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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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.