Robert W. Jenson: “How the World Lost Its Story”

released 3/1/2018

In this article, theologian Robert W. Jenson describes how a postmodern world is characterized by the loss of a conviction that we inhabit a “narratable world” that exists coherently outside of ourselves. Although modernity — as opposed to postmodernity — presupposed in its arts and philosophy this narratable world, it did so while at the same time discarding the Judeo-Christian framework that enabled such a supposition in the first place. Increasingly, as the arts prefigured and now as the general culture at large displays, the experience of and confidence in such a coherent narrative has broken down into fragments. How then is the Church to respond to a world that has lost its story? In Jenson’s words: “If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.”

This essay is featured courtesy of First Things, where it was first published in October 1993. It is read by Ken Myers.

40 minutes

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Robert W. Jenson: “How the World Lost Its Story”

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