Panel: SCRIPTURE & THEOLOGY 2025: EXPLORING METHODOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN BIBLICAL STUDIES AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY



35.10 - REDISCOVERING THE WORLD'S STORY: THE ROLE OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY IN REKINDLING FAITH IN A DYING AGE

AUTHORS:
Villeneuve A. (Sacred Heart Major Seminary ~ Detroit ~ United States of America)
Text:
In his 1993 article "How the World Lost its Story," Robert W. Jenson lamented that modernity, by living on the moral and intellectual capital of Christianity without renewing it, had eroded its own foundations. While modernism still assumed that we inhabit a "narratable world," it jettisoned the Judeo-Christian foundation of this narrative, and leading to its self-destruction. Postmodernism, emerging from the ashes of modernism, altogether discarded the premise that the world we inhabit is a "narratable world," telling a universal story written by an omnipotent narrator. As Jenson quipped, "If there is no universal storyteller, then the universe can have no story line." If God does not write the world's story, then it has none, and human self-understanding is also doomed to fail. Without a grand narrative, human life remains devoid of dramatic coherence and inevitably devolves into an absurdist drama. The result was Nietzsche's nihilism, though only half-fulfilled: Western civilization was collapsing into decadence, as Nietzsche had foreseen, yet without achieving the absolute freedom he had promised. This paper proposes that the primary task of biblical theology is to recover and retell the world's lost story as narrated in the Bible. Only those who understand they are inhabitants of a narratable world can discover their role in it and write a meaningful script of their own lives. Drawing from the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei verbum, four classic keys will be explored as essential tools to rediscover the Story: ONE divine economy of salvation, TWO covenants, THREE criteria for interpreting Scripture, and FOUR senses of Scripture. By effectively utilizing these tools, biblical theologians can rekindle faith, hope, and love in an age of unbelief, despair, and nihilism.