Pastor, Don’t Be a Secondhander

I never tire of teaching the Aeneid to my honors college students. I’m drawn to Virgil’s epic, not only by its poetic perfection, complex story, and timeless characters, but also by its vast historical scope. Indeed, though it was written two full generations before the New Testament, and though its pagan Roman writer was ignorant of the Old Testament, the Aeneid is undergirded by an eschatological vision almost as grand as that of the Bible. A poet or prophet or politician who holds an eschatological vision of history believes that history isn’t random or haphazard but has a beginning,…