Since Christian life is a response to the love of God, and Jesus is the One who leads that response, from first to last we encounter love and grace in him. As those united to our Messiah, we’re also recipients of his life and activity. We can be so familiar with the central doctrines of Christianity that we stop seeing them, so don’t miss this: Jesus doesn’t just love us—he loves God for us. Christ is both God’s ultimate expression of love for humanity and humanity’s ultimate expression of love for God.

Both in theology and in practice, we’ll get ourselves into trouble by picking between two equally true ideas. We make enemies of what should be friends.

For example, should we highlight divine transcendence or immanence? Is it better if our theology is Trinitarian or Christ-centered? Ought we to focus on the “objective” or the “subjective” sides of Christian life? Do we need to think of the church as universal or as local? The list could go on and on.

But why pick?

The mark of a good theologian (whether armchair or academic) isn’t simply affirming the “right things” but the ability to uphold multiple aspects of scriptural truth and not just pick the one that seems most useful at the time.

Take the classic matter of how divine and human agency relate: Some people so highlight God’s sovereignty that human response appears irrelevant, while others so focus on individual agency that they appear to devalue or ignore God’s presence, primacy, and power.

While I was researching and writing a theology of Christian life, I found myself right in the middle of these tensions, wrestling with how to uphold multiple biblical truths rather than pick between them.

We can summarize Christian life as a response to the love of God. To unpack that in a simple but nonsimplistic way, we need to recognize multiple layers to that human response.

Theology of Life

After some years thinking through this basic idea of what this response to the love of God looks like—yes, I’m that slow—I finally framed a theology of Christian life in three sentences:

Thesis: Christian life is a response to the love of God.

Underlying Theology: The triune God not only first loved us, but the incarnate Son also first loved God for us. We (corporately and personally) respond to God’s love as those who have been united to Christ by the Spirit.

Those brief statements describe a Christ-centered, ecclesially grounded, and personal response to God’s love. Let’s unpack this more.

I think of the human response to the love of God as three strands of a rope: Messiah, ecclesia (church), and ego (me). These three cords together allow our understanding and experience of Christian life to be Christ-centered and subjectively engaged, while also ecclesially anchored. Trying to pick only one from among them is a false and destructive choice.

Threefold Cord

Ecclesiastes 4:12 tells us that “a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

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