Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries.

When did we forget God?

It’s a provocative question. And it’s the name of outgoing Christianity Today editor in chief Mark Galli’s latest book. After years working in this world, Galli believes that evangelical Christians’ strong suit today is the love of neighbor be it prayer gathering to evangelism to social justice to acts of mercy. We talk about God a lot and worship him and pray to him regularly.

But on the other hand, relatively few Christians take with equal seriousness the command to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. If we do talk about the love of God, it is said that we love God by loving our neighbor. True enough, but that is hardly a complete answer, nor one that would have satisfied Christians of other eras.

So what would look like to love God with this sort of passionate and all encompassing fury today? Or, to put it in classical terms, what it looks like to strive to behold the beatific vision, that is, the vision of God himself, a striving driven by an unswerving desire to know God intimately, face to face, and thus to love him with earthly and heavenly intensity?

For his last Quick to Listen episode Galli digital media producer Morgan Lee spoke with Hans Boersma, the author of Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, to discuss would look like to love God with passionate and all-encompassing fury today and what difference this move might make in our lives and in the world around us.

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Music by Sweeps

Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder

The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola

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