If we are to develop a gospel proclamation that actually reframes the prevailing understanding of God and the world, then we will have to scrap our historical penchant for simply investing in scholastic study while disregarding the visible demonstration of theological doctrine in life itself. We must adopt the posture of both/and. We must expand beyond mere study and verbal articulation to include an incarnational way of living. This is why discipleship is so vital to the credibility of our proclamation The genuine disciple's beliefs must come from a living, tangible relationship with God. In the Scriptures, knowing God (or the Truth) is less about being able to control and name the experience. To “know” God is more like the kind of knowing described when Adam knew (yâda) Eve and she conceived. This form of knowing involves a kind of union, a dialogical participation with the other. One must have at least a readiness to love God if one is going to have any chance of understanding him. In this light then, knowledge of God is less of an attempt to intellectually grasp God than it is an attempt to touch God. If we make it all about information about God then, “we allow ourselves to lose God behind some prop cardboard cut-out of God, mistaking the menu for the meal, and forgetting that music is the stuff of sound and motion, not marks of ink on paper.”
The true disciple allows this relationship with God to transform them, incarnating their beliefs in his or her life—they live the truth they seek to proclaim. Theological truth cannot be divorced from life itself. It's not enough to claim to know the truth as if it can be contained in a mere idea. It was Søren Kierkegaard who rightly asserted that all truth means subjective change.8 If I want to claim something to be true (in the religious sense particularly) then it must have changed my life, or my life itself will be communicating that I don't really believe it to be true. Without tangible change, the medium of my life thus cancels out the message I claim to believe. There is nothing saintly about that. Demons believe that God is One, and they shudder at this truth (James 2:19), but it does not change them! Truth must impact and change us or, in the end, it will simply judge us. Or as theologian David Tracy says, “there is never an authentic disclosure of truth which is not also transformative.”
Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the one example where the medium of a person's life was most perfectly the message. Jesus was the definitive theological person in that he perfectly presented the will of the Father to the world. Discipleship must follow in this way of Jesus, for “everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher” (Luke 6:40). Authentic truth has to be incarnated in an act or in some action; the way of incarnation is the criterion of all real truth (1 John 2:22; 4:2), and “walking in the truth” is the way the believer possesses the truth (2 John 1–4; 3 John 3–4, etc.).10 We can therefore say that while Jesus is the (sole) incarnation of God, we all must in a real sense become incarnations of Jesus. In some analogical way, disciples of Jesus are meant to be living embodiments of Christ in the world.
The decisive factor for the spiritual greatness of a person is therefore not found in their logical teaching, but rather in their mode of life. It is for this reason that von Balthasar speaks about the exemplary disciple of Jesus (the “saint”) as a theological person. We like this term; it suggests that our life bespeaks theology and people are reading it all the time. It has been said that the definition of a saint is someone who makes it easier to believe in God. “Every person, by living authentically, shall become a Torah, an instruction.” Authentic disciples—people who really live their messages and so beautify truth—enrich the church in marvelous ways because they restore the balance between theory and practice, a balance that every new generation of Christians must strive to attain.
~ Alan Hirsch and Mark Nelson, Reframation, 138-9
Honestly friends, I feel that Reframation was likely my favorite book (although I concede primary importance to The Forgotten Ways ). You should really consider having a proper read. You can do this on this platform, and interact dynamically with the content with the AI agent that is trained to engage you on topic. Give it a shot)