“God’s story,” Robert Webber argues in chp 6 of The Divine Embrace, “is the brief interpretation of everything” (142).
Behind every theory of spirituality is a story. What is your story? Can we discern the story of others? But it is more than this: Behind every gospel presentation is a story? What is the story of your gospel? It has been my contention that our “gospel story” is too small; Webber’s book here invites us to a bigger and better and more biblical story.
Here are the contours of God’s story of God’s embrace, the embrace that unleashes us to embrace God (and others):
God, creation, fall, incarnation, death and resurrection, re-creation, new heavens and new earth. [I’d add “community” after “fall,” which is central to my book Embracing Grace.]
“So I invite you to read the Bible, not for bits and pieces of dry information, but as the story of God’s embrace of the world told in poetic images and types” (128). He captures three compelling typologies:
1. Creation and New Creation
2. Second Adam reversing the First Adam
3. Exodus Event anticipates the Christ Event
Webber then shows how all of this can be summed up in the theology of recapitulation — that Christ sums up, fulfills, and pioneers the way for all. He “reverses, renews, and restores union with God” (138).