Living in the Tension: My Relationship with Dialectical Theology

The thought came to me somewhere over the Pacific, on a flight to Hawaii, sitting next to my mom. She was reading Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer—at my urging, actually, since I’ve invited our whole church to read it this year. As she made her way through the book, she paused and asked me, “What does dialectic mean?” It’s not an easy word to define concisely, and I gave her a somewhat clumsy answer. But in that moment, I was reminded just how central dialectical theology has been in shaping my own work—how it has formed my instincts, even when I haven’t named it explicitly.

I’ve never been drawn to theology that resolves too easily. From the earliest days of my theological curiosity, I found myself uncomfortable with systems that tried to explain God as if God were simply another object of study—something to be grasped, categorized, or managed. My instincts have always been dialectical. I’m drawn to the tensions, the contradictions, the places where meaning trembles rather than stands firm.

But while my instincts are dialectical, my theological aim has never been to float in paradox for its own sake. I’m not chasing confusion or ambiguity. My aim is to say something true about who God is—something that emerges not from speculation, but from God’s self-disclosure, especially as it becomes visible in human experience and practice. I am comfortable with mystery, so long as it is the mystery of Holy Mystery a se—God in God’s own self. But this mystery is not absence or vagueness; it is presence—living, interruptive, and holy. Revelation doesn't dissolve mystery; it deepens it. And yet it is revelation—God making Godself known.

This is why dialectical theology speaks to me so deeply. It names the rhythm I’ve been living: the insistence that God acts, that God speaks, and that God’s presence is not the conclusion of our reasoning but the disruption of it.

In Youth Beyond the Developmental Lens, I argue that young people can’t be reduced to psychological stages or trajectories. That book is not just a critique of developmentalism—it’s a theological claim. It insists that young people, in their irreducibility, reveal something of God’s own freedom and presence. Their being overspills our knowing. That’s not just a social insight; it’s a theological one.

In Delighted, joy itself is treated dialectically. It’s not a product of successful ministry or right behavior. It’s a divine surprise. A rupture. Joy breaks in where it wasn’t earned or expected. In that sense, joy isn’t just an emotion—it’s a theological event. It’s the echo of grace.

I’ve also suggested—in my forthcoming book, Abiding in Amen—that “spiritual discipline” is something of an oxymoron. That’s not just a rhetorical flourish; it’s a theological conviction. If God is truly free—truly the living God—then prayer is not a tool of mastery. It’s a space of encounter, a moment where we are more acted upon than acting.

I’ve sometimes found the label practical theology uncomfortable, even though—by all accounts, and especially within the so-called Princeton School defined by Richard Osmer and Andrew Root—that’s what I’m doing. I think my discomfort comes from the way the term can sometimes signal a drift away from theology proper, as if “practice” were something separate from God’s self-revelation. And perhaps my ambivalence mirrors the ambivalence some practical theologians have had toward dialectical theology itself—especially toward Barth. But I don’t share that hesitation. I see Barth not as a threat to practical theology, but as an ally. He insists that theology begins with God’s action, not our frameworks. Counterintuitively, that’s precisely what makes it practical: it speaks into lived reality with a Word not of our own making.

So no, I wouldn’t say that I’m “trying to do dialectical theology” in a formal sense. But it’s the current that runs beneath nearly everything I write and teach. It’s the impulse to let God be God—to receive rather than resolve, to listen rather than define. Maybe that’s the invitation for all of us: to live not by easy answers, but by faithful questions; to hold mystery and revelation together; and to allow our theology—and our lives—to be shaped not by certainty, but by the ongoing, surprising encounter with the Holy.