Theology, Pt. Two

Franz Kafka wrote that “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? ... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” (1) – and I would say some similar things about theology.

Theology should shatter the pretensions, defenses, false securities, and hollow lies inside us, and so prepare us to read the Bible rightly. Theology should be related to the Bible not as a simplification or a systematization of it, but as a preparation for it, which says the shocking things that the Bible says, and says them in ways which we cannot easily escape; and which explicitly contradicts that which the Bible does not say, but which we deludedly attribute to it.

Theology should be essentially destructive, not constructive. “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2).

The task of theology is to clear space for, and call attention to, the pure word of God – it is never to replace this word. Theology does not essentially explain or summarize the Bible – that is, theology does not do these things in any conclusive sense. Rather, theology challenges you with the assertion that the Bible says a certain thing – and you must then go to the Bible itself and look. Even when we hear the purest truth from theology, we must trace it back to the scriptures so that we can hear the very same truth authoritatively. We must ultimately hear it not as something with which we happen to agree, or something in which we can find no flaws; we must hear that truth as the word of God, and as something which we do not sit in judgment over, but which sits in judgment over us.

Furthermore, theology’s primary task when interpreting the Bible is not to explain things which are difficult to understand, and which we’ve been laboring to comprehend, being frustrated only by the obscurity and opacity of the Bible. No, theology’s interpretive task is to confront us with things which are difficult to do – and which we therefore desperately run from, by every conscious and subconscious means, no matter how they glare at us from the scriptures.

Finally, even apologetics can bring us nothing new. Apologetics does not discover undeniable proofs, and so provide something indispensible which God’s revelation had been lacking. Apologetics does not come to the Christian’s rescue with better arguments than the Bible was able to muster, however hard its Author tried. No, apologetics can only tear down faulty assumptions and arguments against Christianity, and so carry us back to the place of uncertainty where Christ calls out, “blessed is he who does not take offense at Me” (3).

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1) I’ve never read any Kafka, but I’d like to. Thinking about this quote of his which I’d encountered, and about my experience with reading The Cost of Discipleship, got me going on this post.
2) 2 Corinthians 10:5
3) Matthew 11:3-6, and what this guy said about it