God Gives with Interest

“Viewed as a whole, . . . the Christian account of history is eschatological not only in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sense that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. The Christian Bible moves not from garden lost to garden restored, but from garden to garden-city. God gives with interest.

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature (Moscow, Id.; Canon Press, 2006), xi.

How The West Lost Its Story

“The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring disallegiance from the God who was that faith’s object. . . . Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.”

- Robert W. Jenson, “How The World Lost Its Story,” First Things (October 1993).

The Point of The Story Has Been Disclosed

“All telling of history is, of course, selective. No history is written except on the basis of judgments about what is significant. No ‘facts of history’ exist, except in so far as what happened was judged significant. The recorded facts will vary according to the judgement of what is significant, and that in turn depends upon what the ‘point’ of the story is. Normally we do not see the point of a story until the end. But we are not in a position to see the end of the cosmic story. The Christian faith is the faith that the point of the story has been disclosed: the ‘end’ has been revealed in the middle. The point of the story is not the triumph of human technology over nature, nor the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations. There is one human family and it has one centre, Jesus Christ, one history, the history of the making of faithful relationships with its maker. To accept that means to live as part of a potentially universal community, looking towards a consummation whose character has been revealed in Jesus Christ, and of which we have already a foretaste in his risen Body.”

~ Lesslie Newbigin, “Our Missionary Responsibility In The Crisis Of Western Culture”

The Cosmic Story

“The Bible is an interpretation of universal history as the history of the divine enterprise of creating faithful relationships, covenant relationships between God and his creatures, God and the human family, faithful relationships between persons and peoples founded on the covenant faithfulness of God. It has the whole cosmos as its theme. It sets the human story within the context of the cosmic story. It has its centre and turning point in the death and resurrection of Him who is the word of God, through whom all things came to be and are. It looks towards a consummation, which is beyond history and which yet gathers up all that has been wrought through history.”

~ Lesslie Newbigin, “Our Missionary Responsibility In The Crisis Of Western Culture”

Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

“People who grow up without a sense of how yesterday has affected today are unlikely to have a strong sense of how today affects tomorrow.”

~ Lynne Cheney, quoted by William Kilpatrick in Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1992), 196.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): Prophet of Postmodernism

“No one comprehended the stark contrast between belief and unbelief like Nietzsche, and therefore none of the secular prophets depicted the implications of atheism as clearly as he did. Nietzsche brought the tradition of the secular prophets to its conceptual end by proclaiming that atheism was extremely costly. After Nietzsche, easy belief and easy unbelief proved impossible. As the culminating voice of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche foreshadowed the postmodern tradition that effectually eradicated the easy confidence in human nature and in rationality that was trumpeted by his Enlightenment predecessors.”

~ Richard Lints, “The Age of Intellectual Iconoclasm: Revolt Against Theism,” in Revolutions in Worldview, ed. W. Andrew Hoffecker (Phillipsburg, NJ; P & R Publishing, 2007), 301.

The Enlightenment as Christian Heresy

“One way of understanding [the Enlightenment] is to think of it as a Christian heresy. What Christian faith had offered was retained while the Source from which that offer had been made was rejected. The prerogatives that had belonged to God did not simply disappear; now they reappeared in human beings. The revelation he had given now reappeared in the form of natural reason, which would do what revelation had done but without the discomfort of requiring humanity to submit to God from whom the revelation had come; the idea of salvation was retained but transformed into the drive for human perfectibility, at first achieved by moral striving and then, as we know it today, by psychological technique; grace became effort; the life of faith became the hope of personal growth; and eschatology became progress (what Lord Acton called the religion of those who have none).”

~ David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Powers (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2005), 30.

Moving Towards a Deeply Comic Climax

“For the biblical writers, history is moving toward a deeply comic climax in which all wrongs are righted, all tears dried, and all loses regained with interest. Pain and the cross remain indelibly embedded in the narrative, and there is real waste and loss which is felt absolutely to be waste and loss. Yet, the final telos of the biblical story is absolute joy, peace, justice, and love. For the biblical writers, God’s victory is without question a victory in the ‘exterior world,’ for the Fall took place in this world, Israel was called in this world, Jesus was born, died, and rose again in this world, the Spirit came into this world, the gospel was preached to the nations in this world, and the new creation is a transfiguration of this world.”

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy (Moscow, Id.: Canon Press, 2006), 33-34.

The Biblical Story Encompasses All of Reality

“The biblical story encompasses all of reality – north, south, east, west, past, present, future. It begins with the creation of all things and ends with the renewal of all things. In between it offers an interpretation of the meaning of cosmic history. It, therefore, makes a comprehensive claim; our stories, our reality must find a place in this story.”

~ Michael Goheen, “Reading the Bible as One Story”

The Bible & the Universal Reign of God

“The Bible is unique among sacred books of the world’s religions in that it is in structure a history of the cosmos. It claims to show us the shape, the structure, the origin, and the goal not merely of human history, but of cosmic history. It does not accept a view of nature as simply the arena upon which the drama of human history is played out. Much less does it seek the secret of the individual’s true being within the self — a self for which the public history of the world can have no ultimate significance. Rather it sees the history of the nations and the history of nature within the larger framework of God’s history — the carrying forward to its completion of the gracious purpose that has its source in the love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The first announcement of the good news that the reign of God is at hand can be understood only in the context of this biblical sketch of a universal history. The reign of God is his reign over all things.”

~ Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, Rev. Ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1978, 1995), 30-31.