God’s eternal Word has taken to himself our frail flesh, born as one of us. He has embraced as his very own our weakness and fragility, our transience and loss, our sorrows and our griefs. In his flesh, he has entered the deepest depths of our experience.As we sit in our studies and pay heed to Augustine, or Luther, or Edwards, they invite us to leave cramped and crowded walls of our own small understanding, and to step with them into the soaring cathedral of divine truth.

According to Webster, this posture of gratitude entails a willingness to lay aside our own pressing interests. It also entails a willingness to pay close attention to the interests of others. This humble displacing of self offers the hope of immeasurable enrichment. Attention to the traditions of the church is attention to the the saints of God as they strain to hear his voice and pass on what they have heard. And, says Webster, it ushers us into “the possibility of a more spacious domain, a greater store of intellectual goods.”

As we sit in our studies and pay heed to Augustine, or Luther, or Edwards, they invite us to leave cramped and crowded walls of our own small understanding, and to step with them into the soaring cathedral of divine truth.

Prayer and thanksgiving are not just something we do at the beginning or end of a morning’s theological work. They are the atmosphere in which theology lives, the native air our thinking breathes as the motion of our mind comes from and returns constantly to the God from whom, through whom, and for whom our intellectual labors exist.