The whole Middlebrow team has stayed busy this summer working with Wheatstone Academy, a ministry which runs week-long summer conferences to equip young people to take a full-grown Christian faith and worldview to college with them. Starting Sunday, we’ll be leading the final conference of the summer. At this conference, faculty and students will spend the whole week saturating our minds with Colossians, just like James M. Gray said we should. We’re all as giddy as new converts about it. Here is a short (850 words) motivational introduction to Colossians that I wrote for the occasion. Colossians isn’t even my favorite book of the Bible, but ask me about it again in one week and we’ll see.

I. Why Read Colossians?
The book of Colossians is tiny (95 verses in 4 chapters), but its scope is enormous. In this letter, Paul looks from prison up to heaven, “where Christ is seated at the right hand of God,” and scans the history of God’s mighty work of salvation from creation to the return of Christ. In this late letter, Paul presupposes all the truths of the Gospel which he has written about in previous letters, and goes on to teach things which he has never explained before. He is fully aware that in doing so, he is teaching “deep knowledge” (epignosis) of “the mystery which was hidden from past generations but which has now been manifested” (1:26).

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James M. Gray (1851-1935) was one of the most famous Bible teachers of the early 20th century. He was a key player in the generation that established the Bible institute movement, serving as dean/president of Moody Bible Institute for more than two decades. He had worked alongside Dwight L. Moody, and was academically qualified to lead an educational institution into the twentieth century, institutionalizing his signature “Synethic Bible Study” method.

So when he wrote a little book in 1904 called How To Master the English Bible, you can imagine how eager people were to read it. Here was a “How To” book from a man who knew his Bible and could make it come alive in the church or classroom. What tips, tricks, and techniques would he share?

In fact he offered almost no tricks at all, and certainly nothing that seems like advanced or specialized knowledge. His program is so basic that it’s easy to ignore, and most people go right on ignoring it. But it really can take you deeper into the Bible than you’ve ever been, if you’ll just try it.

The fundamental idea is to pick one book of the Bible and read it over and over. And over. And, yes, over again.

That’s pretty much all. Gray manages to get a whole book out of that (a short book) by explaining the rationale behind it, walking you through it in detail, providing illustrations from personal testimony and citing authorities who point in the same direction. But if you’re in a hurry to get into mastering the Bible, you can stop reading now and just go do this: pick a book and saturate yourself in it by reading and re-reading it obsessively. If you’ve got a little more time to spend reading the theory, here’s my summary of Gray’s 1904 How to Master the English Bible.

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Before he gives his testimony of conversion to Christ, Nabeel Qureshi makes it clear that he was perfectly satisifed with Islam as he experienced it. He tells about his upbringing in a devout, peaceful, and intellectual Muslim family, where he was a role model for other Muslim children because he had read the Qur’an in Arabic by age 5.

Islam was not just my religion, it was the whole structure of my life. Born into and raised in Islam, it was my heart’s blood. Laying the foundation for how a youth should live, Islam was the framework and the blueprint of my life. Edified by apologetics, I challenged its opponents and called everyone else to it. It was here, standing atop the minaret of Islamic life, that Christ called out to me.

Eventually his interest in Muslim apologetics would lead him to follow the evidence where he saw it leading him, into accepting Christianity and rejecting Islam. His writing shows how passionate he is about the persuasive power which Christianity has. He is obviously edified by studying the evidence for the core Christian claims, and since his conversion has continued to dig deeper into the deep things of Christian doctrine.

What started him on the road to conversion? What was the first thing that put Christianity on his radar as a serious faith worth investigating at all? He caught somebody reading the Bible. He met David Wood and caught him in the act:

Although he was a Christian and I a Muslim, we quickly became close companions due to our common set of morals. One evening I found him reading the Bible. This was very surprising. As a Muslim, I had read the Qur’an every day for most of my life, but I had never seen a Christian seriously reading a Bible in his free time. My interest piqued by this chance encounter, I decided to see how much he really knew about the Bible. … Unbeknownst to me, David was not just a Bible-reading Christian, but a Christian with every intention of becoming a devoted apologist.

“I had never seen a Christian seriously reading a Bible in his free time.” Small wonder that Christianity didn’t even seem like a remotely plausible religion to this devout reader of the Qur’an. Once Nabeel started asking his new friend some hard questions, he discovered that this “Bible-reading Christian” and “devoted apologist” had answers, and counter-questions, and more answers and more questions, and a real case to present (read some of it here).

David and Nabeel are now partners in an apologetics ministry, Anastasis Apologetics, named for the resurrection of Jesus which is the cornerstone of the case they argue for their faith. This Saturday August 5 they’ll be debating two Muslim apologists on the subjects “Jesus: Mortal Prophet or Divine Son of God?” and “God: Trinity or Tawheed?” If you’re in the Norfolk, VA area, check it out.

And try to get caught reading your Bible seriously, outside of church. Not so you can feel proud about doing your religious duty in public, but so that somebody might imagine that Christianity is the kind of respectable religion whose members read its holy book. If you’re looking into the Bible, it gives the impression that the Bible’s a book that might be worth looking into.

Of all the tiny fragments of Old Testament vocabulary to have washed up on the shore of secular culture, one of the oddest is the old bit about “knowing in the biblical sense.” People who don’t know or care to know (in any sense, biblical or otherwise) about anything from the Old Testament somehow got the word that “Adam knew Eve, and she bore him a son.” So “know” must mean some activity that results in babies, eh? Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Okay, right enough as far as it goes. But whenever I hear somebody say “They got to know each other … in the biblical sense!” I always miss the punchline cue because it makes me think about what the Bible means by knowledge. My mind reels as I try to imagine getting to know someone just in the Johannine sense! A biblical theology of “to know” would be an awesome thing, a thing worth pondering, a life-transforming thing. “To know in the biblical sense” …what an expression! But of course by this time I’ve missed my chance to laugh at a clever way of referring to sex, and apparently our culture feels a dire need to extend its range of witty innuendo on that all-consuming subject. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about what it would be like to have a complete understanding of what scripture means by knowledge.

Here’s one of the best general descriptions ever written about what knowledge means, “in the language of the Bible.” It’s by Karl Barth, and it occurs in the middle of a discussion about how Jesus Christ makes himself known:

We cannot impress upon ourselves too strongly that in the language of the Bible knowledge (yada, gignoskein) does not mean the acquisition of neutral information, which can be expressed in statements, principles and systems, concerning a being which confronts man, nor does it mean the entry into passive contemplation of a being which exists beyond the phenomenal world. What it really means is the process or history in which man, certainly observing and thinking, using his senses, intelligence and imagination, but also his will, action, and ‘heart,’ and therefore as whole man, becomes aware of another history which in the first instance encounters him as an alien history from without, and becomes aware of it in such a compelling way that he cannot be neutral towards it, but finds himself summoned to disclose and give himself to it in return, to direct himself according to the law which he encounters in it, to be taken up into its movement, in short, to demonstrate the acquaintance which he has been given with this other history in a corresponding alteration of his own being, action and conduct. We can and should say even more emphatically that knowledge in the biblical sense is the process in which the distant ‘object’ dissolves as it were, overcoming both its distance and its objectivity and coming to man as acting Subject, entering into the man who knows and subjecting him to this transformation.

— Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV:3.1, pp. 183-184

Knowledge… in the biblical sense.