The Art of Life: An Introduction

The largest problems the church is dealing with nowadays are not theological problems, but practical problems.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. Of course, all practical problems are also theological and biblical. These things always interpenetrate; you cannot have one without the other. That is certainly true. But our problems can bend or tend in one direction or the other.

Let me give an example. Suppose I have a son who has been reading the Communist Manifesto, and he comes to me and says, “Dad, I am a Marxist communist.” In that case, I have primarily an intellectual and theological problem, not a practical one. There will be practical consequences to his conviction, of course, because ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver taught us. But at its root, we have an intellectual problem. I need to give him other books to read, and we need to sit down and have long conversations.

On the other hand, imagine a pipe bursts in my basement. In that situation, I primarily have a practical problem. There are intellectual aspects to it, to be sure. I need to know the proposition that a pipe has burst. I need to know how to alleviate the damage, whom to call, and what the primary causes and solutions are. But even if I possess all of that intellectual content, yet do nothing, I have not properly understood the problem or addressed it, because it is fundamentally a practical issue.

In this essay, I want to explore the symptoms that show we are dealing primarily with practical problems, examine the historical and theological origins of these problems, and outline the small part I hope this project can contribute toward a solution.

The Neglect of Application

These symptoms pop up in many different ways. I live and move in the evangelical, Protestant, and specifically Presbyterian wing of Christianity, so I am speaking primarily out of that world. What I have noticed over the past several years—in sermons, in workshops, and in teaching pastors to preach—is that the Bible is almost never applied. It is almost never applied.

When scripture is applied, it tends to be applied either in very broad, general terms or in purely apologetic terms, where defending a certain premise is treated as if it were an application. Let me give one concrete example.

At a church I attended—a well-known Presbyterian church with a fairly famous pastor who has published many books, a wonderful man and a wonderful preacher in many respects—the pastor was preaching on Genesis 2. Genesis 2 recounts the creation of the garden and the creation of man, where mankind receives two climactic commands. Humanity receives seven commands across Genesis 1 and 2: five in the first chapter, and two additional ones in chapter 2. Interestingly, these two commands are given to Adam alone before the creation of the woman. Those commands are to guard the garden and to tend it, keep it, or work it, depending on your translation.

Given where our culture is today with its deep confusion regarding men and women, this text represents the very genesis of masculinity and fatherhood. It was a perfect opportunity to give men and husbands a rich exposition on the art of being a father and a man. You would expect the preacher to walk through what it means to guard: perhaps spending a sermon or two discussing how to guard your home and your church physically, emotionally, and most importantly spiritually. How do you guard your wife and children emotionally? How do you guard the church? What are the practical ways to do this? And you would expect the same treatment for working and tending the home and the church, which is the clear implication of the garden.

Yet we did not get any of that. We actually received no application whatsoever. The only point that came close to resembling application was a passing remark about the general value of work to God. That struck me as very strange. The woman was not even on the scene yet in the text; this commission was given directly to the man as a leader, something he was meant to communicate to his wife and invite her into. Yet there was nothing practical offered.

As I was walking out of the building that morning, I spoke with a woman from the congregation. There were police officers stationed outside the church, and she asked me why they were there. I said, “It is actually precisely because of the passage that was preached on this morning.” She looked confused and asked, “Wait, to work?” Even when I offered her a direct connection arising right out of the text—guarding the assembly—she could not make the link. That is how far we have drifted from actually applying the text. And this was not an isolated incident; it is a pattern I have observed year after year.

You see the same dynamic in men’s and women’s ministries. When you visit churches today and observe a men’s group or a women’s group, they rarely have anything to do with the distinct callings of being men or women. They are simply generic Bible studies that happen to be populated by one gender. I find that peculiar. I had assumed a men’s or women’s ministry existed to address the art of being a man or a woman, but apparently not. The assumption seems to be that if you assemble people of the same sex, you will eventually stumble into relevant topics by accident, which is a bizarre pedagogical strategy. When my wife attended one of these gatherings, it felt as though, if the women had failed to show up and a group of men had wandered into the room instead, it would have seamlessly become a men’s ministry purely by happenstance of attendance. That state of affairs is deeply strange.

The Gospel as an Interior Proposition

Why has this happened? Any cultural or ecclesiastical trend is multivariate, with many contributing factors. But after years of reading and reflection, I believe there is a core issue: how we understand the gospel, the kingdom, and the Christian faith itself.

We have come to understand the gospel and the kingdom of God as a small proposition that an individual affirms deep down in the interiority of the soul. The faith is treated not primarily as an objective reality out here in the world, but as a feeling or conviction strictly in here. If the kingdom is reduced to that tiny interior kernel, then everything out in the physical world gets treated in one of two ways: either it is dismissed as unimportant, or it is condemned as legalism and works righteousness.

Consider a story involving my wife. A few years ago, some Christian women organized a seminar on interior design, exploring how to think both theologically and practically about how to order and design a home. My wife attended the seminar and later met with the other women to discuss it. When I asked her how it went, she said it was good, though she had hoped it would go deeper. We had spent years discussing theology and aesthetics together, so much of the content was familiar to her, and she was eager for more depth. But when she met with the discussion group, another woman stated that she disliked the seminar because she felt it placed unnecessary burdens on women. She viewed it as a matter of works.

That response is not merely mistaken; it is a profound category mistake. If I were to explain to you how an automobile works—how the carburetor operates, how the oil filter functions, and how to change your oil—and you were to reply, “You are laying heavy burdens on me,” I would think something had been lost in translation. We are not having a discussion about legalistic demands; we are discussing the nature of the physical world God made and how to order our lives skillfully within it. Yet when everything external is immediately viewed through the lens of legalism, any instruction on practical ordering is interpreted as an imposition.

If the gospel is conceived solely as a tiny mental affirmation inside my soul, then everything outside that kernel is treated as irrelevant. People conclude we should not talk about practical order because our only real task is saving souls through evangelism, or, in more academic settings, debating systematic doctrine and biblical theology. Both approaches are simply permutations of the same underlying assumption.

Carl Trueman provides an insightful analysis of how this mindset developed in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In summarizing his argument, in the past, people defined their identity through external structures such as family, church, and society. Today, identity has been thoroughly psychologized. A person looks inward at their own feelings as the ultimate authority. Trueman terms this expressive individualism: the belief that each person discovers their authentic meaning by expressing their private, interior desires rather than conforming to external rules or to the objective order of the world.

This conviction that the core of faith is entirely interior works its way out across the life of the church. You can see it clearly in our approach to church music. Notice how our culture assumes that for music to be deep or profound, it must be slow and quiet. Several years ago, I researched contemporary worship music and discovered a study on dying congregations. The researchers found that as churches die, their music consistently slows down. There is an intimate connection between the vitality of a congregation and the tempo of its music. Yet because music directors are rarely trained in the rich history of liturgical music, musical craft is treated as an afterthought. The prevailing assumption is that the only essential task is preaching to secure that interior intellectual assent, while music merely exists to facilitate a subjective internal mood. If the faith is entirely internal, we try to access it by making music slower, quieter, and more emotionally introspective.

The same instinct governs public prayer. Corporate prayer is frequently quiet and subdued, depending on manufactured emotional intensity to feel authentic. In many churches, writing out a prayer or composing a structured liturgical piece in advance is viewed with suspicion. People assume that planned, written prayers are insincere because they do not flow spontaneously from the immediate interior state of the speaker. The more premeditated a liturgy is, the more readily it is dismissed as artificial.

There is a book whose title captures this tension brilliantly: Ritual: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. When my grandfather passed away, he received a military funeral because he was a veteran. The ceremony was highly ritualized. The honor guard moved strictly at right angles, the flag was folded with precise geometric discipline, and the bugler stood facing a specific direction. Far from feeling cold or insincere, that rigid ritual moved me to uncontrollable tears. I felt deep gratitude that my grandfather was being honored by an ancient, noble tradition carried out with deliberate order. If the participants had simply improvised out of their own private feelings at that moment, it would have diminished the honor of the occasion. When a dignitary arrives, matters become more structured, orderly, and ritualized, not less.

We see the exact same reduction in our understanding of the sacraments. In many evangelical circles, the sacraments are treated merely as cognitive symbols pointing to a private internal experience. Whatever one’s view of the sacraments, treating them as bare mental signs was never the historic consensus of the church; it is a late development outside the magisterial Reformation. Historically, the sacraments have been understood as an objective, external gift of life given to the Christian to nourish the soul. While interior faith is vital, that internal vitality is fed precisely by receiving the external gift of the kingdom in the sacrament.

The Loss of the Doctrine of Creation

This interiorization has also led directly to a loss of the doctrine of creation. When I mention this, people often object that evangelicals have defended creation for decades. That is true, but they have defended primarily the fact of creation—its mere “thatness.” Defending the reality of creation is necessary and noble, but it is the bare minimum. Evangelical discourse has spent decades debating the factuality of the opening chapters of Genesis while paying little attention to the meaning of the text itself. Genesis 1 is a structured literary masterpiece with intricate patterns unfolding across the days. Of course it happened, but the meaning of the chapter goes far beyond the bare fact that it occurred.

If we applied that same flattened logic to the rest of the Bible, our interpretation would collapse. Consider the Abrahamic narrative spanning Genesis 12 through 22. If someone asked for the meaning of those ten chapters and you replied, “The meaning is that Abraham did these things,” any professor would send you back to introductory hermeneutics. Of course the history occurred, but the meaning of the narrative is vastly richer than the bare events. This neglect of meaning may explain why secular thinkers like Jordan Peterson gained such an enormous following. Even when Peterson hedges on historical factuality, people flock to his lectures because they are starved for the actual meaning of things, and they will grasp for that meaning wherever they can find it.

This theological blind spot was illustrated for me when a church planned a teaching series on human sexuality, and a friend involved in the project asked for my advice. I cautioned him to avoid two common traps: the purely apologetic approach and the generic “gospel-centered” approach.

The apologetic approach attempts to address modern confusion over sexuality by constructing abstract philosophical and theological arguments. It produces lists of intellectual reasons why one should not embrace transgenderism. While sound philosophy has its place, Christians lived for thousands of years without needing complex philosophical treatises to understand men and women. They possessed common sense, scripture, and a set of shared bodily practices that tacitly taught them the reality of the world. Those formative practices are precisely what our culture has lost.

The second common error is what I call the “gospel-centered” approach, where teachers simply append the word gospel or grace to every topic and assume the problem is solved. The theologian Kelly Kapic once noted on the Mere Orthodoxy podcast that he forbade his students from putting the word gospel in front of everything, because phrases like “gospel sermon” or “gospel prayer” had become completely meaningless through overuse. I share that concern. Calling something a “gospel view” of an issue is often an admission that one has failed to reckon with the reality of creation itself. Because we have spent so much energy fixated solely on the interior proposition—asking endlessly, “Are you really saved?”—we never advance to understanding creation, fearing that any attention to external practice is either unnecessary or legalistic.

Consequently, whenever a pastoral problem arises, we assume the only possible remedy is another lecture or Sunday school class. When fathers or children struggle, our immediate impulse is to offer an intellectual explanation, because we lack a robust vision of practical life. Many Christians, particularly young men, have absorbed the idea that practical life is simply uninteresting. Ask many young men about dispensationalism, eschatology, or theories of the atonement, and they will debate for hours. But ask them how a father ought to govern speech in his home, how siblings should be taught repentance, or how a church might train mothers and fathers in practical parenting, and their interest evaporates. They assume practical instruction lacks theological depth. A dense volume of biblical theology feels profound, while the craft of living seems mundane.

Action as Drama and Form

I held that mistaken view for many years myself. One of the influences that altered my perspective was reading Plato. Plato is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers in human history partly because he wrote in dialogues. He began his career as a dramatist, and though he reportedly burned his plays after meeting Socrates, he carried that dramatic instinct into his philosophy. When I studied philosophy in college, I did not fully understand Plato until teachers showed me that the dramatic action of his dialogues is just as essential to his philosophy as the spoken arguments.

Consider Book VII of the Republic, which contains the famous allegory of the cave. Prisoners chained to a wall see only shadows cast by a fire and mistake those shadows for reality. One prisoner is freed, ascends into the sunlight, and is blinded by the brilliance of the true world. When he returns to enlighten his companions, they attempt to kill him because they cannot bear the truth. That narrative serves as an allegory of the fate of Socrates, and it established the classic philosophical distinction between appearance and reality that echoes throughout literature and film.

Yet look at how the Republic begins in Book I. Plato opens with the simple words, “I went down to the Piraeus.” The Piraeus was the port city of Athens. A modern reader might dismiss that opening line as mere stage-setting. But within the drama of the dialogue, the action carries profound meaning: the narrator descends to the port just as the philosopher must descend back into the cave to enlighten those living in darkness. The action embodies the philosophy.

The same dynamic appears in Plato’s aporetic dialogues. In these works, Socrates carries on an intense inquiry that ends without a neat resolution, at which point an interlocutor abruptly departs, announcing that he must go offer a sacrifice to the gods. That unresolved ending is deliberate genius. It confronts the reader with a choice: will you walk away like the foolish character, or will you take up the dialectic yourself and finish the journey toward truth? The drama is designed not merely to transmit abstract propositions, but to form the reader in wisdom.

Scripture functions in much the same way. The Bible does communicate propositions, but it is not merely a collection of abstract assertions. The scriptures are like construction blueprints or sheet music: if they are never actually built or played in daily life, we have fundamentally misunderstood what they are for.

Many Christians operate under what might be called trickle-down theology—the assumption that if you simply teach abstract doctrine, practical application will take care of itself automatically. There is a half-truth there, because people certainly meditate on scripture and seek to apply it. But relying entirely on trickle-down theology implies that teachers are unnecessary for practical application, which is demonstrably untrue. Application is difficult even for experienced pastors; if pastors struggle to apply the text skillfully, the congregation will struggle even more.

Furthermore, when a sermon avoids specific application, hearers naturally apply the general principles to their neighbors rather than themselves. A vague sermon allows everyone to assume that the family across the aisle is the one in need of correction. Specific, pointed application forces each hearer to examine their own life, which actually reduces interpersonal resentment within a congregation.

When I speak of the art of life, I am not advocating for legalistic scolding or negative moralizing. I am talking about positive world-building: learning how to use speech skillfully, how to become a wise father, mother, or son, and how to cultivate a healthy domestic and communal culture. Christians are often adept at feeling guilty, but our real task is to construct a generative way of life.

Another obstacle to practical wisdom is an extreme strain of Lutheran homiletics that has influenced evangelical preaching. This tendency can be traced in part to the influence of Edmund Clowney’s classic work on preaching. Clowney made immense contributions, but his followers often argue that one should never present biblical figures as moral examples for emulation, claiming that believers should emulate only Jesus. Preachers are warned never to tell a congregation to be like David or to avoid the sins of Samson.

That restriction is deeply mistaken. Anyone who understands how narrative functions knows that stories exist precisely for emulation and avoidance: we are meant to imitate virtue and shun wickedness. The scriptures explicitly endorse this pedagogy. Hebrews 11 presents the patriarchs as examples of faith, and the apostle Paul commands his readers to imitate him as he imitates Christ. Human beings are mimetic creatures created in the image of God to copy Him and to learn by observing others. Insisting that we may only emulate Christ effectively removes the vast narrative portion of scripture from ethical instruction.

Rediscovering the primacy of action also unlocked church history for me. In college, when I read accounts of the historic saints, an embarrassing thought would cross my mind: “When are they going to get to Paul and the doctrine of justification?” I failed to understand that the brilliance of the saints lay in their action. They were geniuses of practical life, constructing cathedrals of virtue through their daily habits. That is the kind of practical excellence we need to recover today.

Particularity and Depth

Both the Bible and life are deep, profound, ingenious things that deserve to be unfolded. And in each case, their depth is discovered by attending to particularity.

In a biblical text, you have to pay attention to the words, the pacing, the order, and all the particulars. In life, you have to pay attention to how speech works, how men and women work, and how communities work. It is only by attending to these particulars that we get to the depth.

At heart, these are two expressions of the same conviction. Learning to attend to the particulars of our calling in God’s world is what I mean by the art of life.

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