Making the gospel difficult

“Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their strangeness, their non-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another. They need to be made more difficult before we can accurately grasp their simplicities.... And this ‘making difficult’, this confession that what the gospel says in Scripture and tradition does not instantly and effortlessly make sense, is perhaps one of the most fundamental tasks for theology.”

—Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 236.