Theological Impatience

Theological impatience is one of the most troubling features of our generation. Examples of impatience in everyday life abound – measuring your progress against that of the person in the adjacent supermarket queue, tutting at the slowness of a microwave dinner – but far more inisidious is the way this everyday impatience now manifests itself in the way we do theology. Assuming, as we are often told, “the means is the message” (that is, the physical way in which you communicate something forms an important part of what you communicate), we would expect that: if theology is done in blog comments and tweets and Facebook posts, then it would be surprising if that did not make us theologically impatient. This is true of what we write, as Matt reminded us on Friday. And it’s also, perhaps less obviously, true of what we read. Read more