Trevor Laurence
The Bible unfolds a world and bids us enter. It narrates the history and future of God’s action in the cosmos he has created, and in so doing, the Bible defines reality as it is and as it is meant to be. Scripture presents the true vision of the world, a world with a beginning and an end—not an end as termination, but as telos, goal, aim, overarching God-intended purpose for existence. As the word of the Lord of heaven and earth, the Bible purports to tell us the story of the world from the perspective of the universal sovereign, the compassionate creator, the loving author of all things.
The Only Real World
In his comparison of the Bible with other pieces of literature, Erich Auerbach rightly captures the totalizing character of Scripture:
The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it.1
The Bible unfolds a world, to be sure, but more precisely, it unfolds the world, “the only real world.” To dwell faithfully within God’s world requires learning to inhabit the world of the Bible, learning to live in reality as constructed and interpreted by God, learning to take one’s place as a character within God’s narrative as delivered in the Scriptures. This task involves a fundamental recalibration of our relationship to God, self, and world—understanding the story God is crafting, discerning and embracing one’s appointed role in the action, ordering one’s agency and affections and entire being along the same trajectory as God’s good purposes for his creation.
Inhabiting God’s Wor(l)d
All of human life is (consciously or not) a participation in a larger story which orients us to the world and gives meaning to reality and to every act within it. Alasdair MacIntyre famously observes that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”2 There is always a story, a narrative-shaped conception of the world, informing our most careful reflections and our most basic impulses about who we are, who we should be, how we ought to live, what the world is like, what the world is for.
The challenge of the Christian life is not merely to inhabit a story, but to inhabit the right story—the story that God is telling in the narrative of Scripture about his cosmos and its redemption in Jesus—which means we must develop the skill of hearing how God communicates his story in the Bible and cultivate imaginations so formed by his story that the Bible’s vision of the world seeps into our bones, shapes our character, becomes the instinctive framework through which we see and sense and think and love and act.
The storied world of God’s word is one in which divinely crafted correspondences in redemptive history disclose the significance of persons, institutions and events. God constructs his cosmos as a temple in which he wills to dwell with humanity, a world whose ultimate end is to be “filled with the glory of the Lord” (Num 14:21; cf. Ps 72:19; Hab 2:14; Rev 21:1–3) as the holy presence which filled the Most Holy Place takes up residence in a resurrected creation with his holy people. Within this world, human beings are called to live as a kingdom of royal priests, sons and daughters in the household of God who worshipfully exercise dominion and subdue the earth and serve the Lord and guard his holy temple dwelling, a vocation which extends from the garden (Gen 1:28; 2:15) to Israel (Exod 19:6) to the church (1 Pet 2:9; Rev 1:6) and on into the eschaton (Rev 22:3–5). Time itself is ordered toward worship, structured in liturgical rhythm, and the heavens which declare the glory of God facilitate humanity’s glorying in God with lights given to mark the time for feasts, festivals, sacred assemblies (מוֹעֲדִים, Gen 1:14; cf. Lev 23:2).
This is a world where angels minister and demonic powers deceive, where God himself walked in a garden and dwelt in a house and tabernacled in the flesh and temples in a people and will reside and reign forever. It is a world where the sovereign who providentially upholds all creation and decrees the end from the beginning bends his ear to receive his people’s prayer, where the one to whom all sacrifice is due offered himself as a sacrifice for sin, where creatures of dust and flesh and blood are adopted by the Father, united to the Son, filled with the Spirit, made participants in the triune life of God. It is a world where all of history hinges on, finds its meaning in, and is brought to completion through Jesus Christ.
A Failure of Imagination
This is not the world that most of us imagine when we imagine the world. That is not to say that we don’t believe most or all of these things, only that even that belief requires for late modern people a measure of conscious theological reflection that pulls us out of our instinctive ways of conceiving and indwelling the world, and often not without resistance. Schooled in the intermingling narratives and practices of expressive individualism, consumerism, liberalism, and technological proliferation, in the face of everything we believe, we most naturally construe and reflexively sense the world—underneath our professed creeds, we imagine the world—as confined to the immanent frame,3 in decidedly naturalistic terms, as a transcendence-stripped world in which we live as autonomous individuals who exercise (and deserve to exercise!) almost unmitigated choice, freedom, and control and whose highest goods are the goods of self-determination, self-actualization, and authenticity.4
As a result, we tend to filter the Bible through a thoroughly unbiblical imagination, failing to pick up on its characteristic ways of communicating and framing reality, approaching the text demanding answers to all the wrong questions, intuitively balking at certain features of God’s character, action, and commands that contravene our deeply-held assumptions about what is true and beautiful and good. And captive to a faulty imagination, we feel our way through the world in a manner that does not line up with God’s story of reality—we live in an illusion, a world that does not exist. Like characters who have unwittingly rehearsed Oklahoma! for a performance of King Lear, we not only are unprepared to play our true part in the drama but continue to act out an internalized role that makes no sense in the narrative we’ve been called to inhabit.
If we are to appreciate the word’s portrayal of God’s world through typology and figuration, intertextuality and narrative patterns, cultic symbolism and root metaphors, an imaginal reorientation is in order. If we are to faithfully indwell the world of God’s word, the cultivation of biblical imagination is an endeavor of most urgent importance.
The Cateclesia Institute
The Cateclesia Institute was founded to respond to this challenge to faithfulness in our time.
Cateclesia exists to cultivate biblical imagination in, with, and for the academy and the church. In pursuit of this mission, the Institute seeks to develop and distribute ecclesially-minded scholarship and holistically formative resources that open up the story of Scripture and bring that storied vision of reality to bear on the whole life of the whole body of Christ. Our aim is to equip academics, pastors, and laypeople alike to hear God’s word and to embrace their callings as characters in God’s world, to bring a biblical imagination to the text of Scripture and to be formed in a biblical imagination for every aspect of existence.
With our publications, dialogue, instruction, and resources, the Cateclesia Institute endeavors to foster an ethos—a culture—that unites priorities that are often unnecessarily separated. Cateclesia seeks to be:
- Reformed and catholic—Rooted as an institution in the theological tradition of the magisterial Protestant Reformers, a tradition which provides a hospitable and formative home from which the rich contributions of the wider church may be charitably welcomed, explored, appreciated, critiqued, and affirmed
- Convictional and irenic—Modeling and stimulating modes of discourse marked by the manifold virtues demanded and empowered by the Christian faith
- Scholarly and pastoral—Bringing these two spheres into mutually enriching relationship in order to generate rigorous scholarship that is animated by ecclesial concerns and characterized by pastoral sensitivity as well as church-oriented resources that translate and apply the work of the academy in service of worshiping communities
- Historically rooted and faithfully creative—Listening to and learning from the body of Christ through the ages while pressing creatively into the inexhaustible depths of God’s word, confident that humble and attentive exploration will yield a renewed appreciation for Scripture’s beauty and implications for faithfulness
- Theological and practical—Discerning the interconnectedness, unity, progression, and theological witness of God’s redemptive narrative in Scripture and utilizing that immersive, comprehensive narrative as a lens for reflecting upon every dimension of the Christian life and the human experience
- Digital and embodied—Establishing a digital presence that makes academic and ecclesial resources widely accessible and engaging in embodied forms of ministry that foreground in-person instruction, formation, interaction, and collaboration
- For the flourishing of the church and the blessing of the world—Serving God’s people for a life of faithfulness and worship that spills over in love of neighbor and blessing for the world
The Cateclesia Forum serves as a hospitable arena in which contributing scholars, pastors, and writers from across traditions and disciplines may feature work that addresses the academy and the church. The Forum provides space for voices from diverse perspectives within Christian orthodoxy and from a range of specialties to offer articles, essays, and other resources that seek to aid God’s people in understanding and inhabiting God’s story of the world, stimulating further scholarly engagement and ecclesial fruitfulness. This intentionally catholic context is a place for charitable consideration and constructive dialogue, and readers are invited to join the collegial conversation by submitting comments, posing questions, expressing appreciation, and offering critique and so continue the pursuit of biblical imagination as a broad community.
The Director’s Desk is a digital hub for my work as Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute. Here, you will find a regular stream of writing that flows from my ongoing research as well as updates about news and events related to the life of the Institute.
In God’s providence, this is indeed a curious time in which to launch an institution of this kind, one that depends upon the generous support of invested partners. And yet this curious time that we have been given has revealed how necessary the cultivation of biblical imagination truly is. For many, the trials of recent days have fractured a visceral vision of the world and a way of being that were never really as stable as they seemed. In such a time, developing the skills and wisdom and instincts to discern and indwell God’s story of the world—a story in which God reigns in love and sovereignty from heaven, resides with his people by his Spirit, and will bring life from our death in Jesus Christ, a story in which the God who triumphed in the past welcomes lament over the present and gives grounding to hope for the future as he directs the course of history toward its glorious, appointed end—will for many prove essential to the task of reconstructing a shattered conception of reality and learning anew how to live fully in God’s world, which is of course the only real world.
So we will get about the work, aware of the challenges, but even more intensely cognizant of the opportunities that this moment presents to nurture biblical imagination for the good of God’s people and together to grow as witnesses to the true story and the true Author for the glory of God and the good of all.
Welcome to the Cateclesia Institute.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute.
Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus
- Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Thought (Princteon, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003), 14–15.[↩]
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 216[↩]
- See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 542–9.[↩]
- See ibid., 473–81.[↩]