From Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Picador, 2005), page 117:

“Good theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its retelling with a special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and they on it. … Theology is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it. So it need not define freighted words like ‘faith’ or ‘grace’ but may instead reveal what they contain. To the degree that it does them any justice, its community of readers will say yes, enjoying the insight as their own and affirming it in that way.”