Rejoicing over the birth of a child or facing my own death, I'd choose one kind of text. If I am to work for justice or mercy, others would come to mind. But for my lifelong vocation, dealing as I do at the junctures of "faith" and "culture" or "society," I'd choose Paul's letter to the Colossians 1:16b-17. "For all things have been created through [Jesus Christ] and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Those who know me well will know--I think and hope!--that I do not interpret this passage imperially to promote exclusivism, but rather to urge an expansive vision. A story will help me tell why it means so much:
The late Robert McAfee Brown and I were co-lecturing at the University of California at Berkeley in the late sixties or early seventies. We were interrupted when exactly twelve young men in black leather jackets stormed the stage and positioned themselves in a precise formation. They announced their identification with one of the groups then identified as "Jesus People."
They demanded equal time. What were we doing wrong? "You are talking like professors." We had to admit that charge, since we were professors. What was wrong with that? "You are quoting all kinds of writers, philosophers, poets, activists. You only need to be reading and quoting one book!"
It was not hard to guess which book they were advocating. They did give us time to respond and, let me say, they dismissed themselves peacefully a few minutes after the exchange, drifting off into the audience, into the night, into other Christian movements where I picked up the trail of one or another years later.
So we had to play the one-book game! I asked, "Who is your favorite author in it?" As soon as we allowed them to testify that God was the author, we went on to discuss the inspired human authors. They all agree that Paul the Apostle wrote it, and most scholars agree that if he did not, a student or close associate who signed himself "Paul, an apostle. . . " did so.
All right, we were down to one book and just one chapter; so they had to go along with the idea that we could respond to something Pauline. I chose this verse from a letter written to a young congregation at Colossae in today's Asia Minor. So, did that "one book" want Brown and me to limit ourselves as they implied or demanded we should? Not that he talked about "all things" being created "in him" and that "all things hold together in him."
Were not the Berkeley curriculum in all its details, the phone book, the catalogs, the dormitory name-listings, the cinema, the laboratories all part of the "all things?" On that point they agreed. If that is the case, should not Christian theologians (Brown) or historians (Marty) not make a variety of connections with all of them that came into our scope?
Certainly in the time of the biblical writer "all things" did not seem to hold together. They were early post-modernists, living in a world of incoherences, contradictions, pastiches, and the like, but with the eye of faith they had found a means of seeing coherence. I like to see things thus, being, in the lower-case "c" sense of the word a "catholic" believer and thinker. The Greek word from which "catholic" comes -- kata + holos = "by the whole" -- which means that the faith is to penetrate every dimension of being."
That is why we care about arts, politics, learning, labor, love, and all the rest. It does not mean that "all things" are endorsed, but to the believer they take on some coherence, some measure of plot in the midst of the mysteries.
Admittedly, such an approach does not solve all the worlds problems; after all, Christians make up only one-third of the human race. But if they would start interpreting "all things" as part of the Creator's reach of which they are now to be a part, and "all things" as a sphere in which justice counters chaos and injustice, everyone would benefit.
It's amazing what one can get out of one verse from one letter in one book. There are other verses for other occasions and encounters, but for my vocation, this is it.
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