Good Theology is Not Enough
…you may need to update your entire spiritual operating system
They said to him, “John’s disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking.”
Jesus answered, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast.”
He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
(Luke 5:33–39, NIV)
Here’s something you might not have heard in Sunday school: the Pharisees were not a radical religious sect.
In fact, they were pretty mainstream in their day. Some scholars even suggest that Jesus, based on some of his teachings and the region he grew up in, may have learned a lot of what he knew from the school of the Pharisees.
Surprising as it may be, it is not a stretch to say that the Pharisees actually upheld some pretty sound theology. And yet, time after time, we see Jesus butting heads with the Pharisees and their interpretations of scripture, especially as it pertains to the way the people of God ought to live.
Which brings me to the main point of this article:
Good theology is not enough.
The Wineskins Parable (Remastered 2024)
I recently studied the passage from Luke’s gospel above with a small group from my church, and it became clear pretty quickly that the analogies at play didn’t really “work” for us as modern readers a couple thousand years later.
After all, most of us don’t really sew our own clothes much any more — some of us do, but most don’t. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer a crisp, bold Pinot Noir out of a glass bottle, not a leather pouch.
Eugene Peterson attempts to update the analogies in his Message paraphrase, which reads:
“No one cuts up a fine silk scarf to patch old work clothes; you want fabrics that match. And you don’t put wine in old, cracked bottles; you get strong, clean bottles for your fresh vintage wine.”
While that gets us closer, I’d like to suggest a more contemporary analogy.
My phone.
My phone is only a few years old, but due to some convoluted combination of planned obsolescence and a couple accidental drops into a sink full of soaking dishes, it doesn’t quite work the way it’s supposed to anymore. At some point, I’ll need to trade it in for a new one.
Imagine for a moment going to the store to pick up a new phone. You’ve got all your data transferred properly, the sim card is up and running, you’re signed into Instagram, you’re just about ready to walk out the door, but you have one last request.
You ask the person working the counter if they can revert your phone back to the original operating system. I don’t know, maybe you like the look of the icons. Maybe you’re a sucker for that “slide to unlock” feature. Either way, it’s a ridiculous scenario.
Everyone knows that when you get a new phone, it comes with the new operating system.
This is pretty close to what I think Jesus is saying here. New patches don’t work on old garments. New wine won’t work in old wine skins. New phones don’t work with the old operating system.
Losing My Old Spiritual Operating System
I grew up the son of two pastors. For anyone with any kind of experience, you know that having just one parent who’s a pastor can be a mixed bag. Two is a recipe for disaster.
Thankfully, my parents worked hard to ensure that faith was never an obligation, or a chore. And because they did, my siblings and I all still follow Jesus today.
That said, growing up a PK comes with some unavoidable baggage. One of the things that had a significant impact on my spiritual journey was the constant pressure I felt to have all the answers.
Some of it was brought on by the people at my church, a lot of it I put on myself, but even from an early age, I often felt like it was my responsibility to have thoughtful responses to every theological question, so as to not hurt my parents’ reputation.
The problem with developing this sort of performative spirituality at such an early age is that it began to distort my perspective and assumptions about God — what God was like, what God wanted from me.
Before long, I had subconsciously adopted this fundamental logic at the center of my spiritual operating system:
“God loves everyone, but God likes people with good theology more.”
So I did everything I could to be the person with all the answers. I studied my Bible every day. I read books that were way above my pay grade. I even started working at my church at the age of sixteen, and quite literally spent more time doing “ministry” than I did doing homework.
By the time I graduated high school, I had built my life upon a false sense of certainty, and had convinced myself that this was the same thing as having a genuine relationship with Jesus.
Then, without warning, life happened.
The summer before I started college, my childhood best friend (who is now my spouse) answered the door to a police officer who had come to let her know that her sister had been in a car accident, and she didn’t make it out.
The ensuing months and years were sort of a blur, but on the whole they were a twisted cocktail of trauma and tragedy. I didn’t realize it until years later, but that season was traumatic for me in my own way. In a sense, I had to grow up overnight in order to be a steady support for the person I loved more than anything in the world.
In the midst of it all, I had also undergone one of the most significant shifts any 18 year old goes through by moving away from home. And in that season, I began to form genuine and deep relationships with people who were nothing like me — didn’t look like me, didn’t live like me, didn’t believe what I believed — people who I still know and love to this day. These relationships challenged the assumptions I held about myself, the world, and even God.
It was a season of constant disorientation. Everything I thought I knew before, I didn’t know anymore. The certainty I clung to — that I had built my life on — was gone. And I was left to rebuild from the ground up.
Deconstruction: New Phone, Old OS
Anyone who’s been through a season of deconstruction — or if that word doesn’t work for you, we can call it “reorientation” — knows that, while the process is long and painful, there’s always a deep sense of hope that once you get to the other side, everything will be okay again. You begin to find safety, not only in the new beliefs you’ve found, but in the people who helped shape those beliefs.
It was no different for me. On the other side of that season of deconstruction and disorientation — which was quite literally a season of tearing down all that I relied upon before — I began to discover a newfound fervor for God, a community I could trust, and a self-understanding that made so much more sense given all that I had experienced.
But there was one major problem. Even after I had let go of nearly every theological and existential belief, and picked up new ones that fit me better, I still felt this deep, deep loneliness.
I believed, and still believe, that my new theology and worldview were a better representation of who God is, and they gave me a better framework for understanding the world around me, but none of it changed the fact that, at my core, my fundamental assumption — the spiritual perspective from which I operated — was that while God loved me, he just didn’t really like me all that much.
I updated my phone, but I was still running the old operating system.
The Pharisees Ignored Their Update Notifications
The problem with the Pharisees was not necessarily their theology. It was their perspective — their base assumptions about the nature and character of God and God’s Kingdom.
They were so well versed in their scriptures and their traditions that they assumed they would recognize the Messiah in an instant. But they didn’t.
In fact, their theology — and their certainty of it — may have ultimately been the obstacle that kept them from noticing and communing with the Savior they longed to meet, who in fact was sitting right in front of them.
They asked Jesus, “Why don’t you fast, like John and his disciples, or like our disciples?”
But their perspective assumed that there was still a need to fast. The Pharisees knew the prophetic scriptures about the coming of the Messiah better than anyone, yet the Messiah had come and they didn’t see it.
How? It wasn’t a problem with their theology, or their knowledge. It was their perspective — their assumptions about what God in the flesh would look like.
They expected the Lion. The Warrior King. The Righteous Judge. But Jesus, the Lamb, came down without a sword to sit and eat with the sinners.
Good theology was not enough to overcome the distortions of the Pharisee’s perspective — their assumptions, their certainty.
My New Operating System
This isn’t in the text, but if I were to guess, I’d imagine that the Pharisees biggest obstacle was actually their fear. They were afraid of what would happen if they accepted what Jesus was saying. They were terrified that, if they let go of their certainty and embraced the mystery of Christ’s presence among them, they would ultimately be left empty handed and alone.
Last year, I found myself at one of the lowest points in my spiritual life. Historically, church fathers and mothers and various scholars have referred to it as a “Dark Night of the Soul.” I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t stand the Bible. I often found myself annoyed by the songs we would sing on Sunday mornings, because we were singing about a God I hadn’t encountered in quite some time, a God I wasn’t all that sure even existed.
But by God’s grace and the work of the Spirit, I decided one night, as I was washing dishes, to reach out to two close friends of mine. I told them how desperately I wanted to pray, how I couldn’t figure out how to do it anymore. I asked them if they would be willing to just sit and pray over me — to pray for me.
And they did. I sat in a rickety wood chair as they laid hands on me and prayed scripture over me, pausing every few moments to see if I was hearing anything from God.
I wasn’t.
But as I continued to sit there, choosing to open myself up, yet acknowledging that I had nothing to give, I found that a shift was starting to happen within my spirit. It wasn’t some overwhelming revelation, or life altering, audible message from on high, but I began to sense God’s presence with me then and there.
What I heard from God was essentially this: Stop trying. Take a break. Let go.
For all my life, I believed that the distance I felt between me and God was the result of some theological misunderstanding. My operating system told me that if I could just get my beliefs in order, God would give me his attention and presence.
And yet, hard as I tried, even just a few months after I had graduated from seminary, God had never felt further away.
The problem wasn’t my theology. It was my operating system.
The base assumptions I held about the nature and character of God and God’s Kingdom led me to believe that if I just pushed harder in the direction of “good theology” I would find myself closer to the presence of God. But in reality, God was sitting right in front of me, desperately-yet-patiently waiting for me to notice.
The location of God’s presence was in the center of my longing — my loneliness. To encounter God, I didn’t have to make a long trek up some intellectual or spiritual mountain. I just had to stop what I was doing, and look around. God was present to me then and there, and he is still present here and now.
I don’t know what your spiritual operating system is telling you to do. Maybe, like me, you feel like you just need to try harder. Maybe your experience with spirituality has led you to believe that it doesn’t matter what you do — that God will choose to be present, or absent, based on whatever mood he’s in that day.
Either way, I want to challenge you to just stop. Take a break. Look around. You may find yourself noticing God sitting right in front of you, inviting you to break the fast and step into the celebration of his presence.
