n an interview with Ken Myers, host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, the theologian N.T. Wright spoke about the importance of narrative in understanding Scripture and the ways of God.
What Wright emphasizes is the eschatological message that God is doing something in history; that the Jewish and Christian faiths aren’t simply about moral laws, abstract concepts, and disconnected canonical books but are rather about a grand story starting in Genesis and moving forward, “a project going somewhere,” in Wright’s words.
The story has a beginning, soon followed by disaster, which is followed by God’s effort to transform and renew the world, to redeem it and to make things right and whole. (Obviously the Jewish and Christian faiths, while sharing a common origin, differ in how they eventually unfold.)
An interesting piece. But I’ve always found such articles tend to have a subtext of “and Christians should stop resisting the political march by the liberal activists and focus on persuasion because the former is just too hostile and ‘hysterical’ . . . ”
But it really is our duty to resist, calmly and methodically, using the political process we have in our country. That doesn’t preclude pursuing influence, of course — one may do both.
The key line which I question is this one: “Engaging the culture in a very different manner than Christians have–persuading others rather than stridently condemning them–may eventually lead to greater influence.”
I disagree that one may “persuade” the liberal activists. Those people *may* or may not be [i]converted[/i] — but not [i]persuaded[/i]. To be [i]persuaded[/i] one must have a similar foundational worldview from which to be persuaded — to have the same ideas about the existence of truth, reality, the ability to communicate using words, and so on and so forth. But the two groups are on different sides of a very broad and deep chasm — and the art of “persuasion” belongs only when speaking to people [i]on the same side of the chasm[/i] while it is [i]conversion[/i] that is necessary to those on differing sides of the chasm.