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Mocking other Christians for their "system" of evaluating and ranking sins, he himself establishes a hierarchy that collapses all sin into the sin of "judgment," the defining sin of "religion." Murder? Rape? Child abuse? Promiscuity—both heterosexual and homosexual—leading to the death of millions from aids? The will to power that turns an entire nation into the plaything of a dictator?

Ah, but in Boyd's accounting, the "most damaging and destructive variety of the forbidden fruit is its religious variety." To acknowledge the temptations of self-righteousness (a subject hardly foreign to evangelicals who hear a sermon every week) is a necessity; to make that the very definition of sin is a bizarre distortion.

And yet the animating impulse of this book is powerfully winsome: a beautiful vision of the Christian life that Boyd sketches at the outset, in which we are called to "dance the eternal dance of the Trinity, to participate in and glorify this unsurpassably loving fellowship."

This deeply Trinitarian sense of the overwhelming splendor and joy of divine love, this exuberant truth, is no abstraction, no vaporous sentiment; it is, as Boyd says, the ultimate reality.

Hence "God's goal is that humans, when filled with God's unsurpassable love and eternal life, would replicate God on an individual level and overflow with love back to God, to themselves, and to their neighbors." Except for that word replicate, which doesn't seem quite right, I want to say amen. How this glorious vision can be squared with much of the book that follows, I'm not sure. Maybe I am reading with blind spots of which I'm unaware. But even though I am clumsy, even though Gregory Boyd and I may be stepping on each other's toes, I am dancing too.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.

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More about Gregory A. Boyd and his other books is available from his website.

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February 2005, Vol. 49, No. 2