Robin Phillips
Though there are many things we can do to be a witness
for Christ, it is often in what we do not do that our witness shines out
the strongest. Our witness emerges when we reject the dominant temptations of
our time, whatever they may be. Naturally, at different places and times in
history the challenges will be different. Sometimes it has been a simple thing
like refusing to say “Caesar is Lord,” while at other times it is more complex,
perhaps refusing to dress in a certain way or rejecting patterns of behaviour
that, though culturally normative, are Biblically inappropriate. Sometimes it
may be something like walking out of a cinema when you are with a group of
friends because the film is ungodly, even when you know the rest of the group
is going to misunderstand you for doing it. Whatever it may be, it is often in
what we reject, what we say ‘no’ to, that we witness the strongest for Jesus
because we are powerfully proclaiming to the visible and invisible forces who
our allegiance lies with.
Today’s world is, of course, replete with numerous things
that the Christian must reject, some more obvious than others. However, what
makes our own era so difficult is not the quantity of our temptations so much
as their quality. This is because we live in an age where there are
numerous temptations channelled against our minds and emotions. Often, we do
not even realize that these are temptations because they are subliminal, subtle
and hidden beneath a network of intuitions and assumptions that have come to be
normative.
In this
afternoon’s meeting I want to talk about just one of the principles that is a
defining feature of the spirit of this age and something and a temptation for
Christians. It is something which every Christian needs to be aware of so that
they can reject it’s subtle influence on their own thinking. We need to reject
the tendency to deconstruct meta-narratives. Now that sounds pretty complicated
and abstract but it isn’t actually.
A meta-narrative
simply means an over-arching story or thought structure that lends meaning and
context to the particulars of experience, normally group experience. For
example, many pagan cultures revolve around a religion of harvest gods. The
harvest, and all the symbolism that surrounded it, would be a meta-narrative
that gave cohesion to the society. Or a meta-narrative can be an ideology, like
the way in which the elevation of the working class became a meta-narrative in
the communist state, or the way in which national socialism and fascism
provided a framework in which to organize Nazi Germany. In the Bible, the
meta-narrative for the Jews as well as the early Christians was the expectation
of God’s kingdom. In ancient Athens the Homer poems were the Greek people’s
meta-narrative, since their whole society was, in some sense, structured around
the mythology that derived from these texts. During the time
of the Enlightenment, a new meta-narrative was formed in which rational thought
allied to scientific reasoning was thought to lead toward an inevitable
progression for mankind. This meta-narrative of the Enlightenment created a
sense of optimism about human progress that survived well into the 20th
century, before the world wars, and finally Veitnam, brought an end to all
that. Some metanarratives are more opaque, like the fluid network of themes that
converge in many American’s understanding of what it means to be an American. In days gone by, the meta-narrative of Britain was structured around the
royal family, who were themselves symbols of our national identity. Most
metanarratives have physical symbols and paradigms that come to embody the
stories they represent.
Basically then,
a meta-narrative is the controlling theme/s – normally transcendent theme/s –
that act as an organizing to give cohesion to either a culture or a particular
group.
It has been one
of the hallmarks of postmodernism to consciously break up all metanarratives –
to see them as inherently bad. As Jean-François Lyotard said in
the year 1984, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as
incredulity towards metanarratives…" According to the postmodernist,
metanarratives are bad because they are thought to be controlling. Like
systematic philosophical systems, metanarratives are believed to be
“totalising” systems that force human existence into a mould that stifles
freedom. Furthermore, metanarratives, like totalising philosophical and
political systems, allegedly deny the naturally existing ambiguity, disorder
and opaqueness of human experience. Postmodernism sees experience as
fundamentally random, disorganized and ambiguous, while strongly resisting all
influences that might threaten to bring order, continuity and explanation to
bear on the particulars of our world.
In many nations now, we are seeing these
principles reflected in a deliberate attempt to discourage any sense of
national identity and culture – to suppress anything that makes us different
from them. In art, we see this trend reflected in the collages that are
becoming such a defining feature of the postmodern gallery. In these collages,
the random juxtaposition of unrelated images is emphasized. There is no
over-arching continuity, no larger themes that help the artwork make sense,
because it doesn’t need to make sense; there doesn’t need to be any sense of
continuity. Let things just be ambiguous, the postmodernist says, or you are
forcing your own categories onto something and that is being oppressive.
Of course, this is paradoxical when we
consider just how controlling and totalising postmodernism is becoming. Indeed,
postmodernism is beginning to look suspiciously like the new metanarrative: a
metanarrative in which relativism is absolute and ambiguity gives everyone a
sense of identity. To push the paradox one step further, the paranoia against
cultural identity is beginning to produce a mass culture with symbols and
paradigms just as defining as the symbols they have replaced. This is reflected
in a speech that Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech
Republic, made at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 1994. Havel said
that “For me, a symbol of [the postmodern] state is a Bedouin mounted
on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with
a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel’s back.”
My Story and Your Story
There is a further,
and perhaps more significant reason why postmodernists resist meta-narratives.
Postmodernism is the full extrapolation of the Enlightenment’s egocentricity:
the placing of the individual in the centre of reality. The individual becomes,
for all practical purposes, God. This being the case, the only story that is
worth any of us telling is our own story; not telling how we fit into any
larger scheme or how we connect to any larger objective framework, but just
telling our story and leaving it at that. Universal metanarratives are thus
replaced with small local narratives. These local narratives emphasize the “multiplicity of theoretical standpoints” rather than seeing themselves as
interconnected in a larger theoretical framework. All the big stories are
broken up into billions of little stories, in short, your story and my story.
Whereas in the past people saw their own stories in reference to the larger
story of their worldview or metanarrative, now people’s orientation is only in
reference to themselves. Try to construct a larger story you are impinging on
someone else’s little story.
The paradigm of
this is, of course, cyberspace where each individual can create his or her own
virtual reality. The internet embodies the postmodernist’s dream since there
can be billions of little realities floating around on the electronic sea, each
of which need have no necessary relation to any other, while there are no
overall controlling features to bring cohesion. In cyberspace, meaning is fluid
and is constantly evolving out of the encounter, or the intersection, of many
different elements. It is, therefore, paradigmatic of the postmodern self,
which is free to drift around untethered in the abyss that arises after all
external stories and points of reference have been deconstructed.
As Christians we believe that God has a metanarrative.
The history of this world is part of a story God is writing. There are even, if
you will, chapters to this story, including the themes of Creation, Exodus, Promised
Land, Monarchy, Exile, Restoration, Redemption, Inauguration, Continuation,
Culmination, New Creation. It is a grand, over-arching Story that gives
cohesion to everything else. Above all, it is a story that can be our story.
The people of God are asked to enact this story, to live it out, to let every
aspect of their lives tell this story.
In today’s
world, where the spirit of postmodernism floats around in the very air, it is
the easiest thing for Christians to let their metanarrative become disconnected.
Rather than letting the universals of God’s Story connect all the particulars
of our experience, our lives can become fragmented. Worse still, some
Christians can unconsciously imbibe the spirit of this age and begin to resist
the controlling influence of their own metanarrative, preferring to go from day
to day in a state of spiritual discontinuity.
To be part of
God’s story means that we involve ourselves in implementing that story. It is
an active story that is continuing to be written now – and we must actively
involve ourselves in writing it’s chapters. Tom Wright comments that
Although
it is often (rightly) said that the early Christians saw themselves as living
in the last days, it is even more important to stress that they saw themselves
as living in the first days, the beginning of the new creation that dawned when
Jesus emerged from the tomb on Easter morning. They saw themselves, in other
words, as living within a story in which the decisive event had already
occurred and now needed to be implemented… If the Biblical story is told truly,
it will subvert the alternative stories. But to tell it truly, you have to be
living it.
The best
Christians witness, therefore, is to show that our lives do have a
metanarrative. The story of each of our lives is only meaningful in light of
the larger Story that God is writing and in which we are playing a part. But
for our metanarrative to be effective, we need to let it colour and permeate
every aspect of our lives, not just keep it compartmentalized. If we do that it
is no longer a metanarrative. Christians can easily slip into affirming bits
and pieces of the story without attention given to the overall structural
framework that gives cohesion to those particulars. Such forms of spirituality
cease to be a witness against the disconstructive influences of postmodernity.
In our pick and mix culture, nobody minds smorgasbord spirituality that takes a
little from here and a little from there and lets it all mix around in our own
little story. On the other hand, it is when we let people know, through our
actions and our words, that our little stories are only meaningful in light of
God’s Big Story that people will really react. Tom Wright describes how people
think that “the Bible is not only politically incorrect because it told the
wrong story (as the Enlightenment thought) but because it tells a story at
all.”
The extreme
example of a postmodern approach to Christianity are those who reconfigure
Jesus to be a great teacher of timeless principles but not someone who is
enacting Israel’s great story. Jesus is not there to announce the Kingdom of
God, to write the next chapter in the great story of the people of God. He is
there simply to expound timeless truths of brotherly love, self-denial, etc..
In our age Christians as well as non-Christians like to take little bits of
truth and revel in them, in complete isolation from any overall controlling
narrative that might give that truth a larger continuity. My challenge to all
of you today is to reject this temptation – to reject the dominant tendency to
deconstruct metanarratives. We must, instead, allow all the diverse particulars
of our own lives to be linked together by God’s metanarrative - the Story He is
writing in the earth.
Return to Robin Phillips HOMEPAGE
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