Comment Magazine has published a series of articles revisiting and re-articulating the biblical worldview storyline of “Creation, Fall, Redemption.” In the next series of posts, I will highlight and discuss the insights of the authors as they attempt to reinvigorate the imaginations of Christians with the amazing story of God. The authors of the articles are three of my favorite Christian theologians: Al Wolters, David Naugle, and James K.A. Smith. Gideon Strauss, president of the Center for Public Justice and editor of Comment for Cardus, starts us off with three new descriptive words for C-F-R. Check out the article here: 2010 Comment Manifesto: Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope. Below are some excerpts.
Wonder
The Word and the Spirit of God open our eyes to the wonder of the world God made… Creation is not just nature, but encompasses the God-ordained structure of all of human life and all the things in the world…
With eyes of wonder we can see the diversity and complexity of creation accurately and correctly… We begin to discern the pattern of God's creation, and begin to learn the wisdom of caring for things as they are, neither neglecting nor exploiting their structured possibilities, but rather disclosing their meaning as creatures made and loved by God.
Heartbreak
Our dulled tastes, our self-interested arguments, the entanglement of our identity with our consumption, our failures to cultivate expertise, our subtle slights of others and our seeking after status at the cost of justice… all of life (has) fallen away from enjoyment of the good and obscuring the wonder evoked by a good creation.
With broken hearts we confess our own complicity in the vandalizing of God's good and peaceable order. We admit to our own idolatrous love of God's creatures and their diverse qualities: power and fame, sex and wealth, nature and community not least among these. We confess that we seek to shape things into forms foreign to their created purposes, and that we through lack of imagination and enterprise allow things to lie undiscovered and unenjoyed.
As thoroughly as God's good design suffuses all that is not God, so thoroughly does human evil mar all things… The Word and the Spirit of God open our eyes to the heartbreak suffered by the world God made, and mindful of God's pain we find our own hearts broken.
Hope
We…yearn for the full recovery of the peace of God, desire the complete restoration of the reign of God, and await the fulfillment of the promises of God.
Our hearts burning with hope, we rejoice in the good news of the cross and resurrection of Christ and the promise of forgiveness and of the resurrection of our bodies and the reconciliation of all things with God. We celebrate the good things, great and small, that are foretastes of the coming kingdom.
As wide as the sorrows of humanity, as deep as the rifts between human and human, as high as the walls that prevent all God's creatures from fulfilling their intended purposes, so wide and deep and high reaches the redemptive work of God in Christ.
Posts in this series on WORLDVIEW REVISITED:
Creation
Fall
Redemption
Wonder, Heartbreak, Hope
For more on this Reformational Worldview, see my web resource,
Friend of Kuyper
I like how these three words capture our imaginations. For years now, both my efforts in evangelism and discipleship have focused on telling people the story of Creation - Fall - Redemption - Restoration. Sometimes, I tell it in a more NT Wright way: Creation - Fall - Re-Creation (the latter encompassing both "redemption" and "restoration.") I have long-ago moved away from the "Sin-Salvation-Heaven" model and have created a new visual for telling CFRR. See it here- the first page is the "old model;" the second page is the CFRR model. I often draw this out on a napkin to explain to people what's happened and where they are in the story. Now I think I can add some new descriptive words to this!
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