Steve Bell says Christianity is not complicated, it’s difficult:

One of my concerns with the manner in which the Bible functions in American Christianity, is that it can serve as a source of welcome complication to distract us from (and substitute for) the difficulty of Christian practices. The intellectual mastery of the biblical text becomes the hallmark of spiritual maturity. One’s knowledge of the Scripture, and one’s communicative ability to expound and explain it, correlates to the position of authority that one holds in the church organization.

Amen.