About halfway through his new book, Dual Citizens, Jason Stellman makes the following observation: "Perhaps you've been haunted by the inexplicable feeling that your very environment, the only environment you have ever known (namely, time) is foreign. Could time, the very stuff of life and building block of society that greets us every morning with the buzzing of the alarm clock, then pushes us through each day, actually be an enemy? As bizarre as it sounds, I suggest that it is, and as the Preacher argues in the book of Ecclesiastes, this enemy adversely affects all of our toil under the sun. In a word, time renders all of man's earthly pursuits utterly pointless" (emphasis in original). One would be forgiven for asking, as I did, "Why didn't he put this paragraph on the first page? Why did Stellman wait until page 104 to tell me that all earthly pursuits—and this would include reading his book—are utterly pointless?" Unfortunately, this question is never answered. In fact, this is a recurring theme in Dual Citizens—it raises more questions than it answers. When I finished the book I wanted to turn it upside down and read it backwards, hoping that—like a cassette tape—the end was really only the middle. But, alas, the end was the end, and no further insight was to be found.
This is not to say that the end wasn't a good end; it certainly was. It was inspiring, encouraging, and orthodox. It would actually make a great prayer with which to begin each new day (of pointlessness). The only problem with it is that, like the rest of the book, it is all style and no substance. Judge for yourself:
May God give us the faith, therefore, to walk as pilgrims and exiles through the wilderness of this world, strengthened by an assurance that this passing age, despite its manifold temptations, will never win the battle to define us. It is God who provides us our narrative and tells us our story, for it is His story, the history of redemption, the divine drama according to which man was made and then lost, found and then remade in the image of the second Adam, whose faithful obedience insures our acceptance by God and whose glorious resurrection guarantees our own. (p. 176-177)
Theologically and historically, this paragraph is dead-on-center. It is absolutely true that the history of redemption is God's unfolding narrative of covenant faithfulness to His children. In fact, God's story of redemption is THE true history. Man's telling of history as a series of causes and effects is a lie; God rules this world sovereignly, by ordaining whatever comes to pass....
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http://christianreader.typepad.com/christian_reader/2009/09/somewhere-between-heaven-and-earth-part-1.html
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