"Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess"
About this Quote
The line opens by puncturing a temptation as old as literacy: treating experience like a narrative you can skim for meaning. Colton’s blunt anaphora - "Life isn’t..". repeated like a hand on the shoulder - doesn’t just negate; it strips away the comforts of plot, pacing, and moral symmetry. A book promises coherence. Life, he insists, refuses to behave.
Calling life "a mess" is deliberately undignified. It’s anti-romantic, anti-system, and quietly anti-clerical in the best sense: not against faith, but against faith-as-diagram. The target is the kind of theology that reads like a tidy argument, insulated from grief, boredom, shame, illness, and the banal chaos that actually forms a human day. His word choice does cultural work: "logical", "sensible", "orderly" evokes Enlightenment confidence - the idea that reason can domesticate reality. Colton writes from an era when that confidence was both ascendant and cracking, as industrial modernity, social upheaval, and personal instability made "order" feel more like a wish than a description.
The pivot - "And theology must be lived" - is the real provocation. Theology here isn’t a library activity; it’s a practice under pressure. The subtext is pastoral and slightly accusatory: if your beliefs only function in clean rooms, they’re not beliefs, they’re decor. He’s arguing for a faith tested in noise, not validated by elegance. Not a rejection of doctrine, but a demand that doctrine earn its keep in the churn of ordinary mess.
Calling life "a mess" is deliberately undignified. It’s anti-romantic, anti-system, and quietly anti-clerical in the best sense: not against faith, but against faith-as-diagram. The target is the kind of theology that reads like a tidy argument, insulated from grief, boredom, shame, illness, and the banal chaos that actually forms a human day. His word choice does cultural work: "logical", "sensible", "orderly" evokes Enlightenment confidence - the idea that reason can domesticate reality. Colton writes from an era when that confidence was both ascendant and cracking, as industrial modernity, social upheaval, and personal instability made "order" feel more like a wish than a description.
The pivot - "And theology must be lived" - is the real provocation. Theology here isn’t a library activity; it’s a practice under pressure. The subtext is pastoral and slightly accusatory: if your beliefs only function in clean rooms, they’re not beliefs, they’re decor. He’s arguing for a faith tested in noise, not validated by elegance. Not a rejection of doctrine, but a demand that doctrine earn its keep in the churn of ordinary mess.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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