Beware, I say to myself, the gap between knowledge about God and knowledge of God. Beware being a master of theological facts and still nursing on spiritual milk. Beware an intellectual understanding that lacks a passionate following. Helmut Thielicke in A Little Exercise for Young Theologians would say the warning like this:

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 grow up in the same way that one who is to be confirmed must also still grow into the long trousers of the Catechism. Meanwhile, they hang loosely around his body, and this ludicrous sight of course is not beautiful.

Let us tread cautiously in this world of blogs and tweets that our keyboards don’t write checks that our lives can’t cash.