The One Story

Our creation and redemption by God and our discipleship to Jesus are all one story, and it is an odd story. It is odd because the method God follows in all his actions toward us--and which we imitate in discipleship to Jesus--is characterized not by triumph, even paradoxical triumph, or by assertion of a hero's individuality and strength, but by weakness, submission, self-enslavement, and loss. God has followed this method in creating a universe to stand alongside and even challenge God's existence. God has also acted in this way in continuing to nurture the existence of the human rebels against God. So God has also acted in the incarnation, in, that is, the kenosis of Christ (his "self-emptying," Philippians 2:7), which provides us the sharpest delineation of the divine method. And so God has acted for our redemption and our creation as a people conformed to Jesus and giving testimony to the defeat--by his kenosis--of the powers that have enslaved humanity. The One Story fills out the progress of this one story of creation and redemption and speaks a challenge to how the church understands and lives out the victory, by kenosis, of Jesus.