness over argument. But as with most powerful pieces of prose when you commit them to memory, they become deeper. Over time I hope to blog through each line of the quote in both how it challenged me and calls the church to greater depth. But below here it is:
Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained. As a result we end up saying more than we know because what we believe — or better, what we do — cannot be explained but only shown. The word we have been given for such a showing is “witness.”
The second quote is one of the most famous from Wittgenstein. I had known it for some time but had never placed it alongside the Hauerwas quote. As I’ve already said my early knowledge of Wittgenstein was too colored by the logical positivist error. For instance, in this quote I assumed if one must be silent, he meant it can’t exist. Reading the biography by Monk it’s clear that for Wittgenstein the silence had more to do with the need to be shown more than spoken.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
I had long known that Wittgenstein was a deep influence on Hauerwas but until recently the link between the work of both had eluded with his church ‘showing.’
For now, I just want to leave this here but ‘witness’ will be one of those driving themes of these notes.
Trivial
A couple of years ago I tried starting about at Mere Orthodoxy under this theme. It failed for several reasons, some I’ve aware of. But this concept is an important one to guide the church today.
In 1986 Stanley Hauerwas wrote a brilliant essay on Peace and the significance of the trivial. The essay is one of my favorites, and I believe is of particular importance today.
In its context, the essay is an exploration of ‘the bomb’ and what it means to live in the nuclear age. Time Magazine had just published the claim that “the Bomb’s presence abets, if it does not exclusively account for, much of what is nerve-wracking and unsatisfactory about our lives.” Hauerwas takes up the case from the theologian, Gordon Kaufman, and his claim that in light of nuclear weapons Christian theology must be rethought. He writes that Kaufman’s “position…makes explicit what many feel when they contend that if we live as if the bomb does not matter, we are making a decisive mistake.”
Hauerwas is skeptical of these claims. To define life in such a way is to make the bomb (or previously the Vietnam war) a totalitarian force. He writes “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to the discipline of examination to discern whether we may in fact be unconsciously supporting the continuation of nuclear weapons.” What is the end of all this? “That we will be making a mistake if we allow the bomb to determine our lives spiritually. Put simply, we will not be working for a peace worth having if we assume that peace means only the elimination of the bomb from our lives.” What makes for a peace worth having?
While today, the fear of nuclear weapons has faded from such a controlling view new things have risen to take its place. The coming environmental collapse is a ready replacement, however because it stretches out over time and human civilization primarily deals with what is near and immediate to us, redefining our lives in the face of it has not taken root yet. But because we can focus on what is near and immediate to us, current president Donald Trump has become that totalitarian force in our lives and discourse. He must be thought about. He must be written about. We can cut people from our lives for their support of him. We can banish them to the outer places. If one were to try to and live as if he didn’t exist they would be making a mistake. Our lives must be lived in the constant awareness of him and what he does. Every book must confront the legacy of how we got him and what are going to do about it. We must live lives confronting this truth.
What remains for the faithful to do? What can we do when confronted with the bomb or Trump? “That alternative is quite simply the need to reclaim the significance of the trivial.” Resistance isn’t just making every aspect of life tilt toward the bomb. For “there is nothing more important for us to do in the face of the threat of nuclear war than to go on living—that is, to take time to enjoy a walk with a friend, to read all of Trollope’s novels, to maintain universities, to have and care for children, and most importantly, to worship God.” Hauerwas is aware this seems like cheap quietism, but at this moment it might seem like the one way to remain human.
This leads Hauerwas’s essay to a collection of sentences that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
I am not suggesting that the bomb should make no difference for how we live our lives; rather I have tried to suggest that when we allow it to make all the difference we lose the power to stand against the forces that have built the bomb in the first place. For our lives become determined by the kind of urgency that robs us of the freedom to enjoy the time God has given us to make peace possible. Peace takes time. Put even more strongly, peace creates time by its steadfast refusal to force the other to submit in the name of order. Peace is not a static state, but an activity that requires constant attention and care. An activity by its very nature takes place over time. In fact, activity creates time, as we only know how to characterize duration by noting that we did this first, and then this second, and so on until we got somewhere or accomplished this or that. So peace is the process through which we make time our own rather than letting ourselves be determined by “events” over which, it is alleged, we have no control.
The rise of Trump in our current political moment has only made us double down on the forces and mechanisms that created our political moment. In the meantime we’ve abandoned the practices that make a time we call peace.
So why a new blog? My hope is that we regain some sense of the trivial that makes our lives worth living and can redeem some of that peace; peace that takes time.
Church or community?
TEST post from older project
Christianity Today is hosting a helpful review of Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer. The review is overtly positive on what I think is subpar book in many ways. His previous book, Live no lies, has a more compelling and honest look at the challenges the church is facing from the World, Flesh, and the devil, ones that I don’t think are solved by the current obsession with Rules of Life. It’s my opinion that the Rule of Life zeitgeist is tied our current obsession with self-optimization, but this is different because it is for Jesus!
But one critique that is far more than blip but takes a fine book and makes it a bad book is the turn from church to community. The reviewer writes:
The comment is this: Community is a noun, not a verb. Comer treats it like a verb, though, encouraging readers to “practice community.” I know what he means, but the problem is twofold. On one hand, it threatens to reduce the church — the chosen people of God, the body and bride of Christ, the beloved family of Abraham — to “needing others for the journey.” The church is no longer the secret mystery and final end of the Lord’s saving work but rather the desired social accompaniment for individual apprentices who can’t “go it alone.”
In spiritual formation literature it is often that church is replaced by the discipline of ‘community.’ This is no surprise considering the ecclesiological locations of its two best proponents: Dallas Willard was Baptist and Richard Foster a quaker.
This error is damning and reduces the community of believers to fulfilling a need alongside other needs. Not only that it makes the disciplines flow out of my own personal drive rather than the common worship shared together with other Christians. In that view our personal disciplines are connected to our corporate ones and gain their meaning from the larger body. In the Rule of Life/Spiritual formation framework whatever the corporate body is it doesn’t touch those things and may detract from them. That detraction most clearly shows up in the idea of sabbath and the need to reclaim a personal one. Much of this literature will have the individual believer, and more often pastor, decide on a day of sabbath for themselves. But what’s lost in all this it is not man that determine the sabbath day, but the Lord and it is not practiced solo as a family but a community of believers for Jew on Saturday and for the Christian on Sunday.
What Christians need more of today is less a personal path for our fulfillment and transformation but a body of people, the church, calling us out of the self to God, and others. I’m sure I’ll write about this more at future date but it was Phillip Turner who said the question for the Christian is not ‘how am I doing?’ with my own spiritual walk and rule of life but ‘how are we doing?’ as the community of God that is contrast to the world.
Doctrine and the life of the church
TEST Post from older project
When a book is written on something like theosis or APSET it should begin with the premise that because God is faithful and true this is already active in your Christian life and in your congregation. The purpose of this book is to open that picture so that you can language this reality into your own Christian life and share it in your common life together.
So many of these books are built on the premise that whatever thing they are sharing has not been unearthed in your Christian life because you didn’t have the language. Whereas I would suggest they are already active in your church and common life because they promised by God but perhaps this book can help name and bring to surface those realities so that you can grow in them.
A lot of people think that the doctrines are the things themselves and if not worked out properly they don’t appear. But it seems to me the Christian life works the other way. God’s realities become manifest in our lives/communities/worlds and then we put words to those realities. If we use good words/concepts they can actually deepen these things and bring out further truths and devotions.