“Theological thinking can and ought to grip a man like a passion. But passionate devotion means a way of thinking and speaking which all too consistently is borrowed from the circles in which a person has just been moving…
“You can see that the young theologian has by no means grown up to these doctrines [i.e. 'the problems of the Trinity'] in his own spiritual development, even if he understands intellectually rather well the logic of the system…
“Therefore it is evident how and where, given such a state of affairs, serious crises must arise. There is a hiatus between the arena of the young theologian’s actual spiritual growth and what he already knows intellectually about this arena. So to speak, he has been fitted, like a country boy, with breeches that are too big, into which he must still grown up…Meanwhile, they hang loosely around his body, and this ludicrous sight of course is not beautiful…
“Some truth or other has not been ‘passed through’ as a primary experience, but ahs been replaced by ‘perception’ of the literary or intellectual deposit of what another’s primary experience…has discovered. Thus one lives at second hand. But because this kind of perception of another’s religiosity or spirituality can be extremely lively and even passionate, it is easy to lapse into auto-suggestion, as if a person had experienced and passed through all that himself. He lapses into an illegitimate identification with the other. It is possible to be thoroughly bewitched intellectually by the mighty thoughts of the young Luther [for example] and then to lapse into the illusion that what is ‘understood’ in this way and makes such an impression is genuine faith. In reality, it is only a case of perception and of being victimized by the seduction of conceptual experience. In his own life, the young man is not that far along! Young theologians manifest certain trumped-up intellectual effects which actually amount to nothing.
“Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty. Every teacher knows that this is a matter of signs of natural growth over which there is no reason to become excited. Churches must also understand it and must have it explained to them in every possible way.
“It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before the church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken thsi part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection. We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.”
–Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, pp. 9-12
