As some of you know, I have a manuscript due to Wipf and Stock in a couple months titled The Destiny of the Species, a blurb for which says:

Intended as a counter-point to Darwin’s famous work (which just celebrated its 150-year anniversary), The Destiny of the Species is a simple, provocative, and easy-to-read treatment of the fact that all people—whether they are believers or not—are uniquely hardwired for heaven. What distinguishes us from the animals is our being pulled rather than pushed, drawn by our future rather than driven by our past. Part and parcel of our being made in God’s image is our inevitable frustration with things as they are. It is Christianity alone that can make sense out of man’s homesickness for a place he has never been.

In a nutshell, the book is intended to unpack (for both believers and non-believers) the biblical idea that God has placed eternity in the hearts of his creatures, as well as a corresponding frustration with all things earthly when treated as ends in themselves. I still have a few chapters left to complete, but I would like to "leak" a bit of what I have written from each chapter over the course of a handful of posts.

In Chapter 1 I argue that man's bearing the imago Dei means that he has a destiny greater than that of the animals to which he is pulled, rather than pushed. It's our future that makes us what we are in the present, and not our past. This is intended as a challenge to Darwin's theory:

Despite the occasional bit of comfort Darwin's theory of origins may offer, and despite the hook off of which it seems to let us, we humans just can’t seem to escape the nagging feeling that life, at the end of the day, is not completely pointless. Sure, we can fool ourselves with clichés such as “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” but the thought of death inevitably causes one to question the morality of his merriment. In a word, beneath the surface we all know that “You only live once” is bad news rather than good, and that what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay there.

To bolster the idea that our destiny shapes us more than does our origin, I cite David Brooks's idea that man has always lived in the future tense:

People have a different sense of place. They don’t perceive where they live as a destination, merely as a dot on the flowing plane of multidirectional movement.

I think Wendell Berry says it better:

As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India....

Once the unknown geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken anthill. In our time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

For this reason, it seems to me that the all-too-popular approach of preparing people for the gospel by trying to convince them of how unhappy they are is not only completely wrongheaded, but will inevitably create a bunch of Christian consumers who fashion a god after their own image.

Instead of appealing to people's sense of personal fulfillment, what we ought to be doing is granting them their happiness (when they claim it), but all the while reminding them that this present age is not ultimate, and dying with the most toys doesn't win us anything beyond the divine rebuke of "Thou fool! This night is your soul required of you, then whose will be those things you have accumulated?"

Man is an eschatological creature, is what I'm saying. And the sooner we appreciate the dynamic relationship between the already and the not-yet, the sooner we will transcend our own earthly-mindedness, as well as helping others do so too.