Ultimately, the problem of the meaning of history revolves
around the question: "Who is man himself and what is his origin and his
final destination?" Outside of the central biblical revelation of
creation, the fall into sin and redemption through Jesus Christ, no real answer
is to be found to this question. The conflicts and dialectical tensions which
occur in the process of the opening-up process of human cultural life result
from the absolutization of what is relative. And every absolutization takes its
origin from the spirit of apostasy, from the spirit of the civitas terrena, the kingdom of darkness, as Augustine called it.
There would be no future hope for mankind and for the whole
process of man's cultural development if Jesus Christ had not become the
spiritual center and his kingdom the ultimate end of world-history. This center
and end of world-history is bound neither to the Western nor to any other
civilization. But it will lead the new mankind as a whole to its true
destination since it has conquered the world by the divine love revealed in its
self-sacrifice.
Herman Dooyeweerd, In
the Twilight of Western Thought, (Paidia Press, 2012), 75-76.
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