meditatio at the water's edge

Here's something I'm working on... I welcome your comments.

A Loss of Story
Not many of us know our story. What is worse, most of us have lost our sense of story. The result of this is that we find ourselves getting caught up in any number of smaller ‘un-stories’ that are put forward in our culture. Think about the stories that shape your lives—the stories that inspire you to do what you do. How do those stories go? How many of us find our identity as a people in the stories of Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jesus, Peter, Paul, John, etc.? If we were honest, many of us find our identity as a people in the stories of George Washington, Donald Trump, Jennifer Lopez, Bill Gates, Tony Hawk, Martha Stewart, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey, etc.

Let’s face it. We are a de-storied people—even in the church! The reasons for this are complex and many, but let me suggest a few. First, at some point in our history, we began to look at the Old Testament as the Unimportant Testament. We fell into the old heresy that divided God’s story into two parts—the first, God’s failure, the second, God’s success. The Failure could be ignored and avoided, because it had apparently been done away with. In many people’s thinking it was, “Out with the Old, in with the New.” So we had whole groups of people seeking to be “New Testament Churches.” Think about how many bookstores sell New Testaments. Think about how many so-called “evangelistic crusades” pass out New Testaments to would be converts. Doesn’t this suggest that the Old Testament is somehow unimportant?

Second, at some point in our history, we stopped seeing ourselves as an ongoing part of the Biblical narrative. This had to do with our emphasis on timeless, propositional truth and personal-application (Bible as self-improvement manual focused on ‘today’). Our emphasis on the autonomous self and the supremacy of the moment placed the Bible before us as a resource to utilize rather than as a rule by which to measure our lives.

Third, a confidence in common sense (‘everyone will come to the same basic conclusion’), coupled with an egalitarian (‘everyone’s interpretation is equally valid’) approach to interpretation of scripture resulted in both the popularization of some pretty bad interpretations, and the thinning of practical Scriptural authority (‘if it can mean anything, it means nothing’).