All of life is theological, or it should be for the Christian. There isn’t one aspect of life, for me, that isn’t consumed by the love of Christ. And this, I think, is the basis for what ought to count as genuinely theological: viz. a life grounded in the prior reality that God in Christ first loved us that we might love Him. It is out of this constraint that the Christian’s life ought to be compelled to do all that it does and thinks from. Ever since I became a Christian, as a wee lad, I have had this type of ongoing and simple love relationship with the risen Christ in the triune Life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Even as things have grown and gotten more “sophisticated” through growth in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, what has continued to serve as the basis for my ongoing pursuit of Him is indeed this simple ‘child-like’ trust in Christ that has guided my every step every day of my life; and in seasons, particularly in a past season, those steps were only be guarded by Christ’s faithfulness, even as I was faithless (and of course, in moments, I still act in very faithless ways).
But this is what I want to press in this post: Christians need to be saturated in this posture of simple child-like trust and joyfulness in Jesus Christ. Our ways, our theologies (nostra theologia) in this world can often be swayed here and there by the variant circumstances of life; often these circumstances, as we all know too well, can have a sense of death upon them, such that we might become despondent or despair of life altogether. In the face of this it is the simple child-like trust in the living God in Jesus Christ that can sustain us, that can keep things “light” (from His perduring Light) and allow us to push through the most seemingly insurmountable circumstances. Indeed, in the wisdom of the Cross, the wisdom of God, these circumstances, through this sustaining trust relationship with Him, as that is first grounded in Christ’s trust relationship with Him for us in His vicarious humanity, is where the ‘precious gold’ of faith is given an even greater sense of purity, as we live into and from the simplicity of the “child-like” relationship the eternal Son has always already had with the eternal Father by the bonding and fellowshipping work of the eternal Holy Spirit. It is in the wanes and woes, the mundane and pedestrian circumstances of this life that God’s poetry, His rhapsody for us in Jesus Christ is written; this is the theologia crucis (theology of the Cross). Even with the depth gravitas of the matters of life, the matters circumscribed by the ineffable reality of the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ, as that is climaxed in the cross, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and second parousia, there remains this simple child-like joyful trust in our relationships with God; or this is how it ought to be.
As we find renewal, afresh anew, for His mercies are new every morning, this is what brings the Christian existence to elevated levels, such that the whole of our lives become theological; just as sure as the whole of God’s life for us in Christ is theological through and through. It is because we live in and from this Way that the Christian’s life is definitionally and principally theological. It is because the ground and root of our lives, respectively, are given thrust and being in the becoming of God for us in Jesus Christ. The Christian understands that they can do nothing apart from Jesus Christ, as such their lived existence necessitates a theological being that is grounded not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit. And so, when we go to work, to church, to play, to mourn, to dance, so on and so forth the Christian’s life, in an objectivist frame is necessarily theological. But we’ve been called to greater depths than being “objectivist,” we’ve been called to a subjectivist step with the Spirit, which is a full blown participatio Christi (‘participation with Christ’) mode of personal being.
I wanted to register this because I see a lot of Christians failing to recognize these things. 1) We walk with and from a child-like faith, the faith of Christ for us; 2) from this walk we move and breathe in a joyful posture before the living Lord and the world; 3) this walk, because it is full of the joy of the risen Christ, is not burdensome, or something self-fabricated, but a living and breathing reality we have the honor of living into and from as we grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ; 4) this way is not a performative existence wherein we must strive to generate some euphoric sense of feeling in our lives, but a sober and resident reality that God alone has generated and generates this joy for us by His humanity in Jesus Christ. And so, as we live these lives as Christians we are compelled by the love of Christ. We do what we do because God first loved us that we might love Him. And it is out of His first for us, that we can second all that He has said and done as He first did that for us in the new-humanity of the resurrected and ascended Christ. These things aren’t merely platitudes, or that which hovers above our heads in the yonder, but in fact is the concrete reality of the Christian’s lived and concrete life in this world. But it requires eyes to see and ears to hear if one is going to genuinely ‘experience’ these types of heavenly verities made thisearthly.
All of the aforementioned ought to animate the way we do theology. It ought to invigorate the way that we approach the total Christianus, and the texts that help to cultivate the way of the Christian in the world. Like Barth and Torrance, we ought to see the theological endeavor as the joy of our lives; for indeed, the theological existence is our life in Jesus Christ. I can imagine no other way as a Christian person. I cannot imagine living the Christian life for street-cred, or accolade. I can only imagine living the Christian life as if it is life itself, and in living life this way, as a Christian, it necessarily becomes theological, which is, again, grounded in the simple and child-like joy filled trust of Christ’s faith for us.