What is the grand narrative of place in the Bible?
First, yes, there is a grand narrative of place in the Bible. What’s more, this narrative is the controlling context of all other narratives, missions, and themes that exist in the Bible. In other words, God wants His own place in His creation, and He created people to be placemakers to that end. Furthermore, placemaking is in our human DNA, connecting our imago Dei with our human mission in Gen 1:26–28. In other words, as long as people are people, people will placemakers.
The opening and closing bookends of the Bible reveal the context for reading the Bible, and these bookends are a story about God’s place, from its inception to its culmination in the New Jerusalem (Rev 21:2–22:5). Additionally, however, God’s world includes the lands outside of the city’s gates (Rev 21:24-26). The story of the Bible is the story of God getting God’s own place. Of course, the rest of the story gets quite complicated.
People are not only placemakers (Gen 1:26–28), but also they themselves are also a part of God’s place (Gen 1:26–28; Rev 21:7). Because people are part of God’s place, and because they are a critical steward in God’s plan for ongoing placemaking, the original sin (Gen 3) along with our ongoing failures (Eph 2:1–10) jeopardizes this placial narrative entirely.
Thus, God created a solution—salvation and redemption of the people of God so that the placemaking might continue through them as placemakers who think creatively and do good placemaking (Eph 2:10; Col 3:17, 23–24).
In other words, we believe that salvation is not the final purpose for Christianity but rather is actually the beginning, being the resumption of the original human mission of placemaking. The biblical mission of salvation and redemption, which permeates the Bible, therefore has its own agenda—so that the saved might resume their human mission of good placemaking. In this manner, the mission of salvation is set within the mission of placemaking.
When asked, why does God want placemaking to occur by placemakers? The answer in Genesis 1 is basically because God likes the idea. One cannot help but notice that throughout the creation account there is an emphasis on God’s volitional and/or experiential statements—“let us” or “let there be” or “God saw that” or “God said that this or that is good”. God did, because God wanted; and what God wanted was a place in creation. This fact also relates to the creation of humanity, along with God issuing a human mission to them (Gen 1:26–28). From the first creation account to the canon’s close in Rev 21–22, this placemaking story builds off of a placemaking mission that God gave to humans, creating the narrative that we now call The Bible.
Big picture in summary, a canonical reader sees God enjoying creation initially, Gen 1–3. Then, after sin creates complications both for humans and for creation (Gen 3), God begins a long journey back—through Gen 6; through Gen 10; through Gen 12; through the tabernacle; through the temple; through carefully planned allotment of the land as God’s place (Joshua–Judges); through the incarnation of Christ, and now through us as God’s placemakers appearing throughout the entire world (Mt 28). Ultimately, one sees God getting what God always planned, the experience of life in creation with God’s family (Rev 21–22).
So, to repeat myself, yes, there is a grand narrative of place in the Bible, and this grand narrative is a story that plays itself out across the entire Bible. This narrative provides the context and purpose for the salvation of God’s people (Eph 2:1–10), contextualizes all other stories, missions, and themes within the Bible.
Together, these two grand narratives, one about place and the other about salvation, form the one grand story of the Bible, and together they are the grid that The Placial Project will use for reading the Bible.