Tuesday, May 10, 2016

What is the relation of a secular, this-worldly unification of mankind to the biblical promise of the summing up of all things in Christ? Is it a total contradiction of it? Is it some sort of a reflection of it? or perhaps a devil’s parody of it? Or has it nothing to do with it at all? Perhaps there will be many Christians to whom it would not occur to pose the question whether the process of secularization has anything to do with the biblical understanding of the goal of history. The Bible, for them, belongs to a religious world which is not admitted to belong to the world of secular events—the world in which we are when we read the daily newspaper. But this is to read the Bible wrongly. Whatever else it may be, the Bible is a secular book dealing with the sort of events which a news editor accepts for publication in a daily newspaper; it is concerned with secular events, wars, revolutions, enslavements and liberations, migrants and refugees, famines and epidemics and all the rest. It deals with events which happened and tells a story which can be checked... We miss this because we do not sufficiently treat the Bible as a whole. When we do this, we see at once that the Bible—whatever be the variety of material which it contains: poetry, prayers, legislation, genealogy, and all the rest—is in its main design a universal history. It is an interpretation of human history as a whole, beginning with a saga of creation and ending with a vision of the gathering together of all the nations and the consummation of God’s purpose for mankind. The Bible is an outline of world history.

... Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), Honest Religion for Secular Man, London: SCM Press, 1966, p. 19-20 (see the book; see also Eph. 1:7-10; 2 Sam. 7:15-17; Isa. 11:1-4; Dan. 7:13-14; Zech. 12:8; Luke 1:31-33; Rom. 8:17-18; 1 Cor. 15:22-24; 2 Thess. 1:6-7; more at Bible, Christ, God, Historical, Promise, Purpose, Understanding, Unity, World)

 
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2024, by Robert McAnally Adams,
        Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day,
        with Robert Douglas, principal contributor
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Last updated: 05/09/16

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