Which I are We?
The metanarrative is that great overarching story that helps define our lives. It places us within all of history and on the shoulders of those who have paved the way for how we live, function, love, and relate. The metanarrative that all of humanity lives out of is that of being created in the image of God. No other created thing else can say that. It is humanity’s identity.
But in the Fall, humanity lost its true identity. The fall forced humanity to be “like” God. We found ourselves in competition with God, for control, provision, wisdom and sufficiency. Our identity suffered, because we became broken eikons. We live life with a broken view of ourselves. We try to compensate for that brokenness, but the truth is that the pot cannot fix its own cracks. With a broken identity, we struggle to find a place for our story to fit into a greater story, any story that will give us meaning, purpose, and identity. Losing our identity caused us to lose our place in the metanarrative.
Apart from the metanarrative, creation has lost its purpose. All of creation. Therefore, not only is it important for humanity to be made whole, but all of creation is to be remade again. Creation feels the effects of humanity’s brokenness. Restoring the identity of humanity and making humanity whole brings a re-creation of all of all creation.
Unfortunately, institutional Christianity has distorted the metanarrative. The metanarrative is framed in the context of heaven and hell. The emphasis is on how bad people are, how they are all going to hell and the only way to stay of hell is to believe certain things about Jesus. The end result is that you get eternity with Christ in heaven.
Here’s the problem with the institutional metanarrative. First, it’s an incomplete metanarrative. The Bible opens and closes with creation and re-creation, not the fall and redemption. Unless you discuss the whole metanarrative – creation, fall, redemption, re-creation – you lose the impact that God’s metanarrative emphasizes: wholeness, peace and completeness.
Secondly, the hell/heaven metanarrative has proven to be a failure. Hang with me here, I know that is a mighty strong word. But part of what Christianity is battling today is its lack of ethics. Our leader, Jesus, behaves in ways that “christians” do not. Our behavior does not match our belief. As a result, the world sees our metanarrative as a failure.
The Biblical metanarrative – the re-creation of the world and the restoration of wholeness and relationships for the individual – is a place where all of humanity can find their place. We are all looking for wholeness. We are all looking for health. We are all looking for peace. If we frame life in this manner, we are able to touch all of mankind, because these are all of man’s basic longings and desires.
The problem for Christians is that we ourselves don’t understand what it means to be whole, healthy, and complete. We are as emotionally jacked up as everyone else. We have adopted a spiritual formation approach that is about knowledge, not behavior. We do not know why we act the way we act. So we read more books, go to more seminars, and listen to more sermons. But we fail to get past the layers of scarring and brokenness to truly uncover our identity in Christ.
Integrating our identity with God’s holistic metanarrative might be one place to start.
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Tags: Identity, Metanarrative, Spiritual Formation
David,
You are so right on. Hopefully with voices like yours we can recover a gospel of the kingdom.