Retelling the (meta-) Story

I’m always fascinated by anything that takes something I know (or at least I think I do) and flips it totally upside down. Sometimes it’s while I'm building things in software. I’ll be trying to uncover a way of understanding things and then it finally clicks. At that point, I can push the design of whatever it is I’m making that much further.

A World Turned Upside Down

But sometimes it’s about the things much closer to my heart, to my system of beliefs and practice. It’s statements like this one from New Testament scholar Dr. N.T. Wright:

We have read the Bible as though we assume it’s a story about how human beings get to go and live with God, whereas the Bible itself insists it’s a story about how God comes to live with us. — N.T. Wright

As a (recovering) SBC/evangelical kid of the 90’s and 00’s, the issues that this one line points out in our thinking resonates so deeply with me. The implications and outcomes from a shift in thinking like this should be pretty significant.

What Dr. Wright is saying here is not that the afterlife isn’t part of the equation at all (and he would even affirm an eschatology focused more on life after “life after” death). But what he’s saying into our current context is that the afterlife isn’t the first and only concern as some modern evangelical leaders might have you believe. And the implications of that are that what we do on this earth does matter. How we live in the world around us does matter.

Now to be clear, this for me is a single step on a journey that’s taken years of processing, but it’s one more in a pile of learnings that has pushed me ever-closer to rethinking the underlying story that ties everything else together; the meta-narrative, more succinctly put.

Rethinking the Meta-Narrative

What’s a meta-narrative? I’m no philosopher – I couldn’t even play one on TV – but essentially when we have gaps in our understanding of the world, we as humans/storytellers tend to fill in those gaps with a grand, overarching story. That is our meta-narrative. And when it comes to the story that we as Christians tell that ties the Bible together and from that our own outlook on the world, I really believe we’ve missed the mark. And that’s truly a dangerous game. When we are left to our own devices, we can fill in those gaps in the Biblical story with things that end up looking quite different from the God we say we’re serving.

Unfortunately, the combination of an anti-intellectual streak and a heavy-handed “sola scriptura” approach lead so many of us to believe that we already know all we need to be able to understand all of scripture and from that, the whole world. Without historical context, without background, without an appreciation for original languages and understanding our translations, and on and on. That "high view of scripture" underneath turns out to be a high view of a specific interpretation of scripture, because “the God of the universe gave us these words directly, didn’t He?” Then the gaps that are left to our meta-narrative just so happen to sound a lot like cultural and political ideologies that just so happen to line up with the culture we exist within.

What does that look like? It looks like unhealthy partisan political alliances, abusive power structures, segregation of access and privilege based on race, gender, sexuality, etc. And when we tell ourselves that our national identity or our organizational success are the things bringing the good news instead of the community that we are part of, we’ll overlook much on our way to protect that.

Finding Meaning for "Moderns"

One issue in the modern evangelical climate is a lack of historical awareness. We don’t make much of an attempt to understand how we got what we currently have, especially not across most of our congregations.

With all the good that came from the reformation and on into the enlightenment, we do have to be aware of some of the fallout from those changes to the way we think, especially about our faith. We as "moderns" don't see much of the world in the same way as anyone pre-enlightenment would have. One shift made over the past 500 years was from a practice-based religious experience to a systematized set of beliefs.

Unfortunately for us, the thing we try to point to for systematics and instructions (the Bible) isn’t itself a systematic textbook or an instruction manual – it’s a story. When we twist and turn it into a definition-making, statement-generating proof text, we have missed the point. We see Jesus pointing this out to religious leaders of his day when he continually answers their “gotcha” questions with his own question. But a question which should stir within them a desire to dig deeper toward the character of God. And these are the people who he would’ve been most closely aligned with when it came to his own system of beliefs!

What does this mean for us?

One bit of fallout from trying to base our faith on a system of beliefs is that we still want to try to tell the story behind it.

I think first and foremost what this means is that we have to retell God’s grand narrative. Not just to the world, but to ourselves. We have to dig in deep to rediscover how big, how inclusive, and how dramatically upside down it is in demonstrating God’s love for the whole world. It’s retelling that God didn’t set out from creation to live in relationship with just part of humanity, but with all of it. And we within the body of Christ aren’t the protectors of some esoteric belief system headed for a disembodied eternal glory. We’re messengers charged with carrying the good news of our messiah-king.

And before you push back with “eternal consequence” language, I’ll say that the ending is even grander than we’ve let on. If we see our job as convincing people that God is interested only in what happens after they die, we tend to overlook what we’re doing to those people in the world right now. If we instead remember that the kingdom is also present here and now and that it covers the whole world, perhaps it will remind us that what we once saw as the means to an end (serving and loving others) was in fact part of the end itself.