Author: Jonathan Dodson

We labor with the exalted Christ, which gives us the authority to proclaim the gospel of freedom. And we labor like the incarnated Christ, which gives us humility and grace to creatively demonstrate and proclaim the love of Christ to fellow sinners in our culture.

Mark Driscoll, Confessions, 43-44

As finite formulators of truth, theologians (anyone who seeks to think God’s thoughts after him) are forced to nurture their understanding of God within a limited span of time. How each theologian uses his or her time is a personal decision. Personal, finite encounters with a three-personed, infinite and omniscient God require humility and faith.

Theologizing requires humility of heart because in order to understand God, we need his help. Exercise of the intellect apart from dependence upon the One ‘from whom are all things’, renders the theologian philosopher, one who seeks wisdom without seeking the wise One. Such contemptuous disrespect for the God of truth characterized St. Augustine’s pre-conversion search for rational certainty. Resistant to the inspiring preaching of Ambrose, Augustine desired certainty for the things he could not see, the kind of certainty that accompanies the equation of 7+3=10.In reflection upon this memory he writes: “By believing I could have been healed so that my mind’s clearer sight would be directed in some way to your truth, which endures forever and is lacking in nothing.”Augustine distilled this realization into the oft quoted phrase, fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.”

Faith is the flipside of Godward humility and the healing hand for true theology. However, faith in God does not reduce God’s immensity to comprehensibility. More to the point, Colin Gunton writes, “God is incomprehensible in not being graspable; but not incomprehensible in the sense of being entirely beyond our understanding.” As a result, theologians are humbly and delightfully called to plow the fields of Scripture and culture, pressing into God by faith and by reason.

Check out this sermon series and interactive selection of strawmen Jesus by fellow A29 planter, Matt Kruse, of Edgeworth. Strawman Jesus explores strawmen our culture has fashioned to make Jesus into something he is not, to make him softer or harder than he is, more easy to reject.

1. Pray that God will give you ideas while you’re in conversation with people.
2. Learn to value silence and give people a chance to respond to your hint without your blathering all
   over it.
3. Go cautiously and gently. Many people today don’t like to be pushed.
4. If you don’t get very far with your hints, you can always be a bit more direct. But even then be gentle and friendly. And always leave the door open.
5. Listen carefully and be ready to stop hinting and share the gospel when the door opens.
6. If you share Christ with someone who doesn’t make a decision right away, try to get some contact information so you can talk again or at least send some material that will keep your listener asking questions and wanting more.
7. If someone does accept Christ, find a way to continue discipling the new believer or connecting him or her with a local church.

See entire article by Littleton here.