Greg Boyd’s “Myth of a Christian Nation” is the sort of book which unequivocally reaffirms my desire to follow Jesus. If I were to give his book another name it would be, “Greg’s Letter to the Americans,” following in the same vein as Paul’s Letters to the Ephesians, Galatians, Hebrews, etc.

Granted, Boyd would probably cringe if he knew someone was comparing something he wrote to the Bible. But he writes this book (or letter) to well-meaning fellow Christians who are bickering among themselves, and/or peeved about his stance on war, violence, his lack of oppositional aggressiveness toward gays, and his apparent lack of fervor in the war against abortion.

Boyd’s preoccupation is with an absolutely mind-blowing concept: the “power under” kingdom of God. This is opposed to a pervasive and often deceptive “kingdom of the world,” which yields its “power over.” Rather than ordering people to become followers of Jesus, Boyd argues that we use Jesus’ life as a model of how God transforms people into followers.

Though his book is pointed, Boyd’s instructions are not aimed at any one particular group of Christians, but toward the Body of Christ as a whole. Boyd writes:

Conservative religious people involved in kingdom-of-the-world thinking often believe that their enemies are the liberals, the gay activists, the ACLU, the pro-choice advocates, the evolutionists, and so on. On the opposite side, liberal religious people often think that their enemies are the fundamentalists, the gay bashers, the Christian Coalition, the anti-abortionists and so on.

Boyd continues with what are perhaps two of my favorite lines in the whole book:

If we were thinking along the lines of the kingdom of God, however, we would realize that none of the people mentioned in the above lists are people whom kingdom-of-God citizens are called to fight against. They are, rather, people whom kingdom-of-God citizens are called to fight for.

Part of why I like those two lines so much is because, as odd as it may sound, I don’t think I’ve ever heard “power under” taken so far. So often Christians want to remove or ignore that part of the Body of Christ that doesn’t suit them. But Jesus would have us serve them instead. Read this book. I’ve only touched on a smidgen of what Boyd gets to his Letter to the Americans. (Humorous note: if you switch the last two letters of ‘Boyd’ around you get ‘Body’…okay, time for me to get to bed.)