Our Story

I was listening to this fascinating podcast featuring Stanley Hauerwas over on Emergent Village (it's an older podcast, I'm just catching up). The topic of the speech given by Hauerwas was actually the theology of death... Kind of a dark subject, but it launches him into some amazing points.

The thought I had about it doesn't have anything to do with death, actually. What interested me was this thing Hauerwas kept saying about what he called the "modernist story:"

"The modernist story is that we should have no story but the story we chose when we had no story."

It sounds like a bit of a tongue-twister, but if you can decipher it, it's making an interesting point. This story is what modernists think of as "freedom." It's the ability to make up your own identity.

Hauerwas said the belief in this type of freedom has shaped our attitudes toward death. What occurred to me is that it affects our attitude toward the Bible.

If we think about how modernism has affected Christianity, it would appear that we can see it in the narratives we tell about ourselves--the "testimonies" we give as Christians. How a person came to Christ is essential in many churches. Without a credible testimony, you might not be admitted into membership.

Essentially, each individual Christian tends to feel that his story should be a fresh, originally rendering of Amazing Grace: I was lost, but now I'm found. This story becomes the story which defines a Christian's identity.

The reason I think this is a very modernist narrative is that it starts with the individual, and it is designed to give identity to the individual. This shapes how we read scripture: we are relentless in our pursuit of applications of scripture to our personal everyday lives.

We've taken the idea that scripture is God's word to us as individuals quite seriously in evangelical culture. A pastor might use no more than a single verse for his sermon text on Sunday, but you better believe he wants you reading through all the scriptures in your own quiet time.

And there are many churches where it is not uncommon to hear people saying they received "a word from the Lord" as they were reading scripture. A certain passage might "really speak to me" in whatever circumstance I'm dealing with. All of this is interpreted as God's providential ability to connect scripture with our everyday lives.

All of this is well and good, but I think it loses something very big. Scripture is fundamentally not my story, but our story; not only that, but it is a story that started thousands of years ago. My story is not the story that gives me my identity. The story that gives me identity is a story that existed long before I ever did.

Sometimes when I read scripture, I see absolutely no application to my everyday life. And I'm totally okay with that. The point of the text is not necessarily to teach me what to do, but rather who I am. I think it's application enough to be reminded that I was not here first, that life, the universe, and Christianity do not revolve around me and my story.

I can imagine most evangelicals sympathizing with this point, but still... I've noticed that the standard evangelical tendency is to make everything practical. By which we really mean, focused on individual lives.

What if pastors, instead of preaching from scripture in order to get some practical point across, used scripture to remind their congregations that Christianity is way bigger than their day to day lives?

I really like N. T. Wright's essay on How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? He argues that we interpret scripture by becoming the fifth act in the five-act play set up by scripture (Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Church). This makes intuitive sense to me. It's basically saying our biblical interpretation would be more sound if we had the bigger picture in mind.

So yes, we can have the Bible give us wisdom on how to act in today's world, but it won't focus on our individual lives. It will focus on the big picture, on how to be part of the Church all over the world.

To the modernist, this is not freedom, but for the Christian, it is. Freedom for the Christian is not some abstract concept. It is a reality that is grounded in the history of flesh and blood human beings--one human being in particular, who died on a cross and rose from the dead.

It's too bad Christians often don't appreciate our history more.