A friend sent this to me earlier in the week, a quote from John N. Oswalt’s The Bible Among the Myths (Zondervan, 2009). What grabbed me in this quote was the author’s insistence that we cannot measure human progress apart from our God-given purpose. It’s worth thinking about.
I question whether we can talk about ‘development’ of any sort apart from the unique biblical perspective. Does ‘the historical process’ teach us about development or progress? Certainly we can look back over the past ten millennia and see certain signs of increased technical competence. We have moved from hunter-gatherers using sharpened stones as tools to bureaucrats communicating around the world electronically in seconds.
But is that progress? Or is it merely change? What is the goal toward which human society is tending? Or are we too, like our 10,000 year-old forbears, only wishing to survive as long as possible with a maximum of comfort, pleasure, and security? In fact, the idea of progress is dependent on the idea that our Creator has a goal for us, outside of ourselves, toward which we humans were made to progress and against which our progress can be measured. Give up that truth, and ‘progress’ becomes a chimera.
