On Living Well

Sitting here on a snowy Monday in New England. Since I work for a school, and schools sometimes close for snow, I've got an unexpected day off. Do you remember that feeling you had when you were a kid and school was canceled because of snow . . . a whole long day ahead of you, all yours . . instead of imprisoned in a classroom, free to frolic in the falling snow! It was about the coolest feeling in the world (if you didn't grow up in snowy climes, I'm sorry you missed it). So here I am with a bit of the feeling again, although I don't expect to be frolicking in the snow. I expect to do some laundry, catch up with some of my favorite bloggers, and read a whole lot.

For example, I'll be reading Goldsworthy's The Gospel in Revelation. This book concerns itself with the use and misuse of the last book of the New Testament, and attempts to orient our understanding by showing us how to read John's Revelation in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Along the way he provides some of the best brief explanations of what the Gospel of Christ is and what it means for the world that I have ever come across.

It has been my project for some time now to orient myself in just this way. To see things, that is, in the light of the Gospel. That means I will understand people, and history, and life, and politics, and myself, and my friends, in the light of the great story of man's sin and God's redemptive plan for His creation. I've been making much of the Gospel for some time at this blog, and frequently linking to other who do the same. It's my "agenda." I make no bones about it. As Gregory Higgins has written:

The Christian life may be understood as the gradual interiorization of the biblical narrative so that it eventually becomes the overarching interpretive framework through which believers understand the events of their lives (Gregory C. Higgins, The Tapestry of Christian Theology, New York: Paulist Press, 2003, page 3).

I found that quotation in an article by John Armstrong called Learning to Do Theology as a Tapestry, which lives over at the wonderful compendium of Gospel thought and application known as The Resurgence. In that same article, Armstrong writes,

the Christian life can be understood as a gradual process by which we are taken into the biblical narrative and then we learn to live out of that narrative theologically. Theology is thus not a science, in the older sense, but rather a framework, a framework by which we learn to live well in the world.

Yes, learning to live well in the world. I like that.