Being Biblical in a Pluralistic Age

One way to define a disciple is “a follower of someone’s words.” In a pluralistic age, there are many words beckoning would-be disciples to particular ways of life, all promising some kind of wellness. These word-ways are ingredients of worldviews, a program or map for orienting oneself in the world. Worldviews answer core questions about human existence, often in the form of a story. This essay argues that contemporary pluralism is the result of abandoning the Bible as our control story, a loss that is as much a failure of what Charles Taylor calls the social imaginary. If this diagnosis is correct, then the best way for the church to recover a biblical worldview is to focus on evangelizing the social imaginary, a process that begins with local churches inhabiting the drama of redemption of which the Bible is the holy script. The church’s speech and action lives by biblical words made flesh