Some things are worth thinking about, and some things just aren’t. Some subjects repay closer examination, and the longer you spend meditating on them, the more they reveal their own richness and unfold their conceptual complexity. Other things have the opposite effect: the more time and effort you put into pondering them, the more you realize you shouldn’t have wasted the effort.

Most TV shows are not worth thinking about: get your entertainment value from them and then back away. Pop music is usually not worth thinking about. Whatever its merits may be (”It had a good beat, I could really dance to it,” as every guest on American Bandstand remarked as soon as Dick Clark put the mic in front of them), pop music just doesn’t have lyrics that will leave you any better off if you invest your valuable chin-tugging time in them. If you suffer from an analytic turn of mind, you may have caught yourself reflixively over-interpreting overheard song lyrics: “Gee, I wonder what Nelly Furtado means when she tells Timbaland that ‘Roses are red / Some diamonds are blue / Chivalry is dead / But you’re still kinda cute.’” By the time you’ve asked that question, you’ve already put more time into thinking about the lyric than did its composer.

A good poem, on the other hand, just keeps being worth thinking about, and spins out new insights and connections every time you run it through your mind. Truly great poems are so fruitful, for so long, for so many audiences, that we call them classics and use them to educate our little minds that need a good stretching. In fact, the best way to determine whether a book or artwork is approaching classic status is to ask whether it has proven itself to be worth thinking about. Has it been worth thinking about for a hundred years? Have diverse types of keen minds rendered their independent judgements that, agree with it or disagree with it, this work is Worth Thinking About?

There’s no single English word for this quality, but I just ran across a German word for it: Denkwürdig. Badly Englished, that would be Think-Worthy, worth thinking about. If you feel the need to say it out loud, try pronouncing it something like “DANK-vyoord-ish,” and if you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious.

German dictionaries tend to offer more pedestrian meanings like “notable” or “memorable.” But what do dictionaries know? German has better words for both of those, and denkwürdig adds something beyond them. The denser meaning of “worth thinking about” is used on the cover of a book I’m reading a few chapters from, a celebration of theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s 70th birthday, entitled Denkwürdiges Geheimnis, which wouldn’t sound as cool in English but could be translated something like A Mystery Worth Thinking About. In Jüngel’s work, the mystery that deserves our attention and which calls for the best theological concentration is of course the mystery of God, and more specifically the Trinity: the mystery worth thinking about.

The Middlebrow team also runs a click-through site called The Scriptorium that points to three great articles somewhere around the web each day. The redoubtable Dustin Steeve, our managing editor, linked recently to a Christianity Today review of the book Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, by John and Stasi Eldredge. The reviewer, Agnieszka Tennant, doesn’t recognize herself in the descriptions of woman offered by this book, decked out in “pop psychology, sentimentality, eisegesis, and clichés borrowed from Harlequin paperbacks.”

As off-putting and weird as the Eldredge’s portrait of The True Woman may be, I think there’s something even wilder at the heart of this Eldredge book. From what I’ve read of Captivating, the real driving force of the book is explicitly theological: it is a doctrine of God, and a methodology for how to arrive at that doctrine of God.

The keenest theologically-informed review of this book that I’ve seen is by Torrey Honors Institute’s own Dr. Donna Thoennes, whose analysis of Captivating grabs ahold of it by the theological handle and gives it a good worrying. Thoennes quotes this line from the book: “After years of hearing the heart-cry of women, I am convinced beyond a doubt of this: God wants to be loved.”, and adds this comment:

One would expect the sentence to say that after counseling women, the authors are convinced that women want to be loved. Somehow the needs of women become the needs of God in their worldview. The authors have flipped the process of understanding who God is and who we are. Because women are made in God’s image, they are like him and represent him. Therefore, they can look to God to infer things about themselves, but they should not assume that conclusions can be drawn in the opposite direction. Just because we have certain tendencies or desires does not necessitate that God shares those. God is high and lifted up; he is transcendent as well as immanent. In Ps 50:21 God corrects man with a strong accusation, “You thought that I was one like yourself, but now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.” We must look to God to learn who we are, not the other way around.

I especially appreciate the way Thoennes situates her (really quite stinging) critique inside of a gracious and inviting –biblical– doctrine of God:

Our God is relational: the Bible says he has emotions and he responds to our moral status. Certainly his relational nature is evident in Jesus. But he does not need us! The Eldredges seem to assume that if God does not need us, he does not really love us. But God’s love is more secure and provides more hope and stirs more obedience when it grows from his eternal, unchanging, loving character.

Read it all here.

Greg Boyd is promoting a new book about how evangelicals should stay out of politics. With a tag like “evangelical mega-church pastor not toeing the GOP line,” he’s finding all the microphones of the established media pointing his way. Boyd was recently on a regional NPR morning show, working through talking points with the host and callers. Watch the dynamics of this exchange.

Host: Let me take another call from Cambridge, Massachussetts, Gwyn is on the line. Hi Gwyn, you’re on the air.

Caller: Hi, I just want to express my concern about the idea of having government that is led by people who believe that the most important thing is what happens in the hereafter, and which implies that it doesn’t really matter for instance global warming and the crisis in Iraq, in fact…

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Paul’s prayer for the church at Colossae (Colossians 1:9-14) is a catalog of the blessings he wants God to give them: knowledge, spiritual wisdom, understanding, a worthy walk, eagerness to please God, fruitfulness, growth in knowledge, strength, endurance, patience, and joy. With all of that going on in the prayer, I still think it’s safe to say that the dominant note in the prayer (and in the epistle) is the note of knowledge. Paul wants the Colossians to have knowledge, wisdom, and understanding of God. Among the other things he’s asking God for, he’s asking God to give the Colossians the gift of good theology.

H.C.G. Moule (1841-1920) was a great evangelical Bishop of Durham whose Bible commentaries are always worth consulting. In his Colossian and Philemon Studies, Moule quotes “some one” as having said “beware of an untheological devotion,” and underscores the way Paul asks for “just these ‘theological’ blessings… for a salvation nobly ‘theological.’” Moule says, “He prays that they may not only be warm and earnest, but may know profoundly the reason of their hope.” His summary:

This prayer of St. Paul’s, thus read in the context of the Epistle, is no untimely message for us. In many quarters of our Christendom nothing is more in fashion than “an untheological devotion.” “The religious sentiment” is regarded far and wide as a thing which can live and be healthy with a very minimum of revleation, and with an amost nil of reasoned doctrine; above all of the doctrine of a divine Christ, an atoning Cross, and a rescue from “the authority of the darkness.” But such “sentiment,” however warm, has no ultimate “last” in it. Under very moderate pressure from fashions of thought, and from attractive personalities, it is ready to go as far as possible from the ground on which alone the world, the flesh, and the devil can be really met. (p. 58)

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In Colossians 1:6, Paul mentions “The word of truth, the Gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing — as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth.” The most important thing happening in the world is the progress the Gospel is making everywhere, as it “bears fruit and grows.” The greatest reason for rejoicing over the Colossian church is that the Gospel is also doing its “fruit-bearing and growing” thing right there in their town. How does the Gospel bear fruit and grow? Probably by reaching more people and winning them over to Christ.

The same two words (karpophoroumenon and auxanomenon) appear together a few verses later in Colossians 1:10, in Paul’s searching prayer:

We pray that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

The prayer presents a great expansion of the “bear fruit and increase” language: They are to bear fruit in every good work, and to increase in the knowledge of God.

I missed this in 1:6, but 1:10’s expansion and application made it obvious: “Bear fruit and increase” is Eden language, the command given to the birds and fish (Gen. 1:22), Adam and Eve (Gen. 1:28), and Noah’s arklings (Gen. 8:17, 9:1, 9:7). The coming of the good news, the word of truth, renews the possibility of growth, productivity, increase, and expansion. It re-starts the human project, taking us all the way back to the original plan. The command is of course “spiritualized” (which probably shouldn’t be a word). Perhaps, informed by the Genesis background, we could overly paraphrase Colossians 1:10 as “Your church should get pregnant with good works and raise a big family of the knowledge of God.”

Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse,” from the book Teaching a Stone to Talk, is a bit of a stunt. The February 26, 1979 solar eclipse lasted less than two minutes, and Dillard turns her Pulitzer-prize-winning prose loose on it for about 2o pages. If you’re in it for sheer descriptive power, there’s plenty of it here: from the bad clown painting in the hotel room the night before the eclipse, to the way the color of the grass changes, to the freaky speed of the moonshadow rushing across the face of the earth at the spectators, Dillard can let you know how things look and feel.

But there’s something else going on in this essay that comes from that strange land Annie Dillard’s readers expect her to take them to every ten pages or so (or they demand their money back!). Dillard is a sensitive recording instrument, to say the least: a waterbug or a snake can make the needle on her dial jump around to register profound oddness. So imagine taking a sensitive device like that and subjecting it to something as truly uncanny as a total solar eclipse. Her needle is pegged instantly, and it stays there.

So you get paragraphs like this:

Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itelf. If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.

And this:

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

And this:

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add –until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.

What is that? Is that metaphysics, mysticism, therapy, or just what exactly? And what does it any of it have to do with watching a solar eclipse? It’s a genre of its own, it defies classification, and I find it pretty addictive. Nobody else writes like that, because almost nobody else sees like that.

In Colossians 1:4-5, Paul says that whenever he prays for the church in Colossae, he thanks God because of their faith in Christ, their love for the saints, and the hope laid up for them in heaven.

Faith, hope, and love.

That triad sounds familiar because Paul uses it to conclude the famous “love chapter,” I Corinthians 13: “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Where did Paul get “these three?” He uses the triad about seven times, in various ways (I Thess. 1:3, I Thess. 5:8, Col. 1:4-5, Eph. 4:2-5, Gal. 5:5-6, I Cor 13:13, Rom. 5:1-5). If the words “faith, hope, and love” didn’t constitute a definite sequenced formula for Paul, they at least seemed to him like words that should show up together in some order.

There’s some reason to believe that this triad of words belonged together before Paul got ahold of them. If that’s true, then they would be older than Paul’s first letters, and you could consider the triad “faith, hope, and love” to be a common saying in churches that were already established by the time Paul wrote letters to them. If a letter like I Thessalonians is from around the year 50, then some of the first Christian churches ever were familiar with this group of words in a “pre-Pauline” period of church life… the year 45? 40? 35? How early? We’re bumping into the events narrated in the early chapters of Acts here.

Let’s admit that I’ve already used the word “if” three times, and am about to use it even more. But here’s the evidence for a pre-Pauline origin of “faith, hope, and love” as a traditional triadic formula from earliest Christianity.
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Bruce L. McCormack of Princeton Seminary is a serious theologian. He’s not messing around, trying things out, or riding hobby horses; he’s reading and writing Christian theology as if it matters, as if something depends on it. In an article in the new issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology (“Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” in IJST 8/3 (July 2006), 243-251), McCormack turns in his usual excellent performance, providing a preliminary report on his much-anticipated Scottish Journal of Theology lectures to be given in Aberdeen in 2007. After making his main argument (about Christology), McCormack concludes with some remarks about the way he views the current situation for Christian theology:

The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches. I have heard it said –and I have no reason to question it—that if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches (the last named of which will include those denominations, like the Southern Baptists, which are non-confessional in doctrinal matters and Congregationalist in their polity). The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.

(You might want to read that twice before going on; McCormack phrases things carefully.)

By “the slow death of the Protestant churches,” McCormack means the membership decline of those (mainly) Lutheran and Reformed denominations with clear European roots. As he goes on to make clear, evangelical and Baptist churches don’t count as “Protestant” in this sense because they don’t have creeds or confessions, and their church structure doesn’t rise much above the local level (no bishops or presbyteries or strong denominational hierarchies). To a good Presbyterian, that kind of evangelical church life must look anarchic.
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