One of the most significant books I read in seminary was titled THE MEANING OF REVELATION by Dr. H. Richard Niebuhr. Dr. Niebuhr probes the difference between history as lived and experienced, and history as observed by an external spectator.

History is constantly being made each and every day of our lives. The Christian Church exists in a real world, but how do we discern between the external reality of the world and the inner revelation that the faithful community needs to follow as God’s covenant people?

In short, every experience, every life, every Bible passage has two dimensions: the external and the internal, or the landscape and the inscape. The external are the facts of what happened, like our Emmaus Road story. The inscape is the "FAITH" and truth that the story of the passage …