Christometry - The Breadth of the Love of Christ

The love of Christ reaches further than any wall ever built — and further still into the heart of the one who believes.

In the first article of this series, I introduced the term Christometry — drawn from the Greek christos and metron — as a way of thinking about the four dimensions Paul names in his prayer for the Ephesian believers: the breadth, and length, and depth, and height of the love of Christ. I attempted to connect that prayer to Ephesians 4:7, where Paul speaks of grace given “according to the measure of the gift of Christ,” and began to show that the measure of the gift of Christ — Him and His descent and His ascent — is precisely what the four dimensions of Ephesians 3:18 describe.

We begin where Paul’s prayer begins: with breadth.

It would be easy to treat breadth as the most obvious of the four — the widest, the easiest to be understood. Surely breadth just means the love of Christ is very wide, that it reaches many people. But Ephesians does not let stay there. The epistle has its own account of what the breadth of Christ’s love means, and it is far more architecturally precise than a general statement about reach. Breadth in