As Christians, our understanding of the world goes back several thousand years to the creation narrative in Genesis, and God calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, out from his pagan world to become a people of God. Telos, the Greek word for purpose, is critically important for how we understand both creation and history, and both are critically important for our battle against the forces of secularism to re-establish Christendom in the generations to come. I will start with history because it’s easier to grasp, then discuss teleology in creation after we get our biblical historical bearings.
Do you ever ask yourself how we got here? As the late great Rush Limbaugh used to say all the time, most of us think history started when we were born. I hate to break it to you, but none of us are that important. Before I get into a bit of theology and philosophy, I need to establish a Christian understanding of history. That’s not as simple as it sounds. History is stuff that happened, right? Well, yes and no. Most historians agree that certain historical events happened, by they disagree wildly on what those events mean, and why and how certain events lead to other events in the flow of history. All history, in other words, needs to be interpreted, and all interpreters are human beings with limits of knowledge and insight and wisdom. These human beings are also sinners, which brings up fundamental assumptions these people hold about the nature of reality. Such assumptions cannot be escaped, and thus will determine how we interpret history. As Christians, we must interpret history as Christians, which means our assumptions will inescapably be different than non-Christians. Let’s find out just how different.
A Biblical Teleological View of History
Like most Christians influenced by secularism, I’ve tended to see history and events like hurricanes, just happening and who knows which way either will go. In September 2022 when Hurricane Ian was tracking toward where we live in the Tampa area, I had to remind myself it is God alone who determines where it goes, not mere “natural” forces. Regarding history, we too must often must remind ourselves God directs all events, past, present, and future. As David says in his great doxology to Yahweh, the Lord, the God of Israel, He is “the ruler of all things” (I Chron. 29:10-13).
A proper Christian providential theology of history is captured by Daniel when God revealed to him Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (Daniel 2). Grateful he and his buddies would not be killed, he proclaims the greatness of our God, the author and perfecter not only of our faith (Heb. 12:2), but of all history:
Then Daniel praised the God of heaven 20 and said:
“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons;
he deposes kings and raises up others.
He gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to the discerning.
In Daniel 4, after Nebuchadnezzar’s sanity was restored, this pagan king of Babylon also couldn’t help coming to the same conclusion as Daniel the Hebrew prophet. The Old Testament affirms this continually. When we come to the New Testament, our providential understanding of history should be intensified by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the world. The Apostles Creed declares our belief in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and then we affirm of the second person of the Trinity:
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
We Evangelicals do not pay enough attention to Christ’s ascension. In the ancient world the one who sat at the right hand of the king shared his kingly authority and power. In this case, Jesus has the ultimate position of power and authority in the universe. We find this in Ephesians 1, the crowning New Testament rationale for the confidence of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar in God’s providence. We cannot overemphasize the theological and providential implications of Christ’s ascension, and Paul tells us why. Speaking of the surpassing greatness of the power for those who trust the Lord Jesus, he says:
That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
This is not only the rule and authority of material creation, but over beings spiritual and mortal that exercise rule and authority and power and dominion—over all of them. Many Christians quote Paul’s declaration in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” But it is critical to quote this in the context of the passage in Ephesians 1. Nothing happens that Christ doesn’t permit or cause to happen; his rule is sovereign and absolute.
I tended, however, to see this passage eschatologically when Christ comes to consummate all things in him. It’s more difficult to grasp that Jesus has all this power now and is using it in this world, in space and time, for the advancement of his kingdom and ultimately for his church. This has implications beyond the church, though, which is why Paul tells us Jesus’ kingly rule is for present age, as well as in the one to come.
Linear versus Teleological View of History
Once we accept God’s providential control over history, we need to have some idea how it works out in actual history, as in what the implications are for events themselves.
Prior to “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1), all ancient peoples viewed time cyclically, a perpetual wheel endlessly turning going nowhere. One of the most profound changes Jews brought to the ancient world was the conception of time and history. This change started when God called Abram to go from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan, by faith he left everything he knew and the world was forever changed. History going somewhere, forward, in a different direction was now possible.
We tend to think the contrast to the cyclical view of history is linear, a line going straight in one direction from A to B. That, however, is not the biblical understanding of history. If we’ve learned anything from thousands of years of recorded history, it’s anything but straight. It zigs and zags all over the place, backward, forward, and sideways. Biblically, the contrast to cyclical isn’t linear but teleological, meaning the end is bound up in the events themselves. History is going somewhere, every event leading to God’s appointed end regardless of what it may look like on the surface. This means there are no throwaway events in history, things that just happen. Every event has teleological significance whether we think we can see it or not. Too often we presume that we can. There are many times looking back in history, or at current events, or even in our own lives, when this is difficult to swallow. The most common question in all of history attests to this, “Why, God?” It just doesn’t make any sense. . . . to us.
As Christians, our fundamental assumption about history is what Jesus revealed in Luke 24 as the ultimate biblical hermeneutical principal—that the entire Old Testament was about him. But it isn’t just the Old Testament. The same hermeneutical principle applies for all history: we interpret it all according to God’s revealed word. Because of this, we can no longer look at the past, present, and future, and all events contained therein, in any other way. They are all ultimately about Jesus in some way, unless we have some other interpretive non-biblical framework for history, to which we turn next.
The Secular View of History
Those who don’t have a biblical and thus providential view of history will by default have a secular one. Even though there are variations on the secular view, a strictly God-less interpretation of history means there is no overarching narrative, no telos, or purpose, to history. Things happen randomly. If there is no God ordaining and guiding history providentially, we’re forced to conclude it is but chance and agree with Macbeth at the death of his wife:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Typical of Shakespeare, it could not be said any better. However, given we cannot escape living in God’s created universe no matter how hard sinful humanity insists otherwise, chance has never proved a satisfying explanation, for anything. We also live with thousands of years of the influence of Judaism and Christianity, so the teleological view of history can’t be completely escaped. Which brings us to Hegel.
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is the father of historicism, which is a teleological view of history without God—well, without a God any of us might recognize. As a child of the Enlightenment, Hegel could not believe in a personal God who ordains history according to His will. Instead, for him God was history itself as the unfolding of a World-Spirit. Hegel’s writing is inscrutable, but it made sense to a lot of other philosophers and intellectuals, including one Karl Marx. Historicism is in effect a bastardization of the Christian idea of God’s providence, and a competing assumption on how we interpret history. The takeaway from Historicism is that it strips human beings of agency, that we can change things and alter the course of history. The World Spirit is impersonal and deterministic. We’re basically cogs in the World Spirit Machine. In the Christian view, human beings have real agency, they can change things even though God ordains and is in control of all things.
While most modern Americans and Westerners are not Hegelian per se, his influence can be seen in their assuming history is the story of inevitable “progress,” an idea baked into the historical cake. A driving assumption is that things just naturally get better because as secularism teaches, we went from ancient superstition and “the dark ages” to Enlightenment and science.
Therefore, we have three options for how we interpret history, the biblical providential view of a sovereign ordaining God, or the two secular options, a historicist view a la Hegel, or chance. That’s it. There are no other options when it comes to interpreting the events of the past, the present, or the future. Agnosticism is not an option. As Orwell said in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” For our purposes, whoever defines history defines the present and the future. These are not just academic questions debated in ivory towers, but questions the answers to which will affect everything about our lives and the generations to come.
The Importance of Telos in Creation
As we’ve seen, our assumptions about history will determine how we interpret history. The same can be said about creation, or what people today refer to as “nature.” I no longer use the word nature because it is loaded with Darwinian assumptions, and as we saw with history, assumptions determine interpretation. So what has telos, or purpose, to do with creation. Only everything!
Way back in the Middle Ages, a brilliant scholar and monk, William of Ockham (1287-1347), developed what in philosophy is called nominalism, and having some understanding of it will help us grasp the importance of telos in creation. These are very deep philosophical waters in which to swim, so we’ll only get our toes wet. Bear with me and its importance will become apparent.
Richard Weaver in his book, Ideas Have Consequences, believed nominalism was “the best representative of a change which came over man’s conception of reality.” He argued the seeds of this move to the subjective (meaning, we think our perspective is reality itself) goes back to nominalism. Ockham rejected the idea of universals, a concept developed by ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Very simply put, nominalism contends that things only have meaning because of the names we attach to them (Latin nomen). What does this mean in practice?
Over time this led to empiricism, or the idea that knowledge can only be attained via sense experience. In due course experience came to be viewed as ultimately authoritative, and as the only thing that really counts. As a result, personal preferences become sovereign, and people tend to deny any authority exists outside of the self. In other words, all meaning exists inside, not outside of them. This connects directly to how nominalism affected our perspective on creation, and in due course destroyed the possibility of telos in God’s created order, what people mean whey they say “nature.
There are numerous deleterious implications of a nominalist perspective, but one is that we no longer see the created world imbued this its own meaning and purpose, or telos. Nature, as we see it through a secular lens, no longer has an end to which it works. It just is. We’ll use the most common of things in human experience, dogs, to illustrate this. Since nominalism rejects universals, there is no such thing as “dogness,” only things that have dog qualities we call dogs so we don’t confuse them with cats, for instance. Think of a dog like you think of puffy clouds that take the shape of a dog. it may look like a dog, but we know it’s only a bunch of moisture particles condensed in the air that just happened at that moment to take the shape of a dog. Nominalism does the same thing with atoms of matter. There really is no such thing as the universal dogs, only matter that by chance just fell together and there were these things we call dogs for convenience, so we don’t confuse them with other animals.
Again, as I said, these are deep philosophical waters, but we in the modern world are drowning in these waters, and God is throwing us a life raft called telos in creation. Once Darwin came along, evolutionists rejected any kind of telos or purpose in nature, in matter itself. Matter just fell together without any guidance from an outside source, and out popped dogs! And everything else. There’s nothing behind the matter but . . . . more matter. In my favorite metaphor, there are only puzzle pieces and no puzzle, so no bigger picture, universals, to give the pieces, the particulars, any meaning. Here’s the takeaway: the individual pieces can only be given ultimate meaning from the bigger picture. If we only see pieces in isolation, we will get a distorted picture of everything. Welcome to the modern world in 2024! No wonder we are in the middle of a Great Awakening. People are tired of nominalism, so to speak, tired of the puzzle pieces without the big picture, and the resulting confusion. They’re exhausted.
To show the practical implications of this concept, let’s finish this with an example as simple as it is relevant; human sexuality. If human beings are merely a collocation, an arrangement, of atoms or matter and that is all, then male and female don’t actually exist. Simply put, the concepts of maleness and femaleness are malleable, can be changed on a whim by rearranging some of the matter. Same with sexual organs. If bodily orifices are just so much matter with no inherent telos or purpose, then we can do whatever we want with them, pleasure and preference is all. If homosexuality floats your boat, knock yourself out. If, on the other hand, God’s creation is filled with the purpose he gave it at creation, then we look at it all completely differently. We try to find the meaning outside of us, in the things themselves, to discern their purpose, which leads to human flourishing because we’re using things as they were designed to be used! It’s incredible how simple it is, yet sinful rebellious humans want to “be like God” and call the shots. Telos says, they . . . . don’t . . . . get . . . . to!
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