Why I Construct a Theological System

I have been driven into a corner by the spiritually deranged Christians of this age. At first, I only intended to gather my fierce deconstructions into a kind of confessional notebook of meditations.
But then I discovered: nearly every sickness I diagnose today has already been struck at by many before me.

Luther exposed the corruption of indulgences.
Calvin re-exalted the sovereignty of God.
Kierkegaard tore open the hypocrisy of crowd-faith.
Barth resisted natural theology and secularized religion.
A.W. Tozer cried out against a vulgarized church and cheap grace.
Walter Brueggemann exposed the absence of lament in the church
…

And yet, “solutions” never truly came. The same sins return in each age dressed in new clothing, circling back into human hearts. Those profound insights and critiques have been absorbed, ignored, domesticated—finally dissolved by the contemporary church and culture.
I often feel that my own deconstruction of contemporary maladies is nothing more than “inheriting a long river of critique,” and I am recklessly trying to “find its outlet for our age.”

In truth, I hold only one genuinely new problem in my hands: How can we rebuild a coherent narrative in an age of fragmentation—and make theological narrative itself the answer?

This is a fragmented age: information and life are severed; attention and memory are reshaped; people lose the very capacity to sense continuity, reduced to algorithm-driven, task-reactive creatures of the instant.
The very structure of the human heart has been altered. In such soil, devotion and theology lose their narrative coherence. This battlefield, my theological ancestors never truly faced head-on. It forces theology into a new literary form and rhythm, or else it cannot land at all.

That is why I do not begin from traditional doctrine. Too often doctrine becomes nothing but “bones in a museum”—preserved by academic systems, eroded by denominational quarrels, selectively consumed by believers intoxicated with self-sentiment, or else left to gather dust.

I do not begin from speculation and ethical concepts. These lean on abstractions and categories, lacking flesh and blood. In such frames God is reduced to an idea, faith to philosophy and moral management.

I do not begin from sweeping cultural critique. For such exposes live parasitically on “naming problems” without providing a solution that pierces reality. They rarely reach the true transformation of persons, and usually decay into a posture of self-righteousness for the author and his disciples.

Most importantly, all these approaches fail to answer fragmentation. Indeed, they themselves easily devolve into fragmented slogans.

I observe that the root shallowness of nominal Christians, and the root unbelief of non-Christians, are in fact the same: they “accept Christ” only as subjective feeling and personal emotion, not as the One who confronts the whole human condition and world history.
They treat faith as a “private experience,” tied to truth only by a fragile thread of sentiment, not as the ultimate response to their finitude in dialogue with the God who acts across all history.
Thus their “instant conversions” do not engage the shared condition of humanity, nor the dialogue between their life and God’s acts in world history.

For this reason I once turned to grand history—seeking to trace the Spirit’s providence and guidance across the ages.
Yet I found this work overwhelming, draining, and almost incapable of renewing others—or even myself. Christians, trained by “subjective thrills,” no longer care for the wide historical drama of God and humanity. Even if they grasp my telling of history, they hear it only as spectacle—and often become even more self-righteous through it.
For the study of history alone dissolves the individuality of the person, lacking power to confront or rebuild the soul.

If Christ is the Lord of History and we are His body, then His earthly procession is nothing less than the soul-history of each believer.
Thus I have been pressed by a series of revelations onto this battleground: to construct a whole new mode of writing theology, one rooted in the substance of the Incarnation.

This form must grow from fissures of narrative tension, from collisions of character, from the contradictions of the real world. For “the Word became flesh” is not an idea—it is Jesus living, dying, and rising in blood and dust.
Only by rooting theology again in narrative and the tension of life will Christ not be made an idol.
And my writing cannot remain mere emotional moments, fragments of thought, or heaps of detail. It must bear the divine structure and the Word-like order of language. This is the integrity of the individual narrative.

In creating such narratives, I have at last found the outlet of that long river of critique:
Critique is not the final battlefield—narrative reshaping is.

But if I only write narratives, people might still say, ‘This is just your personal experience.’ Even if my stories move them, it would only perpetuate a consumer mode of ‘subjective emotional stimulation’ in their minds, allowing them to comfortably continue taming the image of Christ to suit their own preferences and superficial understanding. Without a system, even the devout who truly long for Christ cannot stand on my shoulders.

Therefore, I must construct a theological system for this form—to provide a clear skeleton, coherent logic, and universal meaning—ensuring that my way of writing is not scattered, not merely emotional or subjective, but able to bear and transmit the wholeness of truth.

This is not a mere testimony, but a participation in the very event of Christ becoming incarnate again in the present. Through writing in an incarnational mode, what I re-present is precisely the Incarnate God Himself.

C.S. Lewis once said: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—or else the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.”
Now I say: if people cannot acknowledge the untamable Jesus in my writings, then they must take me for a madman—or something worse.

There is no third option. Not for unbelievers, and especially not for Christians. For I am not challenging their opinion of me; I am challenging their opinion of Christ, and of their so-called identity as “Christians.”

But here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.


# Aug 17, 2025