History of Time from 30,000 Feet

I apologize for not posting in the past few months. I had writer's block for most of the summer. But now my seminary classes have begun, and I am trying desperately to take in more information than I can hope to process. This blog may become my outlet to bring coherence out of my time here.

One of my classes is a church history course and our 3-hour block this week was like nothing I have ever experienced academically. What I am going to share in this post is from Dr. Gwenfair Adams' material on the theology of church history. I'm not sure if she has published it yet, but I will post a link to it if I can find one. And for full academic integrity, I should also mentioned that the terms and structure discussed come from Robert McKee's Story Seminar.

As an introduction to studying history, Dr. Adams gave us an overview of time. The Bible gives us the entire story outline, from God's creation to Jesus' return. What Dr. Adams discovered in McKee's Story Seminar is that, like other great stories throughout history and across cultures, the Bible follows a very particular outline.

All stories have a protagonist. A catalytic event interrupts life as he knows it, sending him on a quest for a desired object (or a person, goal, etc.). There is opposition throughout the quest, leading to the climax at the end of the line, where there is no other option but to take the greatest risk possible. In this, the story reveals the character of the protagonist and the strength of his desire for the object he seeks.

As I listened to the lecture, I realized

God is the Protagonist.

We are the Desired Object.

The entire history of our world is about God pursuing us. This sounds prideful or self-centered unless one has realized how much greater God is than we are: his holiness next to our sin, his power compared with our weakness, his glory opposed to our shame. Within this revelation of who he is and who we are, it becomes humbling that he would initiate relationship with us, that he would desire that which is so often undesirable.

In all the Braveheart metaphors and sermons based on Lord of the Rings that I've heard, it's easy for me to think that I'm supposed to be the hero, that my life with Christ should be a dramatic, movie-worthy quest. But in zooming out to look at the full story, I see that the climax already happened on the Cross. Though my own role in the story is valuable, it is really just a small piece. The protagonist is the one who gets all the glory and the fame, and that is God himself.