I am a post-modern.
I never tried to be, but whenever I decide to google the things that I really believe in I end up on some obscure website reading about post-modernism, post-conservatism or post-Enlightenment thinking. Kinda makes you wonder what the “pre” to the “post” is. I mean, being “post” anything means that my entire worldview somehow rejects what was popular thinking when I entered the world making me “post-everything.” A few generations from now people like me probably won’t be known as post-anything. Maybe we will be known as pre-narratives or pre-neotheocommunists or whatever. At any rate, the same thing they were saying about my generation twenty years ago is still true – all we really know for sure is that we don’t know who we are.
What I do know is that story matters to me.
Deeply. Foundationally.
Maybe I believe that story matters more than anything because I am a storyteller. Or maybe I became a storyteller because I believe that story matters more than anything else. Either way, it probably doesn’t matter. The problems I see associated with faith in America boil down to the fact that people refuse to believe that their faith-story is actually their metanarrative (I’d define this word as “the biggest story I live inside.”)
For many people the biggest story that they live inside is their own story.
We call these people all sorts of things from sociopaths to egomaniacs to shallow thinkers to go-getters to heroes. But they all have one thing in common – they are the main character of their story. This thinking is not only incompatible with the metanarrative of Jesus, but it is antithetical to it. It’s more or less the opposite.
Then there are all the -isms of the world. There are those people who have broken out of thinking that their own life is their own big story, but have latched onto some popular (or reactionary) communal metanarrative. This can be as simple as believing that your biggest story is that of your home state or hometown, your family, your nation, your political party, your religious denomination, your sports team, your career, your race or class, etc.
The reality is that we all live in overlapping stories.
I am an American, for instance. Regardless of how I feel or think about America, I cannot really change the fact that I live within the reality of the story called America. My story is also that of an Ohioan and a transplanted Nevadan. I cannot divorce the story of Las Vegas from my story because the ten most formative years of my adult life were entwined within that city’s story. I also have family and religious heritage – I’m an Appalachian Campbellite if you must know. (At times this has evoked pride, at times shame and at times indifference, but it has never not been one of my big stories.) When I was finally eligible to join the Screen Actors Guild as a professional actor there was a temptation to make that my metanarrative.
Our metanarrative produces our primary self-observed identity:
“I’m an actor.” “I’m a quarterback.” “I’m a good person.”
Here’s the point – none of these things are my true metanarrative – the biggest story that I align with. Or more accurately, the biggest story that has made me who I am. (See the Chesterton quote below.)
My big story is not that I am an American, a caucasian, a pastor or a SAG actor. My big story is that there is a living God. He created us and we have rejected him in order that we could live apart from him. Apart from him, though, our lives are meaningless, painful and shallow. My story is the story of a nation called Israel because my God selected that nation to reveal himself to the world. Again, through Israel, we rejected him. So he sent a real man named Jesus who called us from the world to follow him in order to be reunited with our God. He came to start a Kingdom ruled by Love that would never end. We rejected him too and killed him, but he was resurrected three days after he died. (I never said that my metanarrative was easy to believe.) His resurrection set in motion a conspiracy to see evil conquered in the world through the power of love and life and hope. He then asked us to tell others the good news of our big story and to invite them into it. This is evangelism to me. Inviting others to turn in all of their stories, including their biggest story, for the story of God, Israel, Jesus and the Church. It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to ask of someone – to be willing to change their prime identity. But for those who are really ready for change (now I sound like a presidential candidate) – for those who are really ready for a new life, it is remarkably good news.
I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me. – GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
This post is a re-edit of an older one from 2008 sparked by a question in my book club on Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel. I asked Scot this week to give his take on living within the story of God, Israel and Jesus within our current culture. Here’s his response:
The ancient culture was no more a storytelling culture than ours, except for this: the folks around Jesus told a different story, one in which God was paramount, one in which their election/place in God’s family was unashamedly something to delight in, and one in which a longing for a Messiah shaped the whole.
Our problem is that we have a different Story, one that doesn’t need the Old Testament, one that doesn’t need the Messiah (we have reduced Jesus to a Savior), and therefore one that tells a fundamentally different Story than the one the Bible tells.The aim, then, of King Jesus Gospel is to tell what the gospel looks like when we take the Bible’s storyline as the one and only story that makes sense of God, of history and of Jesus. -Scot McKnight
If being post everything means you are pre-story telling then count me as post everything. I love that word pre-neotheocommunists even though I have not taken the three seconds it takes to google that phrase. I would love to believe that I see the world as a story. I find myself in my naive search for the FEELING of fame to compare people’s life stories. I always tell myself that people are not famous forever they are famous for a moment and then you remember them forever and believe them to be more than they are.
I speak with a pop star online and when you really get to know someone that is famous , fame disappears and what remains is the story. This is a giant interwoven 10 Trillion Page long Story that is never ending and self referencing.
I actually believe that the pre internet era produced something special that no one remarks on. Good or bad when we had Radio Television Books and Movies for our MAINSTREAM culture we had a story. We collectively in the US population shared a cohesive narrative. Now its like the internet was the Tower of Babel or something because that cohesive narrative has split the country into many mini narrative and maybe that didnt happen but when I see music sales dropping and when i see movie sales dropping it means that people are not sharing the same experiences anymore. When Whitney Houston was #1 she was #1 for everyone. We all loved her at the same time and movies came out like Star Wars that blew our minds TOGETHER. Now your experience with the web and my experience with the web are all different and the story they tell on television is different than the story I experience through my dabblings online. The world is no better or worse but it is different.
I think that Jesus provides something that even I overlook at times. Jesus is going to live forever in our collective stories. People may hate him forever for the way that other christians behave or people may love him because of the way churches create community but he is mainstream culture. He lives in a story that we all know come internet or radio or television or whatever there is a narrative that everyone knows. Jesus. Jesus in the United States is comprised of all of the interest that the churches and the people in the churches create.
If I went to a church I would be a part of a mainstream culture that would be micro in nature. I would be a part of many lives from many places all meeting to share an interest in the story of jesus. I want so badly for it to just be a story. I want the story of jesus to just be a story about a man. I want there to be a pastoral conspiracy that elevates Jesus to a promotional concept that gives people a reason to talk about something. Hey lets talk about this story? Which One? The bible? Yeah the bible. Lets talk about the Bible. Thats all I want it to be but Jesus and the story of Jesus is so much more than that. Its the story of a man that walked and died and we can conflict over rose or not but even if he didnt rise he still started the church and his followers said he rose and wrote about it which is still impressive as well hell. The story of Jesus fact or fiction is impressive either way and it goes to show that STORY can transform life not technology , not academia , but the most important aspect of our lives is the Story. The story of our lives. We from before to after. Our language is based on the communication of story. We exist because of our ability to tell story.
I know that there is nothing. There is nothing that needs to happen and I know that we all have something in common with Jesus that no one ever talks about. He was created out of the woman the same as all of us and he experienced a set of circumstances that propelled him to infinite power. He was God because we made him a God. If we had ignored him he wouldnt be a God. There used to be less belief systems and more control over the story of Jesus. There used to be more belief in what the Pastors said and the Priest said because just 50 years ago the Catholic Church told their story in Latin and persevered as the dominant force in Christian Theology. Then they broke into telling the story in english and now we all know what we are dealing with. We all have access to the story and from that access we all have our own interpretation of the story. Jesus in being a more personal god is also less impressive. We still tell the story of Jesus.
I think Jesus is less impressive because I read the story for myself. I read about how he was influenced by John the Baptist and both JOhn and Jesus met untimely deaths. I read that jesus was essetially looking for trouble and that he overturned the tables in the temple and was treated like a felon for comitting felonious acts. I have completely my interpretation of the Gospel of Jesus. I have not finished reading the entire bible but I have jesus where I want him in my life. I dont know what connection there is to his death and what I do wrong in my life but I believe a lot of symbolism has crept into our understanding of this story but this is still part of the story.
My understanding of Jesus and your understanding of Jesus are necessary for Jesus to be understood. You understand the pastoral side of JEsus and you understand Jesus in a way that brings people together and promotes teaching. I understand the story of jesus in a hyper factualized way that is based soley on my pristine interpretation of my beliefs and my needs as a human are served by my style of belief in jesus. I believe that the world would be a worse place if people like Joe Boyd did not have a pastoral understanding of jesus. I do not have a pastoral relationship with jesus. I have an almost pontius pilate understanding of him. I want to know the story in such a way that my lack of going to church has no affect on me. I dont want to feel like going to church would improve my life. I dont want to believe that a different interpretation of jesus would change my life because if someone could convince me to speak about jesus in a different way then my life would change and my story is not ready for pastoral change.
I believe that i understand the world better because of my understanding of jesus and I enjoy being in a position where i believe that 90% of the people that go to church are just wrong and strange because that makes me feel special and powerful. I dont like being taken for a fool and this is all subjective but i do not like being told that something is happening when nothing is. I do not like being told that something happened when nothing did. My story. The story of me. Is important and because of the lack of a mainstream culture I am being left to stew on these antithetical thoughts of the jesus movement and i feel disconnected and I am growing my disconnection and its strange because when you believe something different Catholics at least will look down on you. I am looked down on because I do not have the capacity to believe what you believe. I wont let my fact centered mind derive philosphical constructs from a story that could just be journalism.
I dont even know what to think if it turns out that the story is true. That a man died and rose and ascended into the skies. That sounds like alien technology to me. We have different words to describe the events and the words we use to describe the events dictate how the story will affect you. I believe in Jesus. I really do. I just dont care that I believe. My story has been filled with its own unique torment that I feel connected to jesus in that socially I have received my own torment that makes Jesus’ life more understandable to me. Maybe when I die I will resurrect maybe you will turns out you dont know if you will resurect until the time comes and I believe we all receive resurection and we all live forever and our story is neverending and that this earth is all that there ever is or will be.
God created a perfect planet for life and we just experience it over and over and over again or we experience it once but i error on my beliefs on the side that your journey with life is ever present and never ending. That your story that your story goes on forever from life to life from moment to moment. I write like I have the insight of a saint because I feel like I do. I feel like I dont have to go to college to understand jesus. I can compare my life story with his life story and say yes this makes sense. I am aging and the story of jesus is not growing more mysterious it is growing more sane.
The story remains the same I use it like a clock. I used to be amazed by the story of Jesus then I didnt care and now I do again and as my life is changing so is my understanding which lets me know that i am growing and changing as a person because as my beliefs change that is indicative of me changing which in the end is all i want.
I want to change as a person and I want a complex life story. Jesus had that. I had that. I hope you have that too.
Colossians 2:8 NLT
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.