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(2019
premidterm assignment) Model Midterm answers 2019 (Index) Essay 1: Compare, contrast, and evaluate Narratives of the Future |
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Andrea Gerlach
24
February 2019
The Beginning and the End: Renewal in Future Narratives
The Creation/Apocalypse Narrative, originating from the classes first texts,
Genesis and Revelation, sets up the story in Scripture as linear in nature. It
begins at creation and ends with the apocalypse, or so this narrative title
would have us believe. In actuality, Revelations doesn’t end with the end of the
world, which is what the Apocalypse has come to mean. Apocalypse actually means
"revelation," and what Revelation reveals or discloses to the reader is not an
end at all, but a new beginning where God will defeat Death and Hades and
establish a New Heaven and a New Earth for
all the saints to dwell. When this Re-Creation is overlooked and Scripture’s
linear aspects emphasized, the divide between Apocalypse and Evolution
Narratives is widened. However, in light of the true ending to Revelation and
other events in the Bible, referenced by Tom Britt in his essay, like Noah and
the Flood, and Sodom and Gomorrah, one can acknowledge how the Bible begins to
take on a more cyclical shape, reflecting Evolutional Narratives of growth and
preservation.
Within the confines of a literary linear chronology of time, we see how cyclical
time is present and of profound significance in the Bible. Without a cyclical
narrative there would be no hope in Revelation. The world would end with the
seven plagues poured out upon the Earth and all would perish. Yet, it doesn’t
end there, because God is cyclical in nature; “the beginning
and the end”, His creation is
sustained by and perpetuated in cycles, “behold, I am making all things new”
(Rev. 22:6, 21:5). God’s cyclical nature comes from these verses in Revelation.
He is both the beginning and the end
all at once. Illustrated, this would look like a perfect circle with no start or
finish; a perpetual exchange. Another illustration of this would be a running
river. If you were to take a sip of water from this river, and then, a moment
later, take another, you would be, yes, drinking from the same river, but not
the same water. Heraclitus said it in this way, “no man ever steps in the same
river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. He
understood this concept of perpetual exchange, or constant renewal, if you will.
The Bishop Moule, who came up with the first river illustration, called it
“water instead of water”.
This incredibly complex concept of God is put simply by Lauren in
Parable of the Sower: “God is Change”
(3). Even though she meant to say that God is
only Change, it helps to draw the
connecting line between the Apocalypse Narrative in Scripture and the Evolution
Narrative in Sower. She deepens their
similarities when she says on pg. 25 that “God prevails”. Because God is Change,
and no one can prevent change from coming, no one can hold it back. Time is
constantly progressing and not a single moment can be held captive. Time drags
all of creation by its hair into tomorrow. In this, the Author of Time, as God
is depicted in Genesis, making day and night, setting our days, weeks, months
into motion, this would be the only being capable of resetting the clock, of
beginning again. In the words of God at the moment of final victory before He
set up His kingdom on Earth, “It is done!”, and with victory there is an end of
battle, and end of death, and beginning of new life. This is how the two
narratives collide in the attributes of the God of the Hebrews and the God of
Earthseed.
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