How paragraphs can save your theology

Carl Jung once declared, “Hurry is not of the devil. Hurry is the devil.” We may forgive Dr. Jung his theological imprecision if we stop to consider his point. There is something dangerous about hurry, both physically and spiritually. In a 4G age, it’s hard even to be aware of the parts of our lives that we may be compromising in the name of speed and efficiency. Indeed, we often feel the problem of hurry before we see it. Philosophers can refer to “the burnout society” and hardly need to explain themselves, since we kind of get it already. Ours is a rushing, breathless, hurried modern life.

John Mark Comer, a former pastor and current bestselling Christian author, published a book a few years ago that has sold roughly a bajillion copies titled The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. It’s a thoughtful, often helpful read on the emotional and spiritual pitfalls of hurry (Comer’s book is where I discovered the Jung quote above). Yet, one danger of hurry that Comer doesn’t address much in the book is the intellectual danger of hurry. And that might be because Comer himself seems to have fallen prey to it.

Comer’s distinctive writing style consists of short, often fragmented lines. In The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and several of his other books, nearly all of which have sold extremely well in the Christian market, Comer trades the traditional 4-5 sentence paragraph for a choppier, speech-like style, where ideas are often blurted out rather than developed slowly.

Evangelical reception of Comer’s books has been somewhat mixed. He is one of the strongest selling writers in the Christian market, but several theologians have raised red flags about Comer’s views on topics like Scripture and justification. Those red flags were raised even higher up the pole recently, when Comer shared a social media post that appeared to signal his rejection of the teaching that Christ bore the judicial wrath of God the Father on the cross, a doctrine called penal substitutionary atonement.

Comer’s rejection of penal substitution is deeply concerning, but the reasons for this are beyond the scope of this brief essay. Instead, the point I want to make is this: The doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement is precisely the kind of hard but hearty theology that demands paragraph-shaped thought, rather than sentence-shaped thought. A mode of writing that eschews the careful, sustained development of ideas, in favor of a more abrupt and intuitive style, is a mode of thinking that will likely, over time, tilt away from traditional theology.

Over the last few years, I have become convinced that the way we communicate shapes the way we think. In the era of the Internet and social media, modern people have become accustomed to a constant, spasmatic intake of data that absorbs more of our attention by thinning it out. You and nearly all the people around you spend about 16 of your 24 hours going from texts, to posts, to headlines to clips, to snippets, etc. Each year, the average American reads about twelve books and spends over 800 hours on social media. This is a recipe not just for stress, but for becoming a particular kind of thinker: one who has a low tolerance for the slow, trudging processes that are often required to really understand something.

Writing styles are not neutral. They are expressions of intellectual commitments. Sporadic prose privileges speed and emotional reaction over rumination. This is the reason why social media “debates” usually devolve into brainless insults. It’s also the reason Christian writers who embrace this style tend to lean away from traditional theological commitments. There is something about this style that will always make progressive theology seem more plausible. Traditional evangelical theology, including penal substitution, demands a patience and perseverance with seemingly abstract and dense ideas. Progressive theology does not have this patience. It wants to hurry past all that and get right to the more emotionally intuitive conclusions.

Comer’s ability to communicate to readers who may not be willing to sift through long paragraphs filled with 4 syllable words is admirable, and necessary; the church needs communicators who can reach the unreached. But the abandonment of the paragraph is, even unintentionally, abandonment of a carefulness and thoroughness that something as big as God’s word and God’s gospel demands.

C.S. Lewis once offered an encouragement to Christians who aren’t getting anything from their devotional books. “I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand,” he wrote.

Lewis was right, and I think one reason is that tough bits of theology can’t be hurried past. A microwave and a smoker can both prepare food, but only one of them can really give you all the richness of what’s inside. Consider the paragraph an intellectual smoker, one that can really bring out the richness, and the joy, of this thing we call truth.