Flourishing Theology

Theology thrives and best fulfills it purpose in wrestling with pronouns and prepositions more than with propositions. It can’t do its work without propositions but unless they are directed and seasoned by pronouns and prepositions their work will remain barren.  


-the guiding pronouns are we and ya’ll.

Me is only truly found in We – not a faceless collective but a teeming throng of difference; no individualism where we find our identity and vocation by standing out from and over against the We, turning it into a They and Them (the third person is deathly to theology) but rather an individuality and vocation birthed in the womb of connected and relationality which calls forth who we are and what we are to do.


Ya’ll is the truly genuine language of theology. Ya’ll is self-involving rather than selfish, relational rather than transactional, committed rather than instrumental. Ya’ll is constituted by communication, communion, and community. The singular has its place in that each of us is created responsible and response-able to be a part of Ya’ll. Sin is fleeing that responsibility and response-ability in favor of fidelity to self and its agenda that breeds in us an affinity for distance, differentiation, and denial. Distance and differentiation are necessary in the process of maturity but those psychological dynamics are not the same as what I name here. These stunt human growth. Luther described it best, I think, as “a heart turned in on itself.”


Apart from Christ we tend to imagine ourselves as “I’s,” billiard balls as I picture it. Complete, self-sufficient, being what it is apart from contact or connection anything else. It can roll around the billiard table and make contact with other balls or table rails. This contact will redirect us for good or ill but contributes nothing to who we are. Theologically, molecules provide a better model of who we are. Various atoms bound together by electrical charges and forces constitute a molecule. H₂O is only water if the two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen, and all their attendant charges and forces are present. Water is the “community” of these particular elements and binding agents.


-the guiding prepositions are with, in, and for.

With describes the relatedness which marks us as God’s creation and creatures and that creation redeemed and healed in Christ. This is the Emmanuel reality that marks us. Our lives are inextricably connected with God (even in denial of or rebellion against him) and one another. Created to be with God and each other is a fundamental drive that moves us or, in its absence, deforms us.


In marks the location that makes us human. Out of and Apart from, though perhaps necessary at times for specific purposes, are not locations in which human life in nurtured. In means that we cannot and will not be ourselves by ourselves. We cannot live by ourselves, for ourselves, and through our own power and resources. We are In, immersed in, enmeshed in a matrix of relations, practices, and opportunities that make us who we are. Theologically, St. Paul’s leading motif, that we are “in Christ” is the most fecund reality of human life or history.


For marks the direction of life as eccentric. That is, outside of ourselves, centrifugal, toward the other. Theologically, missional is the word for this. I don’t use mission for that suggests something we choose to do. Missional gestures toward something definitional of who we are. We are created for each other, for the world, for the good of all people and things.


All this means that theology must be trinitarian, that is, rooted in the tripersonal God – three persons whose relations constitute the one God. In this God, We-ness and Ya’ll-ness, With, In, and For, are the pronouns and prepositions that best describe this God in so far as this is possible. There is a fundamental mystery to the being of God, and thus of us as made in God’s image. Neither God nor humanity can be reduced to these pronouns and prepositions though neither can be adequately described without them. Such a vision of such a God ought ground,  guide, and form the goal of our theology.