At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The text below the video is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
For most of us, subjectively, the everyday experience of being human probably hasn’t changed very much, but we may be aware of a storm of questions blowing furiously outside the house, rattling the windows and loosening tiles. What does it mean to be male and female? What is a “normal” state of mental health? Are ethnicity and nationality essential to our humanity? Are we anything more than compliant consumers of goods and services? Is AI making the human mind redundant? And as we enter the Anthropocene, are we—paradoxically—losing control of our destiny?
To be human is not just to be one thing. It is to be part of a story with a past, a present, and an imagined future.
To have been created in the image of God—whatever exactly that means—is not the end of it. The Bible always places people in societies—nations, cultures, civilisations; and societies experience change over long periods of time. Sometimes that means that imagining new futures becomes critical for determining what it means to be human. Pope Leo is right, I think:
We are living through a rapid phase of transition, a “change of era,” in which… most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community? (Magnifica Humanitas §6)
But there is a choice to be made, in biblical terms. Since Abraham was called out of the shadow of the proto-empire Babel to be the beginning of a new creation in microcosm, there have been two intertwined stories: the story of humanity and the story of God’s counter-humanity.
The church should be a refuge in the current period of turmoil, but not because it is immune to change. We may naturally desire to preserve the religious and ethical foundations of a long age of Christian dominance, but history only ever moves forwards. We are a counter-humanity inescapably having to re-imagine our future.
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