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While Christianity is beautifully simple, it is also endlessly deep.

There is a long tradition—often attributed to Augustine of Hippo—that describes Scripture as shallow enough for a child to wade, yet deep enough for an elephant to swim. The image captures something essential. The same Bible that a new believer can understand at a basic level is the same Bible that scholars can study for a lifetime and never exhaust.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33).

We should expect this. If God is truly God, then we will never reach the end of Him.

And yet, there is a danger here too. Some are tempted to reduce Christianity to something so simple that it becomes shallow—flattened into slogans and maxims and stripped of its mystery, its tension, its depth.

Others go the opposite direction. They chase complexity for its own sake—treating faith like a system to master rather than a relationship to enter.

The challenge is to hold both together.

That’s why the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. are so helpful: “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

There is a kind of simplicity that is naïve—unaware of the hard questions. But there is also a deeper simplicity, one that has wrestled with doubt, studied carefully, and settles in a posture of defiant trust.

So we keep learning. We keep studying. We wrestle with difficult passages and big questions. But in the end, we return again and again to the same place: trusting God, following Jesus, walking by the Spirit.

A faith simple enough to live and deep enough to last a lifetime.