The Footnotes Ate the Book

A lot of preaching is a confident summary of a text the preacher never actually read.

I've sat under men who could recite their systematic theology from memory and had never once read the book it claims to summarize on its own terms. They knew the framework. They knew the study-note consensus. They knew what the tradition needed the verse to mean. The text itself was a formality to pass through on the way to the point.

We, people, do not want to admit that the Bible spends most of its length arguing against the very thing we built. God keeps stepping around the institution. Prophets show up outside the temple. The veil tears from the top down and nobody sews it back.

Yeshua saves his sharpest words not for sinners but for the professionally religious, the men who had systematized God into a job.

The book was never meant to be managed. It was meant to be wrestled with. Always, two people at a table, never with a pulpit.