Simmered, Not Stirred: Communicating Complexity in an Age of Simplicity
Most who know me well know that cooking has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s not for a lake of trying. There’s just something about the intuitive nature of cooking that doesn’t resonate with me the way that it does for Tara. She can conceptualize a meal in her mind and just instinctively know what it needs to turn it into a masterpiece, while I on the other hand, much prefer the precision and predictability of baking.
I remember the first time I ever tried to make a deglazing, reduction sauce. I’d watched my favorite chef, Jacques Pépin (whom I credit for teaching me from afar any functionality I now have in the kitchen) dozens of times create beautiful, rich sauces by adding a bit of wine to what was left from preparing the meat. He frequently remarked about how people would discard the crusty bits in the pan when that was actually where the most beautiful flavors were if only one knew to add a little bit of wine, perhaps a bit of starch, and a wee bit of patience.
What I lacked was the patience—and, if I’m really honest with you, I much preferred the idea of having a lot of sauce rather than just a little. After all, after you’ve perfectly cooked a steak, who wants to wait to make a sauce? I added the prescribed ingredients to deglaze the pan and after what seemed like an eternity was still left with just a bunch of bits floating in a pan of very liquid-y sauce. It was far from the thick reduction I had seen on the many YouTube reruns Pépin’s of Fast Food My Way.
My impatience and greed had created a diluted mess rather than a reduction of rich, complex flavors.
The Age of Diluted Simplicity.
It’s no secret that American culture thrives on what is fast, simplistic, and immediately accessible. One need only watch reality tv or scroll social media to see our society’s almost dogmatic insistence that if something is complex then it isn’t worth our time. Instead, we want things that are quick…delivered in digestible Tik Tok reels and Instagram carousels. Otherwise don’t bothering giving it to us at all.
French theologian Jacques Ellul touched on this in his now-classic book The Technological Society when he critiqued modern culture (and by “modern,” I mean the 1950s when he wrote it!) for its over reliance on what he called “technique.” For Ellul, technique referred to our recently pursuit of pragmatism and efficiency for its own sake, often at the expense of thinking more deeply about the bigger and broader questions of life (in his case, it was specifically about the uncritical embrace of technological innovation).
We see the fruit of our culture’s priority of practical application and easy-to-understand relevance in how we are quick to dismiss anything that doesn’t have an immediately clear applicability.
This is commonplace in the church as well. We often resist ideation that doesn’t soon jump to “So what do we do with this?” “What’s the application?” In the local church this often takes the form of sermonizing and discipleship that is practically oriented, simplistic, and bite sized. Modern preaching has become a TED Talk with some Scripture thrown in. Modern discipleship ignores the deeper mysteries of the faith in favor of covering the basics of doctrine and embracing the vision of the church.
But it is not so much that we simply ignore the complex, the mysterious, and the ancient traditions and insight of this holy faith handed down to us through the testimony of the apostles, the church fathers and mothers, and the prophets and mystics of the past. In some respects, we’ve become hostile to them—viewing the richness of the Great Tradition as a barrier to church growth instead of a great deposit entrusted to us to steward.
Consequently, when we ignore the richness of the wisdom handed down to us in favor of “Three Points For a Better You,” we think we’re reducing the complexity of faith into a sauce that pours nicely. But in effect, we commit the same error that I did in attempting my first reduction sauce. With a lack of patience to sit with the complex, and with an ultimate desire for scalability (i.e., “how can this have maximum impact” on the masses), we create a diluted sort of nothingness that relies solely on our own, individual insight and wisdom instead of resting on the shoulders of those who have gone before.
Recovering a Demi-Glace Faith
The solution to this is not found in simply leaving things as complicated and unreachable to those we disciple, teach, and preach. That’s no more helpful in for spiritual formation than if I were to have simply scraped all the bits left in the pan after the steak was cooked and sprinkle them on to the steak.
Instead, passing on the difficult and complex things to be more easily understood is not a matter of discarding or diluting, but in reduction (or, what we call in missiology: contextualization). A good demi-glace sauce is found in reducing all of the elements by half so that it thickens, melts the good bits of the pan’s remnants into the emerging sauce, and brings out a fine richness that takes the patience and wisdom of the chef to result in an expert level sauce that sophisticated and unsophisticated palates alike can appreciate.
If you have children in your life, you’re likely used to making “reduction sauces” in response to their questions. When a child asks you to explain the difficulties of life, a complex geo-political event they see on the news, where babies come from, and more—we’re forced to do our best to communicate the truth faithfully in an age-appropriate way they can understand. It takes patience and wisdom to do that well. But we do it because we love the kids in our lives.
Similarly, it takes a great deal of intentionality to explain the complex things of the Faith, of life, of suffering and hardship in a way that is faithful to the truth and is digestible to the person we’re speaking to. But it can be done. One of my favorite examples of this is Duke professor Jeremy Begbie explaining complex theological constructs like the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity by using a piano:
This is demi-glace faith. It requires that we think well, that we read from those who have gone before us, that we take seriously the wealth of wisdom and knowledge handed down to us and strategically think about how to explain those complex things to someone who has absolutely no knowledge of them. We don’t need diluted TED Talk Christian formation and we also don’t need scraped-off unrefined bits of Christian formation that make no sense to people. What we need is thoughtful formation that thinks deeply and carefully about how to communicate the richness of the faith in a way that resonates with people.
Can You Smell That? Dinner is Ready
One of the things I’ve learned from Tara over the last couple years, as she’s studied semiotics under Len Sweet, is the powerful role that awakening the imagination plays in communicating complexity. Often, when we want to explain something, we try to break down a concept into an outline filled with data, logic, and reason. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
But when we look at the ministry of Jesus in the gospels, when he wanted to explain something, he told parables. When Jesus wanted to explain the vastness of the kingdom of God, he talked about pearls, and sheep, and wayward sons. When he wanted to talk about faith he talked about a mustard seed. Jesus used stories and images to help people better understand complexity and mystery—not attempting to solve the mystery for them, but to awaken a hunger within them for it.
Begbie’s musical example of teaching theology reminds us how the whole of our senses can be activated to help people understand complexity—sometimes better than with words alone. Begbie is right in suggesting that the trinity is better understood by being heard than by being explained. It can also be tasted and smelled, as we understand how both allow us to simultaneously taste and smell something as a whole unit, but also be able to discern the individual spices and scents that exist in perfect harmony together.
What if our approach to formation was more multi-sensory? More story laden? More thought-provoking (and less simple question answering). What if, like a good sauce that awakens us to an elevated dining experience that transcends simply eating food for fuel, our telling what the kingdom of God is like provokes people to imagine, to wonder, and to…just maybe…find hunger for more.