A short time after 9-11 occurred, I had an online debate/discussion with Andrew Sandlin on the question of whether Christians can speak prophetically about the providential meaning of events in our own time. Of particular interest was the question of whether or not we can say that a particular event or disaster was God’s judgment for x, y, or z. I was maintaining the affirmative, and Andrew the negative. There was, of course, no difference between us on whether or not God ordains all things, but rather a question about whether we can make out what it is He is doing in that superintendency of all events. The secret things belong to God after all (Dt. 29:29).
I have continued to work and meditate on this issue, and have come to the conviction that getting straight on this question is right at the heart of the Church’s ability to relate to our culture, understand our culture, and exercise leadership in our culture. In other words, this is not an isolated issue, but rather is connected to everything else.
A year or two ago, I preached a series of sermons on the “worldview wheel,” identifying narrative or story as one of the four essential spokes in a full biblical worldview. The other three were catechesis, lifestyle, and symbolism. But narrative cannot be understood without understanding the plot points, and the plot points have to include the judgments of God. Put another way, without understanding (in a broad way) the judgments of God, we cannot understand what is going on. What sense does it make to say that we have a comprehensive Christian worldview, which comprehends everything with the exception of what it all means? In the more popular versions, we are dealing with a Christian worldview of every tree and every leaf, and no understanding of the forest whatever.
I am now preaching through the book of Amos, and have been really struck by the importance the prophet places on learning to read judgments. This is not just something that Israel needed to do. The pagan nations were also expected to be able to read the meaning of the judgments of God — oracles appealing to the nations are a common thread in the Old Testament prophets. In fact, right before that famous quotation from Deuteronomy 29:29, Moses was talking about the judgments that would come upon Israel for her violations of the covenant, and he put words into the mouths of the surrounding nations. What caused the heat of this great anger (Dt. 29:24)? It is because they abandoned the covenant and went and served other gods . . . (vv. 25-26). Now why would a nation like Edom be able to tell that judgment fell on Israel because of covenant-breaking and idolatry, and yet American Christians be unable to tell if America has done the same?
Too much of our worldview thinking is still in thrall to Enlightenment thinking which demands that true thoughts be timeless in the sense that Euclid’s proofs are. Now I am all in favor of timeless truths as over against relativism. God is not triune “for now,” or “for you.” God is triune, eternally, everlastingly, timelessly triune. But I am not in favor of timeless plot analysis, which is like trying to square the circle. Too much Christian worldview thinking is static, and not fluid.
If the Church is incapable of saying that this is what it means, or this x on the map means that we are here, then the Church is limited to telling people how to get to heaven when they die, which is the sinful accommodation we made with Enlightenment thought in the first place — ceding earth and everything down here to them, while we get the afterlife.
Of course, I want to finish by saying that there are two enemies of this kind of “prophetic speech.” The first is the result of our loss of historical faith, a dogmatic loss that makes us unwilling to say that we could possibly know anything about what is happening. But we need to take note of the other enemy of the prophetic word, which would be glib and overconfident pronouncements about what God is doing and why, with all our sure pronouncements happening to support our own little hobby horses. The American Church fell into the first error in the middle of the 19th century precisely because of manifestly false appeals to the providential meaning of the War Between the States, as made by both sides. We bet the farm and we lost it.
Recovering a biblical worldview approach, and not just the semblance of one, means that we have to recover a sense of God’s narrative, and our place in it. It will not be easy, but if it is not done, then the resurgence of “worldview thinking” among Christians will turn out to be just one more dead end at the end of a century and a half of dead ends.