Modernity: The Story Without Its Author

If there is little mystery about where the West got its faith in a narratable world, neither is there much mystery about how the West has lost this faith. The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring disallegiance from the God who was that faith’s object. The story the Bible tells is asserted to be the story of God with His creatures; that is, it is both assumed and explicitly asserted that there is a true story about the universe because there is a universal novelist/historian. Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.

—Robert w. Jenson, “How the World Lost Its Story” (HT: Tim Massaro)

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One comment

  1. I read the whole article. Brilliant! The Only qualification is that he doesn’t take Reformed orthodoxy into account; but what he says about Protestantism is true in general.

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