knowing your stuff, then what?

came across this quote while reading a friend's blog and thought it made a whole lot of sense.

As Christians, we of course want our worldview to be fundamentally derived from God's Word, not the climate of opinion that happens to prevail in the world in which we live. Still, since "all truth is God's truth," as Augustine taught us, we should assume that whatever is true about the views of our culture, including the views of science, will be consistent with God's Word (assuming we are interpreting it correctly).

Locating this element of truth in the culture and aligning it with our theology based on the Word can be advantageous to communicating credibly the truth of the Word to our culture. It can also help us more effectively think through and apply our theology for our culture and for ourselves. This is why our theology should be developed in dialogue with every other branch of learning. Whatever truth is to be found in physics, biology, anthropology, and so on is God's truth and can only help us credibly proclaim the truth of God's Word to the world.

Greg Boyd, God of the Possible (2008)

very often, i find that there is this divide between believers and pre-believers, because believers read the word, pray, and see it in light. nice. pre-believers cannot believe how we are looking to a 2000 year old book, unverified to be the truth by the way, to let it guide our lives. as if the Word is not already hard enough to decipher given it is the Word of God and us humans, in our humanly knowledge need to depend on the spirit to guide us in our understanding, what more the perspective of some one peering in from the outside. i think what we're essentially called out to do is an entire spectrum of Kingdom-edifiers. one of them being using the wisdom of the spirit that God has placed within us to dissect the word into bite-size, understandable pieces, and put it into the new world context, for the world. and as with all Kingdom-edifiers it must be prayerful and spirit-led. knowing who and not what's at the center.