We are schooled in institutions that train us in the acquisition of facts and data, of definitions and diagrams, of explanations and analysis. Our schools are very good at doing this. When we study persons, whether God or humans, we bring the same methods to the work: analyzing, defining, typing, charting, profiling. The uniquely personal and particular are expunged from the curriculum; and that means the removal of the most important things about us—love and hope and faith, sin and forgiveness and grace, obedience and loyalty and prayer—as significant for understanding and developing as persons. The fact is that when we are studied like a specimen in a laboratory, what is learned is on the level of what is learned from an autopsy. The only way to know another is in a personal relationship, and that involves at least minimal levels of trust and risk.
— Eugene Peterson
