The "Real" World
Yoder has a helpful gospel-correction for appeals to the "real" world: "Which is the 'real world'? Whereas contemporary dominant mental habits assume that there is 'out there' an objective or agreed accounts of reality and that faith perspectives must come to terms with that wider picture by fitting into it, as a subset of the generally unbelieving worldview. I propose rather that we recognize that we are called to a believing vision of global history, suspicious of any scheme of analysis or management that would claim by itself to see the world whole apart from faith or apart from avowing its own bias. The modern world is a subset of the world vision of the gospel, not the other way around. That means we can afford to begin with the gospel notions themselves and then work out from there, as our study has done, rather than beginning with the 'real world' out there (someone else's definition of 'the nature of things') and then trying