God the Father, Mentor's Guide, MG06

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G O D T H E F A T H E R

A P P E N D I X 3 3

Your Kingdom Come: “The Story of God’s Glory” Living Under His Reign and Doing Missions in an Unchurched World Rev. Dr. Don L. Davis

I. The Significance of Story, the Importance of Myth, and the Kingdom of God

A. Human beings operate according to their interpretive frameworks: human beings exist as “walking worldviews.”

1. Every human existence is basically a “story-ordered world.”

2. Myth-making as a primary act of human beings

3. The role of culture: enabling us to compose our realities from scratch

B. Integrating the details: story and the need to live purposefully

1. Purposeful mindset: relating all details to the whole

2. Provisional mindset: relating to details as wholes

C. The problem of a reductionistic faith

1. Reductionism–substituting a comprehensive religious vision of Christian faith for an alternative, smaller, usually culturally-oriented substitute notion, activity, relationship, or element 2. Rationalism–spending the majority of time using modern scientific proofs and arguments to underwrite faith in Jesus, reducing Christian faith to holding of particular, contextualized doctrinal positions over against other contrary views 3. Moralism–reducing the Christian vision to personal and communal decency and ethics, e.g., living well in a nuclear family context, holding certain views on selected socially controversial moral issues

D. Elements of a comprehensive biblical worldview

1. The recovery of “Christian myth”

2. The Picture and the Drama : From Before to Beyond Time