Today, Dr. Michael Heiser passed away. Author of numerous books and host of the Naked Bible Podcast, Heiser made a name for himself by diving into some of the mysterious and fringe parts of Christian theology, and communicating those insights beyond academic circles to the masses.

If I were to create a list of top 5 academics who have most shaped my Christian theology, Heiser would easily be on that list.

What I loved about Heiser was that he never put God in a box. He sought to approach passages of Scripture without prior assumptions, and he just allowed the Bible to speak for itself, in the way the original authors intended.

That last point is crucial. Heiser frequently argued that many of the cultural norms in the modern American church regarding how we read the Bible would have been foreign to the original authors. We are often reading the Bible (and this true of both Old and New Testaments) as if the authors had post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation Christians in mind (and this critique is true of both theological conservatives and progressives). We are applying modern standards to the Bible that the authors never intended.

Once I saw that, and once I began to immerse myself in the worldview of the original writers, I began to see the Bible in a different light. Instead of immediately jumping to, “What is God speaking to me?,” I started asking, “What did the original author say to the original audience? And how is God using this divinely inspired record of what happened to speak to me?”

It seems like a small shift, but it had enormous consequences. It led me through a journey of unlearning old things and learning new things. Deconstruction would be too strong of a word. It was more like doing some major renovations. The foundations of my evangelical tradition still stood (the inspiration of Scripture, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, etc.). But I began to see myself being led to theological conclusions on secondary issues that I didn’t expect—ones that often fell outside of my theological tribes.

Every time this would happen, I would find myself asking questions. Is this belief an orthodox view? Who else believes this? Do I want to associate with those people? Why haven’t I heard this perspective before? Does this contradict other beliefs that I hold already?

But fortunately, something else started to happen the more I dived into Heiser. I became more and more content with the fact that I didn’t feel certain about things, and that I didn’t have a clearcut tribe. It was okay.

We modern readers are often using the Bible as a proof text—to prove or disprove one theory or another. But I realized that was never its intended purpose.

It wasn’t that I became more wishy-washy theologically. It’s that I cared about theological precision less, and I cared about literary accuracy more. And sometimes the path to literary accuracy caused me to say, “This passage seems to suggest this, while that passage seems to suggest that. These two things seem contradictory on the surface, but that’s okay. We just hold these two things in tension.”

Theological tribes often assume theological frameworks that oversimplify the whole of Scripture. But no one system can account for all of the nuances and complexities of the Bible. All systems do is argue, “My side has more proof texts than your side.” But that misses the point. We don’t read the Bible to put God in a box. We read the Bible to encounter God in all of his mystery.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of Jacob wrestling with God. I used to have so many theological concerns about it.

Was that an angel or God? Or a pre-incarnate Jesus? Why did it seem like Jacob was physically stronger than this divine being? Why did Jacob want a blessing from this mysterious figure? Why did God dislocate Jacob’s hip? How did Jacob claim to see God’s face yet live?

But over the years, I came to see that I was approaching the text all wrong. I was trying to find satisfactory theological categories for every little detail. I was seeking to put God in a box. But the story is inherently a story about wrestling. And wrestling is not smug or comfortable. It is awkward and uncomfortable.

By explaining things away, I was trying to take the mystery out of God. But this story shatters all expectations of what God is like.

A man wrestled with God, and he came away with a limp and a new identity. And I realized that that’s what I want to come away with.

I don’t want to come away from the Bible feeling smug that my theological system is the best. I don’t want a God I can figure out. I want a God I don’t fully understand. I want to feel like I am wrestling with God. I want to encounter him, and come away with a limp and a new identity. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to be changed.

Thank you, Dr. Heiser, for your legacy. I hope to pass it on.