Few things excite me more than the announcement of a new scholarly tome on Christology. It’s not uncommon for me to knock things over en route to my credit card when I receive a promotional e-mail or printed flyer from a publisher. And I get a weird smirk on my face whenever I go to a theological library and discover a pile of new journal articles to copy for later consumption. I guess you might say that I’m a junkie when it comes to academic Jesus studies. But despite my affinity for the ivory tower, I’m just a visitor to that world. I don’t live there. Neither do the people that I’m called to influence.

Around five years ago, I started receiving invitations to speak on the deity of Christ at various churches and organizations. About that same time, I was asked to teach an undergraduate course—one involving a defense of orthodox Christology—at Northwestern College in St. Paul, MN. With these new opportunities before me, I began to think long and hard about the best way to communicate things I had been aggressively studying over the preceding years. As anyone who follows the field of Christology knows, we’ve been hit by a continual avalanche of fresh, fruitful work for more than a decade. This has made the task of researching very rewarding. But it has also made the prospect of teaching very daunting. How can a responsible communicator pare down the mountain of material and make it accessible, understandable, and memorable for his or her audience?

My head spun as I looked at my stacks of notes and wondered where to begin. Even if I succeeded, by some class-B miracle, to whittle things down to essentials and faithfully represent the whole, how would my audiences remember even a fraction of the material? I wasn’t going to waste my (or their!) time and energy if everything was going to go in one collective ear and out the other. As Howard Hendricks is fond of saying, I wanted this stuff to stick like a piece of broken glass in their brains. After all, we’re talking about the deity of Christ. It’s hard to get more foundational than that. And it’s too easy to stumble on confusing attacks of this cardinal truth these days.

I knew that there must be a way to package the material with sensitivity to pastoral and pedagogical concerns. I just didn’t know what it was. So I said a prayer. I hoped for a Christophany, but Jesus didn’t show up to give me the solution. He would, however, answer my petition—though not in the way that I wanted!

That spring my wife and I traveled to Chicago to meet with some ministry associates. We returned home late one evening when it was dark, and I sensed that something was different when I stepped through our door and my ankles got wet! The entire lower level of our home had flooded while we were gone. As providence would irritatingly have it, my library was on the lower level. And since everything had been sitting under water for several days, mildew and rot had already started to spread. Everything on that rain-soaked level needed to be gutted, and my library—at least the parts of it that were dry!—needed to be boxed up and stored. For the next several weeks as fans dried things out and contractors fixed things up, I was without my library and files. But at least I still had my computer!

I don’t remember precisely what prompted me, but I began to do some Internet searches on the psychology of memory. I found many fascinating articles, excerpts from textbooks, and case studies. The more I dug, the more interested I became. I put together a bibliography and got copies of articles at the library. For the next few weeks, I immersed myself in the study of human memory—with the deity of Christ continually on my mind.

I won’t bore you with the details that now fill a section in one of my file cabinets. But I will say this: study after study, article after article, and book after book confirmed that the best way to remember a wealth of material is to organize it at the point of storage. What really intrigued me was the number of case studies that demonstrated how much people could recall if information was organized (i.e., clustered) in categories starting with a small number of general concepts that contained a larger number of specific concepts. The amount of material that test subjects were able to retrieve was staggering!

I started thinking of the few general ways that the New Testament bears evidence of Christ’s deity and began listing the numerous specific ways in which the evidence is presented. A nice flow chart was emerging when I stumbled upon the words of G. Mandler in an article called “Organization and Memory.” Mandler simply said, “all organizations are mnemonic devices.” Mnemonic devices, eh? I dug into resources that dealt specifically with mnemonics and memory, and I became more and more intrigued by the idea of an acronym. So I studied effective acronyms and principles behind their construction, eventually formulating my own list of seven conditions that would need to be met if I were to use an acronym. After all, I had encountered far too many acronyms that were forced, confusing, or just plain cheesy. Based on new ideas gleaned from my recent studies in the psychology of memory, and keeping in mind all that I knew about the field of New Testament Christology, these were my seven principles:

1. The acronym must be comprehensive in its breadth. I wanted an acronym that reflected every major category of biblical evidence for Christ’s deity.

2. The acronym must be a natural fit for all of the data. Too many acronyms are too doggone awkward. I didn’t want an acronym that felt like a square peg being shoved into a round hole.

3. The acronym must be short and simple. Too many acronyms are too cumbersome to aid memory. I wanted an acronym that was itself simple and formed by the first letters of simple words.

4. The acronym must be elastic in depth. This principle applies to the many specific categories under each general heading. I wanted the number of specific categories to be collapsible and expandable to accommodate beginning and advanced students alike. For example, laypersons attending a seminar might be encouraged to pick three specific categories to learn under each general heading, while college or seminary students could be required to master much more data. What’s more, I wanted the acronym to be adaptable to different situations. For example, the same acronym can be used for a five-minute encounter at the front door of one’s home or in a semester-long class on Christology; one merely needs to adjust the number of specific categories (and the depth with which they’re explained) used to support each general heading in the acronym.

5. The acronym must be thematically linked to the data. Acronyms that form meaningless words (e.g., BODMAS, a common mnemonic for the order of mathematical calculations) require greater repetition to learn because they aren’t anchored to a known, related entity. I wanted an acronym that formed a real word that was also meaningfully related to the material.

6. The acronym must be reinforced by story or imagery. This principle is related to the one above. Embedding an acronym in a narrative or mental picture provides context and further enhances memory, especially if the story or imagery evokes strong emotion.

7. The acronym must be comprised of separate words that fit interchangeably into a single thesis statement. This adds a simple verbal context to the acronym, aiding the user’s recall (by repeating the same basic sentence with one-word variations) and his or her ability to verbally articulate the material to others.

With these seven principles in mind, I went to work on constructing an acronym. Within a matter of days, I landed on one with which I was quite pleased: HANDS. The HANDS acronym clustered the five general ways that the New Testament demonstrates the deity of Christ, showing how Jesus shares God’s Honors, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat. The data fit nicely; nothing was forced. The word HANDS was itself simple, and the five words represented in the acronym were simple as well. Each general heading in the acronym could be supported with a few key texts or several texts depending upon the need of the student and/or situation. Since the HANDS acronym was inspired by Thomas’s confession of Jesus as God when Thomas saw the holes in the resurrected Jesus’ hands, it is linked by a theme (i.e., Jesus’ hands) to the material and embedded in meaningful imagery (i.e., Thomas’s worshipful confession). Finally, the acronym itself and every general heading represented by the acronym could be interchanged in a single thesis statement that read, “Jesus shares the _____ of God.”

I eagerly started putting the HANDS acronym to use, and my excitement only grew as I witnessed one overwhelmingly positive response after another. By the end of a short 3-hour seminar, laypeople could repeat in unison the basic material that I had chosen to present to them. I was most pleasantly surprised, though, by the performance of my students at Northwestern College. I spent a total of about 10 classroom hours on the HANDS acronym, explaining exegetical and interpretive issues in detail. Students were then required to take an in-class, 3-hour essay exam in which they simply told me, in their own words employing the HANDS acronym, how the New Testament presents Jesus as God. Students were required to cite biblical references and explain them. I had 44 students in my class that semester; three-fourths of the students received A’s and 40 of them received a B+ or higher on the essay exam. Those who lost points usually had a wrong chapter/verse reference or two along the way. I was a stickler when it came to grading and the students performed admirably. Today I still have contact with a handful of my former students. One wrote to tell me that she is not allowed to use any Christian books in her work in a Muslim country, yet she still remembers and uses the HANDS material that she learned several years ago in class. Others call or visit me periodically and rattle off the HANDS acronym and a few subcategories to let me know that they still know it. Few things warm my heart more.

I know that there are a lot of acronyms out there that make us cringe. And I know that listening to a professor or pastor who insists on using acronyms, alliterations, or rhymes—no matter how much the English language must be tortured—is like hearing fingernails dragged slowly across a blackboard. But there’s a reason that, as German scholar Rainer Riesner has pointed out, more than 80% of Jesus’ sayings were given in memorizable form. There’s a reason that Rabbis used mnemonic devices to pass down their traditions until they were codified in the Mishnah. And there’s a reason that we employ the HANDS acronym in Putting Jesus in His Place. Memory matters (especially when ideas need to be shared verbally!). Indeed, it matters most when something is far too important to be forgotten. The deity of Christ is one of those things.

Is the HANDS acronym a gimmick or pedagogical tool? I trust that I’ve at least demonstrated a method behind the madness. But the only way to really know is to read the book, commit the acronym and a few subcategories to memory, and start sharing the deity of Christ with people who need to hear about it. As Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” So dig in to the HANDS acronym and see what you find out!