Theology, Preaching, and the Direct Path to God
Jean Khoury
Summary: This article offers a theological reading of 2 Timothy 2:15 — Paul’s exhortation to Timothy to “rightly handle the word of truth” — through the lens of Catholic spiritual theology. Drawing on the Greek verb orthotomeo (ὀρθοτομεῖν), the biblical context of Proverbs, and the witness of Aquinas, John of the Cross, and Thérèse of Lisieux, it argues that authentic theology, preaching, and teaching are not primarily informational but directional: their purpose is to open in the listener the act of faith by which God gives Himself. Conversely, any discourse that becomes entangled in verbal disputes or conceptual self-sufficiency betrays its mission by blocking, rather than opening, that straight path into divine communion. The article concludes with practical implications for theologians, preachers, and spiritual directors.
Introduction: A Pauline Criterion for Speech about God
In his second letter to Timothy, St. Paul issues a directive that is at once simple and radical: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.” (2 Tim 2:15, NIV)
The Greek expression at the heart of this verse is orthotomounta ton logon tes aletheias, literally, “cutting straight the word of truth.” The verb orthotomeo is rare, appearing nowhere else in the New Testament, and commentators have long debated its precise image: a road-builder making a straight path, a craftsman cutting cleanly, a steward distributing food rightly. What has received less attention is the immediate rhetorical and theological context that gives the verse its sharpest meaning.
The verse is bracketed by two contrasting pictures: just before it, Paul forbids quarrelling over words (logomachein), which “does no good but only ruins the hearers” (2 Tim 2:14); just after, he warns against “profane chatter” that spreads like gangrene (2 Tim 2:16). The contrast is not between ignorance and learning, but between two modes of speech: discourse that leads directly to God, and discourse that circles back upon itself.
It is from within this contrast that the present article proceeds. Its thesis is theological and spiritual: the “straightness” Paul demands of the minister of the Word is not merely rhetorical clarity or doctrinal accuracy, but a quality that belongs to the innermost nature of speech that is genuinely ordered to God. Speech that is truly theological, in the original sense of the word, leads the hearer into the act of faith by which God gives Himself. Speech that has lost that orientation, however doctrinally elaborate, has ceased to be theology in any spiritually operative sense.
I. The Straight Way and the Crooked Word
1. Orthotomeo and the Biblical Background
The verb orthotomeo is composed of orthos (“straight,” “right”) and temno (“to cut”). Its Septuagintal background is instructive: Proverbs 3:6 uses a related form to speak of God making one’s paths straight, and Proverbs 11:5 connects righteousness with the straightening of one’s way. The image, on this reading, is less of division than of rectitude: a road laid straight, a course kept true.
This matters because Paul is not asking Timothy to divide or dissect the Gospel into parts. He is asking him to keep it on a straight course, to handle it without deviation, without the swerving that he immediately attributes to Hymenaeus and Philetus, who “have wandered away from the truth” (2 Tim 2:18). The Greek verb there (astocheo) literally means to miss the mark or stray from a path. The spatial and directional metaphor is consistent: there is a straight way, and there are those who depart from it.
Significantly, the Christian movement itself was known in Acts simply as “the Way” (hodos: Acts 9:2; 19:9; 24:14). And Christ has declared: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). The proximity of “way” and “truth” in John’s Gospel is not merely linguistic: truth, when it is living and operative, is itself a way, a path into God.
2. Quarrelling about Words as a Spiritual Pathology
To appreciate what Paul is resisting, one must understand the spiritual pathology of logomachein, i.e. fighting over words. Such disputation is not simply a rhetorical defect; it represents a deeper disorder: the mind has turned back upon itself. Instead of being a transparent medium through which the Word of truth passes into the hearer, language has become an enclosed arena of conceptual combat.
The French word alambiqué captures something of this: language that is laboured, over-elaborate, convoluted, and indirect. It is the opposite of straightforwardness. It may still employ religious and even biblical vocabulary, but its energy is no longer directed outward toward God; it circulates within an intellectual structure that has become its own purpose.
The medieval tradition named this pathology curiositas: the restless movement of the intellect that seeks stimulation rather than truth, multiplication of distinctions rather than wisdom. As Gregory the Great observed, Holy Scripture is not to be understood only in words but in life. Augustine, even more radically, writes that the purpose of all speech about God is to produce the return of the soul to God: any discourse that does not serve that end has missed its only justification.
This is why Paul’s command is not merely about preaching technique or intellectual rigour. It is about the soul of theology itself.
II. Faith as the Straight Path into God
1. Aquinas: The Act of Faith Terminates in God Himself
The theological tradition has consistently located the resolution of this issue in the nature of the act of faith. For Aquinas, faith is not primarily a state of believing propositions about God; it is an act of the intellect, moved by the will under grace, that terminates in God Himself as its ultimate object.
In the Summa Theologiae he is explicit: “The act of the believer does not terminate in a proposition but in a thing. For as in science we do not form propositions except in order to have knowledge of things through them, so in faith.” (ST II-II, q.1, a.2 ad 2)
And again: “Faith causes assent in the intellect in such a way that it is ordered to the First Truth itself.” (ST II-II, q.1, a.1 ad 1)
That “First Truth” is not an abstract principle but God Himself. Moreover, Aquinas insists that the whole purpose of sacred doctrine is not intellectual satisfaction but the ordering of the human person toward God as ultimate end (ST I, q.1, a.5). Theology, for Aquinas, is already implicitly ordered to the act of faith: its speech is faithful only insofar as it serves that act.
2. John of the Cross: Faith as the Proximate Means of Union
John of the Cross presses further into the experiential and ontological dimension. For him, faith is not merely an ordered act of knowing; it is the only divinely established mode of real contact with God in this life. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel he writes: “Faith is the only proximate and proportionate means of union with God. For the likeness between faith and God is so great that no other difference exists than that between believing in God and seeing Him.” (Ascent II, 9, 1)
Faith is proportionate to God because it receives God as God gives Himself: not through natural images or concepts, which are always inadequate to the divine reality, but through a dark, luminous adherence that surpasses intellectual grasp precisely because its object is too full, not too empty. God communicates Himself to the soul through faith and this communication is not informational but ontological: it begins the transformation of the soul into God.
This is the theological depth behind the Pauline intuition: the “word of truth” is not merely a set of true propositions. It is a divine utterance that, when received by faith, gives God Himself. The minister who handles that word “straightly” is one whose speech remains transparent to that gift, a medium of divine self-communication rather than a barrier.
3. The Mind as the Place of Reception, Not the Place of Arrival
A necessary clarification must be made here against any anti-intellectual misreading. The act of faith is not a bypass of the intellect; it is an elevation and fulfilment of it. The Word of God passes through hearing, understanding, and interior assent before it becomes faith. As Aquinas states with precision, faith is “an act of the intellect assenting to divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace” (ST II-II, q.2, a.9). The mind is the created locus in which God’s Word lands; it cannot be shunted.
What must not happen is that the mind becomes its own terminus, that intellectual activity, however sophisticated, becomes a substitute for the act of adherence. The danger Paul names is not intelligence but self-enclosure: speech that circulates within itself rather than opening onto God. When that happens, the mind becomes a prison rather than a threshold. The word has lost its direction.
III. Thérèse of Lisieux and the Living Exegesis of Straightness
If John of the Cross provides the metaphysical account of why faith is the straight path into God, Thérèse of Lisieux provides its most luminous existential realisation. In the “little way” she does not propose a new doctrine; she discloses the innermost structure of what theology is always, at its best, trying to do: lead the soul into simple, direct, total surrender to the God who yearns to give Himself.
The terms she uses are themselves striking: she speaks of a way that is “very short and very straight” (Manuscript C). Shortness and straightness are not incidental adjectives; they are the spiritual translation of orthotomeo. The little way eliminates the detours, i.e. the spiritual achievement, the accumulated merit, the theological elaboration, not because these are evil, but because they can become, imperceptibly, new forms of self-referential circling that delay entry into the God who is already waiting to give Himself.
Her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love is not a pious exercise appended to theology; it is the telos of theology made explicit: total self-placement within God’s own initiative of love. In its structure, it is the most perfect possible realisation of the act of faith as John of the Cross understood it, not an act of the soul going toward God so much as the soul opening entirely to God’s movement toward it. “I offer myself as a victim of holocaust to Your merciful love, imploring You to consume me unceasingly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul.” (Act of Oblation, 1895)
Thérèse is, in this sense, a living commentary on 2 Timothy 2:15. Her words do not circle around God; they open onto Him. Her teaching does not produce conceptual refinement in the hearer; it produces trust, which is the form the act of faith takes in a soul still traversing the ordinary conditions of life. She is the true theologian in the deepest sense: one whose words are themselves straight paths into the living God.
The Church’s recognition of her as a Doctor of the Church is therefore a doctrinal statement as much as an honorary one: her insight belongs to the interior of theology, revealing what all authentic theology is ordered to.
IV. Theology That Leads and Theology That Loses Itself
The foregoing analysis allows us to formulate a theological criterion, both classical and urgent, for evaluating any act of theological speech, whether in the lecture hall, the pulpit, or the direction room.
Theology is faithful to its own nature when its words are transparent to God: when they function not as final objects of attention but as openings onto the living God who communicates Himself. This is what the tradition of theologia genuflexa (theology born on one’s knees) has always insisted upon. In monastic and mystical theology, speech about God is not the point of departure but the overflow of prior encounter. The theologian who has not prayed at length before speaking risks producing, however elegantly, words that are about God rather than from God.
Theology loses itself when discourse becomes self-referential, when the elaboration of theological positions, the multiplication of distinctions, or the combat of academic controversy becomes the operative goal of speech, rather than a means ordered beyond itself. This is not a defect confined to academic theology; it can afflict preaching, catechesis, and spiritual direction equally. Wherever speech about God ceases to function as an opening onto faith, it has become, in Paul’s language, a quarrel about words.
The question every minister of the Word must ask is therefore not only “Is what I am saying true?” but “Does what I am saying lead my brother directly to God? Am I opening a straight way to the Word of Truth? Are my words theological, that is: do they carry the soul toward the God who is already yearning to give Himself?”
Practical Conclusions
The following orientations emerge for those who teach, preach, or direct:
1. Pray before speaking. The theologian, preacher, or spiritual director must spend time in contemplative prayer before any public act of theological speech. This is not a devotional preliminary but a constitutive requirement: words about God that have not passed through personal encounter with God are unlikely to open that encounter in another. They may inform without transforming.
2. Let the act of faith be the measure. The question that must accompany the preparation of every homily, catechesis, or lecture is: does this lead the hearer toward the act of faith, that loving, total adherence to God by which God gives Himself? If the answer is unclear, the speech needs to be simplified, not elaborated.
3. Resist the temptation of verbal complexity. Not all nuance is a service to truth. Complexity that opens horizons is valuable; complexity that becomes self-sufficient, that leads the hearer deeper into the labyrinth of words rather than out into the light of God, is a form of the logomachein Paul condemns.
4. Receive Thérèse as a doctrinal teacher. The little way is not a pious alternative to rigorous theology; it is rigorous theology in its most existentially operative form. Spiritual directors in particular should let her teach them what it looks like, in practice, for a soul to be led directly into God’s self-giving love without detour.
5. Cultivate theological transparency. The goal of theological formation is not the production of people who know much about God, but people whose entire intellectual life has become transparent to God, who are, in Paul’s phrase, “approved workers” precisely because their lives and their words point consistently toward the same reality: the living God who yearns to give Himself.
Conclusion
Second Timothy 2:15 is not merely a piece of pastoral advice about homiletics. Read within its context, against the backdrop of verbal combat and doctrinal wandering that Paul denounces, it formulates a criterion for all genuinely theological speech: orthotomein ton logon tes aletheias, keeping the word of truth on a straight course.
That straight course runs, as the whole of Christian spiritual theology insists, into the act of faith: the divinely graced adherence of the soul to God as First Truth, by which God Himself is given. Any speech that opens that act is, in the deepest sense, theological. Any speech that replaces or displaces it, however learned, however correct in its propositions, has missed the only goal that justifies it. “But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” (Matthew 12:36, King James Version).
In the end, the measure of theology is not its conceptual precision only but its directional power: does it move souls toward God? John of the Cross and Thérèse of Lisieux, from the heart of the Carmelite tradition, give us the most penetrating answer. Faith is the proximate means of union. Trust is its simplest form. And the word that opens both – short, straight, transparent – is the word that is truly theological.
Select Bibliography
Patristic and Medieval Sources
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Bros., 1947. [ST I, q.1, a.5; II-II, q.1, aa.1–2; II-II, q.2, aa.2, 9; II-II, q.45, aa.1–2.]
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Augustine of Hippo. De Trinitate. Translated by Stephen McKenna. Catholic University of America Press, 1963.
Augustine of Hippo. De Doctrina Christiana. Translated by R.P.H. Green. Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gregory the Great. Moralia in Job. Translated by J. Bliss. John Henry Parker, 1844.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on 2 Timothy. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 13. Edited by Philip Schaff. Eerdmans, repr. 1979.
Carmelite Sources
John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mount Carmel. In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. ICS Publications, 1991. [Book II, ch. 9.]
John of the Cross. The Spiritual Canticle. In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. ICS Publications, 1991.
Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated by John Clarke OCD. ICS Publications, 1996. [Manuscripts A, B, C.]
Thérèse of Lisieux. “Act of Oblation to Merciful Love.” In General Correspondence, Vol. II. ICS Publications, 1988.
Thérèse of Lisieux. Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Vol. II. ICS Publications, 1988. [Letter 197.]
Modern Commentaries
Knight, George W. The Pastoral Epistles: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Eerdmans, 1992.
Mounce, William D. Pastoral Epistles. Word Biblical Commentary 46. Thomas Nelson, 2000.
Towner, Philip H. The Letters to Timothy and Titus. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2006.
Spiritual Theology
Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus (Père). I Want to See God. Fides Publishers, 1953.
Ratzinger, Joseph (Pope Benedict XVI). Jesus of Nazareth. Translated by Adrian Walker. Doubleday, 2007.