What good is it to know the Trinity?

The Imitation of Christ opens with one of the most provocative sentences in the history of Christian literature.

What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing to the Trinity?

Thomas à Kempis is not attacking theology. He is attacking the disconnect between theological knowledge and transformed life — the person who can discourse fluently about the inner relations of the divine persons and is simultaneously proud, petty, unkind, and self-serving.

The medieval university had produced, alongside its genuine saints and scholars, a class of theological professionals who knew a great deal about God and were not noticeably changed by what they knew. Thomas had watched them. He had been near them at the University of Paris. He had come home to his monastery and written a book that was essentially a long, patient rebuke to everything they represented.

The Imitation proceeds from this opening through four books: the contempt of worldly vanities, the interior life, inward consolation, and the sacrament of the altar. It is practical at every point. Not what to think about God but how to live before him — in humility, in silence, in self-knowledge, in love.

The book becomes the most copied and most read Christian text of the fifteenth century. It travels from monastery to monastery, from Rhineland to England, from Germany to Spain, arriving everywhere slightly ahead of the Reformation it will help to produce — reminding readers that what the church needed was not primarily institutional reform but interior transformation.

Both, as it turns out, were needed. But Thomas's point comes first.

Thomas's question cuts through every era of Christian intellectual life: what is all this knowledge for?

Not: stop thinking. But: notice what your thinking is producing. Is the study making you more like Christ? More humble, more loving, more genuinely present to God and to the people around you? Or is it making you more impressive, more confident, more comfortable in the role of the person who knows things?

Mary chose the one necessary thing. Martha was busy with many things. Both were in the same house, near the same person.

The proximity to the knowledge is not the same as receiving what the knowledge is about.

What is your theological learning producing in you? And how would you know if it was producing the wrong thing?