An eternal story told across time
Chapter Eight
Significance and security in a new key
Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.
The canonical relationship between imaging and idolatry suggests that the imago Dei is fundamentally a relational term but one with a peculiar relationship in view. It draws attention to the way in which the image reflects the original as its primary relation. The image is conceptually like a shadow, ontologically dependent upon the object it reflects. It is the imaging relationship rather than the image itself that is the primary vantage point throughout Scripture. It is perfectly appropriate to talk about the image as an object in its own right, but it is conceptually impoverished if this is the primary discourse we use to think about the image. The two fundamental claims from the biblical-theological argument of the previous chapters can be stated simply. The inextricably relational character of imaging language across the canon forces us to affirm both the social character of human identity as well as its fundamentally liturgical nature in relationship to God.
It is also appropriate to say, Christianly speaking, that a relationship to God is that which secures our identity as humans. Our existing as people is rooted in our relation to God. It is also true to say, asymmetrically, that God’s existence is not rooted in a relation to humanity. It is rooted in the triune relationships that exist prior to and apart from creation. And further that the very permanence of God is that which grounds the independence of the triune persons from human personhood. It is the very transitory character of human personhood that manifests a dependence in the triune persons. It is the nature of that ‘transitoriness’ and thereby ‘dependence’ that the Scriptures depict with the language of ‘image’.
The divine community (Trinity) is the blueprint of the redeemed ecclesial community, and the Godness of God is what secures the ecclesial community as a redeemed image and by which the original and the image are distinguished. It is God by virtue of his being God who grants significance to the human community and who also redeems or reconciles that community. It is the ontological ‘weight’ of God that serves as the foundational assumption in the redemptivehistorical account of humans as created, redeemed or consummated images. It is not just any sociality that defines the human person but a sociality whose telos is found in the permanence of God – in his very Godness.
The very ‘ordinariness’ of biblical language supposes that God’s oneness is not a theological abstraction from his threeness. Nor is God’s threeness a theological abstraction from his oneness. The substantiality of divine unity ought not to undermine the sociality of the divine Trinity. But neither should the sociality of the divine Trinity undermine the substantiality of the divine unity. If evangelical theology has insufficiently appreciated the sociality of the divine Trinity, it has nonetheless recognized the substantiality of the divine unity. In ordinary language this means that there is only one God who is worthy of worship.
Human identity is wrapped up in the dialectical relationship of the community to its constitutive elements – people. As social creatures we do not exist independently of society, and theologically we do not exist apart from the reflecting relation to the divine community. Human significance rests precisely in what or whom humans reflect and the relationships in which those reflections occur.
Individual people are never people outside a web of relationships. Identity is given by virtue of the intrinsically relational character of personhood. This means that the search for personal identity is a function of the web of relationships in which each individual is engaged. People take their clues as to who they are from the other people who speak into their lives. The individual’s own voice undoubtedly is part of this ‘identity-forming conversation’, but it is only one voice among others. The ‘identity-forming conversation’ is not mechanical in its working, nor is it predictable in any recognizable way. The biblical-theological claim also runs against the grain of the modern intuition that personal identity refers to an essence deep in a person’s psyche – what the Cartesian tradition might have referred to as the ‘self ’. Late modernity has produced a heightened interest in the ‘self ’ but it has been an interest without due regard for the ultimate purpose of the self – honouring or delighting in the living God.
The biblical account also runs against the grain of the contemporary intuition that personal identity is identifiable with the peculiar character traits of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or gender. The web of relationships described in the Scriptures is far richer and more complex than any one of these could encompass. Even more importantly none of these characteristics captures the essential divine–human relationship at the heart of an accurate description of personal identity.
The sociality of the human person is never a sociality simpliciter. It is never merely a set of human relationships by itself. Relationships always manifest and point to a liturgical impulse in the imago Dei, where the imago Dei is constituted by a yearning for satisfaction or fulfilment in that reflecting relation. The intrinsic desire for fulfilment is hardwired into the sociality of the human person. It is precisely this yearning for completion that draws humans into relationships, and makes those relationships fragile and open to corruption. Though God could have chosen to create differently, he in fact did create humans in his image who are completed and fulfilled in their relationship to him.
The human–divine relationship is reflected and refracted in the way in which humans relate to one another. Elements of human–human relationships grant significance and security to people in partial as well as pleasant and/or painful ways. The varying nature of relationships runs the spectrum from intimate to hostile – and often the same relationship can swing to both ends of that spectrum across time. Some relationships bear marks of intimacy and hostility at the same time. Marriage and sibling relationships are of this sort. Familial relationships are different from other kinds of relationships (business partners, teammates, co-workers, etc.) in that the relationship is its own end, sustained (or not) without reference to an external functional end. Familial relationships are a species of friendships, to be valued because of the intrinsic character of the relationship rather than as a means to another end.
Marriage is a unique form of friendship, valued not only because of the intimacy of the relationship, but also because of its enduring nature. It is not an accident that marriage is the primary illustration of the human–divine relationship across the Scriptures. Marriage is instituted to protect the significance of each spouse, even as it also finds its security in the safety it is intended to provide. Marriage is also the most painful relationship when it goes awry. There is no pain like the emotional agony experienced in a broken marriage.
Relationships of intimacy sustain us, and broken relationships undermine our sense of significance. This is the natural result of the way in which God has made us. The deeper point throughout the Scriptures is that this hardwiring relational character of humankind is a reflection of God’s relational character and the relationally perfect love one member of the Trinity has towards the other members.
When the intimacy of the divine–human relationship is broken, significance and security are shattered as well. The fracturing of the relationship inevitably creates a yearning for something else to provide significance and security. Though there is not anyone or anything that can provide that ultimate significance and security except for the triune God, individuals will search for a substitute. This is the initial dynamic of idolatry.
At the heart of worship is a sense of ‘giving yourself away’ to another. Key to worship then are the questions ‘To whom are you are giving yourself away and in what manner are you giving yourself?’ Genuine worship is giving yourself to the living God in whom and for whom you have been created. Idolatry by contrast is substituting the true object of worship (God) for an imitation (idol) and reorienting the relationship from worship to possession. One who worships the living God does not possess him for one’s own purposes. But those who create an idol seek to possess it for their own purpose. Martin Buber supposed that idols turn people into objects – and therefore even God could be worshipped idolatrously, that is as an object for human purposes. This is the difference between the image of reflection and the idols of possession.
An idol is desired as a means to an end, and the end is significance and security on the individual’s own terms. But a strange reality sets in with idols. Since significance and security cannot be fulfilled by the idol, the idol creates a deeper longing for significance and security for that which it cannot provide. This results in a chasing after the idol, driven by the conviction that eventually the idol will somehow provide the promised significance and security. The cycle repeats itself. Longing provides the opportunity to chase, and chasing creates a deeper longing. Effectively the idol possesses the one who fashioned it. The yearning for significance and security that initiated the dynamic of idolatry has in fact led to a deeper dissatisfaction and a greater frustration – a dissatisfaction and frustration caused by inability of the idol to fulfil that which it appeared to promise.
The worshipping relationship to the triune God restrains the idolatrous intentions of possession and consumption, and as it restrains them it causes the worshipper to become an alien of a sort in the wider culture of consumption. And if the unleashing of desire for consumptive purposes is near the centre of our present cultural story, those who worship the living God must feel a certain unease with the core values of our times. They must recognize the peculiar idolatries of possession that arise in an era of affluence and consumption. Idolatries of possession are peculiarly strong in eras of affluence when the plethora of material possessions gives the illusion of spiritual progress and prosperity, thereby masking the addictions of materialism and consumerism.
The crisis of identity and the idolatries of consumption
The crisis many people experience in daily life is one of significance and safety. It is not an abstract crisis but has the larger questions of purpose and meaning in view. The central battle zone of the crisis may be one’s job or marriage or reputation, though the sense of crisis has to do with how these realities are connected to the wider meaning of one’s life. In a world in which time appears to move very rapidly for ordinary people the disjunction between the number of ‘things’ on one’s schedule and the significance of the schedule as a whole is often acute. Our lives move at such a pace we can barely remember what is actually important any longer. There is often too much busyness to sense anything meaningful in life. Many of us are too busy to slow down long enough to find life satisfying. If our lives are a story, the story seems to have too much filler and too little real plot. We sense our lives would not make a good novel. There are too many parts to ordinary life to keep it coherent in any recognizable sense, and it is too complicated to untangle or savour.
As life becomes more complicated it becomes more ambiguous. It becomes more difficult to find a set of focal concerns that give meaning and sustain life. As a result life also becomes more shallow. It begins to feel plastic. Ordinary life reads like a plastic narrative. It is surrounded by artificial constructs in films, television and Internet entertainment made to imitate the real world but at critical junctures deviating from reality in order to achieve a set of higher purposes, namely to enact a consumer economic transaction. These artificial constructs reshape the human heart, which in turn imagines it can live in this pseudo-paradise with the eschatological hope that there will eventually be enough money to make it come true. The words of its central refrain, ‘If you can pay for it, you can do it,’ appear almost as a covenantal promise. Part of the very enchantment of these plastic narratives is that they appear interwoven with the delights of our own desires. As a cultural critic once wrote of Disney World, ‘They can be forgiven a certain amount of hubris because the laws of reality do not operate there.’ Likewise our plastic narratives create a set of unrealistic expectations that promise fulfilment. The consumer-driven narrative is a story where the streets are always clean, where everyone has a smile on their face and where the triumph of human creativity reaches apparent perfection – Disneyesque in its proportions.
It is also a story that would prefer to postpone the truth question. The important uncertainty is not whether the story matches up with reality, but rather whether the story is enjoyable. The last half century of rising affluence came with an internal logic of faith in progress and happiness, even as a more cynical mood settled into North American life as a result of vast inequities of affluence. The ironic pairing of these two contrasting moods (happiness and cynicism) left little room for transcendent realities. Life in a consumer culture was lived without external reference points. It was a story with its own language, thought-forms and practices within which consumers searched for the fulfilment of desires. Marketing had become a quintessential task in late modernity as the means to ensure that truth was irrelevant and self-definition all important. Whatever notion of truth remained appeared as a mere relationship between a set of products to be sold and a set of desires that would pay a price for satisfaction. It is a story which tells us that our desires are worth satisfying and yet implicitly tells us which desires are more important than others, and then commodifies those desires. The gratification of those desires comes primarily with an economic purchase.
It is a world created for us, which in turn recreates us in its image. We have become consumers because we live in a consumer culture. No one is at fault here. We are all at fault. We buy the image because we want it and it is the raw desire for happiness that drives most transactions in these plastic narratives. As Woody Allen once claimed in his sordid trial defending his affair with his adopted step-daughter, ‘the heart wants what it wants’. We are so enchanted by the plastic world of our idols that we believe the heart gets what it wants.
While all of the consumer structures of culture take shape around us, we too often naively suppose the world has changed but we have remained relatively unchanged. The world may be filled with technological innovations undreamt of fifty years ago – cyberspace devices, social media networks and advanced medical technologies – but the reality is that the greater change has occurred in how we relate to our world, what we think about ourselves and, last but not least, the ways in which religious faith has been transformed.
One of the striking facts of late modernity is the way in which these technologies have reordered our inner consciousness. The gadgets of our age have exerted enormous pressure to reshape the categories of our mental life. We think differently about the world we live in because of the world we live in. We believe the plastic narratives because after all ‘the heart wants what it wants’.
One of the fundamental changes in modern consciousness is the movement from fate to choice. The power of our tools creates so many more choices than could have been conceived by any earlier civilization. The vast array of things possible now through our technological innovations makes it appear that an individual has unlimited power and unlimited choices. We are not bound by the fates of history any longer.
But the choices created by our tools represent only a small slice of an enormously larger array of choices that are part of the taken-forgranted fabric of life in the first part of the third millennium AD: choices of occupation, of place of residence, of marriage, of the number of one’s children, of one’s holiday destination. The list goes on with regard to the external arrangements of life. But there are other choices, inner choices, that deeply touch the consciousness of individuals: lifestyle choices, religious choices and moral choices.
The more choices, the more reflection. The individual who reflects becomes more conscious of himself. He turns his attention from the objectively given outside world to his own subjectivity. As he does this, two things happen simultaneously: the outside world becomes more questionable and his own inner world becomes more complex. People become more suspicious of any solution that appears as the ‘only’ one. The hegemony of truth itself comes under severe scrutiny. And ironically, the greater amount of reflection on our own inner subjectivity results in far less reflection about ‘ultimate matters’. Steven Fjellman has written:
The world of commodities presents itself in an onslaught of discrete, disconnected packages, and the pursuit of these packages – each designed to fill some artificially constructed need – leaves minimal space in our lives for coherent critical thought about what we are doing. We are encouraged to pay attention only to those things that are amusing and fun.
It is this critical dynamic of human identity that is at the heart of the biblical argument against idols. The plastic narratives of our times suggests that reality is eminently mouldable into our image, that our image and identity are profoundly flexible and ought to be shaped according to our deepest desires, and finally that those desires are most fruitful when empowered with choice. This is the mega-narrative of late modernity.
Christian identity and plastic narratives
The challenge for all of us is the influence of this plastic story upon our apprehension of the biblical narrative of the imago Dei. Religious activity where it exists in this world has increasingly been compartmentalized into a private experience. Religion is privately meaningful and publicly irrelevant. Religious faith has increasingly ceased to be the glue that holds the world together for boomers, busters and millennials. It is simply one piece of a very large puzzle, and is simply one narrative among many. The modern religious narrative appears as plastic in our public discourse precisely because every story is construed as artificially constructed. There is no cultural space for an integrating story of the rest of reality, nor a meganarrative originating in a transcendent source. Every story is one story among others, simply narrating a distinctive compartment of our imagination and desires.
One of the greatest obstacles to recovering an identity rooted in the gospel is the plastic-like designation conferred on all the narratives in our times – including the gospel narrative. Christians run an enormous risk if they interpret their identity as simply an arbitrarily chosen one among the myriad of possible ones. If our raison d’être emerges from the plastic narratives of our times, we will be endlessly tossed to and fro by the winds of our own dissatisfactions. But it is by honestly facing the dissatisfaction with our idols that an opportunity arises to restore a more genuine and authentic identity.
The cultural captivity of evangelicalism is by now a well-chronicled story. The consumer character of modern church life is a subject upon which there has already developed a healthy consensus and scepticism. Robert Wuthnow has argued eloquently that in their more candid moments evangelicals admit to being thoroughly materialistic (while deploring this trait in their children). They believe in the proverbial bottom line. They shoulder greater and greater personal economic obligations and fret about how to pay their bills. These are matters of sheer necessity, they tell themselves. But they also enlist hearts and minds. Gainful employment supplies us with a purpose for living. But in our modern context work has become a means of self-expression and no less so for evangelicals than non-evangelicals. Careers have replaced callings both inside and outside the church. Having money is too often the secret key to happiness. Correspondingly, financial setbacks destroy self-esteem. We associate freedom with having the latest iPhone, a townhouse in the city, an Audi A6 or whatever the latest symbols of material wealth may be.
Compare the weekly sermon seventy-five million Americans hear each Sunday morning with the daily bombardment of television commercials to which they are exposed, or the ‘do this or get fired’ pressures they experience at work. Put a few thousand dollars in their pocket and send a young couple out to make a down payment on a new car: how much is some vague religious teaching about stewardship going to matter, compared with arguments about sportiness and acceleration?
Christian faith is, as a result, an ambiguous presence in the evangelical churchgoing population. It sends mixed signals about work, telling them to work hard but not too hard. It counsels us to be diligent with our money but seldom instructs us how to be diligent. Indeed it raises our anxieties about money and discourages us from talking openly about them. It warns us against the excessive materialism that pervades our society but offers little to keep us from the temptations of materialism. Feeling ambivalent about the role of wealth, evangelicals therefore go about their lives pretty much the same as those who have no faith at all.
The populist character of the evangelical movement has given it an enduring relevance in a deeply populist culture, such as America has been across the last two centuries. It has also made it susceptible to the plastic-like character of the contemporary contexts. The theological vision of the evangelical movement has been created in large measure by popularizers and celebrity pastors, individuals with no other perceivable gift than the ability to communicate effectively. It is given legitimization by popular vote, usually in the form of large conferences organized by the modern ‘circuit riders’. And it survives by the creation of simple slogans and mediums of communication void of serious reflection. These communication techniques work on the assumption that the world out there is straightforward and void of ambiguity.
Likewise the Bible is studied primarily with the aid of all-too-simplistic Bible study materials. The fundamental question asked of the text is ‘What does it say to me?’ Implicit is an assumption about the essential clarity of the text and its accessibility to any person who would briefly consider it. The practice of the small-group Bible studies does encourage individuals to read the Bible as they have never done before, but encourages them to read the text according to their own subjective interests. The Bible becomes captive to the whims of individuals and therefore continues to sit too lightly on their lives. The irony is that our celebrity pastors serve as papal-like interpreters of the Bible in public settings, and individuals are trained to read the Bible as if no one has read the Bible before them. The interplay between these two factors reinforces a pattern wherein the Bible is subject to multiple opinions. Its authoritative force is diminished. By avoiding the aid of the community of interpreters across the history of the church and around the globe there has been a reinforcement of the power of the biases of our own individual situation. The Scriptures become refashioned in our own image, becoming an object we possess rather than our being possessed by them.
Along with most other Christian traditions in our day the evangelical movement is largely post-denominational. The direct effect of this is that individuals do not inhabit a theological tradition but reside in a nebulous heritage, a heritage with little substance and no sharp edges. It is an ecclesiology rooted not in concrete traditions, but in the ambiguity of style and taste. It is not a commitment that has much to say about soteriology or the sacraments, about church and culture or about biblical theology. It is a heritage that cannot speak to all of life, because its concerns are driven by relevance to modern life.
Evangelical worship may well serve to communicate the gospel in a medium intelligible to many contemporary citizens of our culture, but it often does so without recognizing the unintended consequences of its own ordinary language. The rhetoric of evangelical piety reinforces the ‘story-like’ character of the Christian life – but a story rooted in the constructs of our time. It is an artificial medium whose primary intent is to fulfil the desire for happiness. Its hidden assumption is that the world unfolds before our eyes on the terms of ordinary modern life.
The evangelical tradition has too frequently embraced the ‘solitary minds’ of modernity as the means to resist the tyranny of corrupting communities. And in doing so has left itself open to the danger of reflecting the idolatries of our peculiar age of consumption. The evangelical sense of sociality rests too lightly on its understanding of the Christian faith, and the privileging of the individual has weighed too heavily in its soteriology. The ‘Christian life’ has too little space for the ‘Christian community’. Often lost in practice is the sense of being covenantly bound to the people of God as a reflection of the triune God to whom that individual is also covenantly bound. From this perspective it looks like evangelicals have not resisted the plastic narratives of the age.
A contrasting word must be spoken to this common ‘cultural captivity’ narrative of evangelicals. The evangelical tradition has resisted central cultural pressures with its emphasis upon the uniqueness of the gospel – a uniqueness grounded in the claim that there is only one God. The God revealed is the one divine being who requires an experiential encounter, who enacts the grounds of the encounter and who authorizes the narrating of that encounter on the pages of Scripture. All of this points inextricably to Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ in whom the experiential encounter takes place. It is Jesus Christ who enacts that encounter in his incarnation. And it is the narrative of Jesus Christ as the Alpha and Omega of the canon of Scripture that is the hermeneutical centre of the gospel. In each of these ways the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is the necessary ground for the resistance of idolatry, the very idolatry to which evangelicals are in other ways so susceptible. But it is this resource that is integral to the evangelical tradition (and the ‘Great Tradition’ of Christianity) that is the ground for the hope of exodus from its present cultural captivity and is a route through which personhood might be recovered as a ‘being-in-relation’ reflecting and honouring the ‘Three-in-One’ living God.
An eternal story told across time
Let me turn my attention finally to a consideration of the unique opportunities in our highly partisan world of plastic narratives to recover the biblical narrative of the imago Dei. Those opportunities are connected to the reawakening of the power of stories in our culture. The Christian’s hope is bound up with the story of God’s redemption in history, which gives meaning to the past, explains the present and provides guidance for the future. If our identity seems rooted too often in our yearning for yet greater and better comforts and conveniences promised by our consumer culture, then the unmasking of those objects as idols in an unsatisfying narrative may point the way forward. The narrative of Scripture is not simply a story of ancient events; it is a story that continues to interpret the idols of every age through its lens. It interprets our present identity by giving a different set of glasses through which we see ourselves and our world. These glasses give us a new ‘way of looking at the world’ that is distinctively theological in character. It is distinctively theological in the sense that it connects everything to the reality that we are creatures in the image of the living God and made to find our security and significance in all that he is.
We have also come to recognize that stories require a community to provide them with a living plausibility. As social creatures, communities are required to provide legitimacy to a ‘way of looking at the world’. Ecclesial communities in particular will either reinforce a theological way of seeing reality, providing it with ‘oomph’, or they will adopt and adapt to the plurality of narratives that swirl around them. The living community of faith is that community commissioned to bring to life the story of eternity so to speak.
This simply is to claim that the church is the context for our identity, but in a time when the church sits lightly on the minds and hearts of many Christians in the West it is not a surprise that Christian identity has become so fragile. What is it that holds our identity together in and through the church? The presence of the risen Lord in the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the sacraments through which the Spirit has so chosen to make this presence manifest. This presence is intimately rooted in the history of redemption and it is that story which the church continually rehearses in its worship. It is the story of the church that is the larger story of any individual Christian.
It is the story of God’s redemptive presence that connects the past, present and future and thereby connects us with the living God. At the beginning God spoke creation into being. His presence throughout creation is everywhere assumed and yet he remains distinctly separate from his creation. God created by the power of his Word and gave life and breath to his creatures by his Spirit. In this, as at all other critical junctures of redemptive history, there is a manifest presence of the triune God, Father Son and Spirit.
It is imperative to understand that God’s presence is an ordered presence at the beginning. It is a presence whose boundaries he himself has set. He determines the nature and purpose of creation and the manner in which it will reflect him. The two cultural mandates, to be fruitful and multiply and to be stewards of the garden, are reflections of the character of God himself. It is also God who determines the relationship between his creatures and himself. He is the one who defines good and evil and is the one who placed Adam on probation in his presence.
In Genesis 3, when sin is introduced, God’s presence becomes a threat to the existence of Adam and Eve and the serpent. It is a threatening presence. As a result the original couple are removed from the immediate presence of God, cast out of the garden. The flaming swords guarding the garden are the reminders that Adam and Eve will not return to God’s immediate presence except through judgment. Cain is further punished for his sin by for ever losing a home, ever to be a pilgrim on a journey.
With the renewed presence of God to Abraham in Genesis 12 there is a recovery of the fellowship of the garden, yet deepened in ways unforeseen earlier. God promises to be with Abraham, to make of him a great nation and to give him a land flowing with milk and honey. God promises a presence, a people and a place. In all of this he renames Abram, reminding him that it is ultimately God who redemptively establishes purpose and identity. God’s words are accompanied by his promises to be fulfilled in actions. Word and deed go hand in hand.
We reach another redemptive climax in the call of Moses. God shows himself present to Moses in the burning bush. During Moses’ entire life God manifested himself in unique miracles – showing himself not only to be the Lord of nature, but also the Lord who will use nature for the redemption of his creatures. The Red Sea is parted and the people baptized into Moses, as the one who will take them to the Promised Land. But in God’s providence Moses does not take them into the Promised Land. He looks at Canaan from the other side of the Jordan, foreshadowing the future Redeemer who will take God’s people into the Promised Land of God’s presence eternally. At Sinai Moses is given a glimpse of God’s direct presence but only of his back. God determines that Israel will hear him when they listen to Moses. A tent of meeting was constructed where God would be present to Moses and over which the pillar of cloud would rest, signifying God’s abiding presence.
When the people were finally taken into the Promised Land, it was not until David’s rule that the land was entirely brought under Israelite rule. As Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land, so David was not permitted to build the temple where God’s name would rest. That task was left to the son of David, Solomon. Then at the temple God’s redemption was graphically acted out in the sacrificial cultus. The people were reminded that the presence of God was still largely protected – the Holy of Holies was entered into only once a year and then only by the high priest. God’s presence was mediated and severely restricted.
The climax of God’s redemptive promise occurred with the coming of God himself in the flesh. The apostle John tells us that in Christ God has come to tabernacle in our midst. The fullness of God dwells in Christ, and in our union with Christ in his death and resurrection we are given new life – the breadth of God’s Spirit. The veil of Moses is lifted from our faces when we come to Christ and now we see God face to face – in Christ. Christ is both God and also the mediator of God’s presence for his people.
The life and breadth of the Spirit are given in and through the body of our Lord – in his death and resurrection. It is extended to us spiritually in the calling of the church, in its proclamation of the gospel and its practice of the sacraments as the tangible signs of the gospel. Though we still ‘see’ God through a glass darkly, we wait expectantly for that day when his presence will no longer be mediated for us.
We await the day when God himself will reside in the midst of his people. On that day he will wipe away all our tears and no longer will there be a sun or moon, for the Lord will be our lamp. We will know in the fullness of our experience that the Lord is genuinely the Alpha and the Omega. He is the one who makes sense of the beginning and is the end.
It is this epic story that not only transforms our beliefs but our entire identity in the world. It is a different ‘way of looking at the world’. And it is the church that needs to tell anew the story not only among its people but also in the world outside its walls. The story is not private – its claims touch all of life. It speaks to the world of work, to the world of leisure, to the world of the family. It is concerned with human flourishing and the place of justice in our common life together. It is a story that encourages a love for those who hate, to forgive those who seek to harm, and to work for reconciliation among alienated parties.
Recovering the plausibility of the biblical ‘way of looking at the world’ begins with small concrete steps. It cannot be an abstract or ethereal strategy. It is not simply believing a story, but being embedded in the story that makes the difference. That inevitably happens slowly across time. It requires a change of habits as well as a change of convictions. It comes from belonging not only to the present but gaining a sense of belonging to something that reaches into the past as well as far off into the future.
Plastic narratives are notoriously stories within generations and not across generations. Generational narratives tend to divide rather than unite. Christians buy into this distortion of their own narrative whenever they root their sense of identity generationally. Instead of conceiving an identity rooted in peer group units there should be a return to thinking of cross-generational units, consisting of people of different ages across diverse cultural geographies.
Concretely this means ecclesial communities encouraging generations to bump into each other and to encourage them to know their cultural genealogies. Local churches should think of ministry across cultural generations as well as across generations. The church needs to develop ways to let older folks be a part of the lives of younger folks, and younger folks to be involved in the lives of even younger folks, to find older mentors in the marketplace for younger individuals in the marketplace, and create opportunities for leadership in those younger generations. The church ought to be wary if age group peers are the primary mentors in discipleship or evangelism – or in the world of work, the world of the family, the world of education. This is not simply a pragmatic concern; it is to think about the practice of Christians in community theologically.
In the vinyl narratives of our age meals are often of the fast-food variety – both in terms of nutrition and speed. The investment of our lives in others across the table has been replaced by thinking of meals as simply a functional means to satisfying one’s personal hunger. The recent renaissance of ‘farm to table’ traditions in the West comes as a mild rebuke to the gospel-believing church that too easily has been co-opted by the fast-food culture of late modernity. In that light might the church encourage people to eat meals together not simply as a means to meet new people, but as a celebration of the covenantal aspects of shared meals. Lives are so busy in our day that families eating together proves to be a major undertaking. Churches are no different. Blocking out time to share a meal among communities and in communities has profound spiritual consequences. It will not slow the world down but just may be one way to remind Christians of the covenant that does in fact bind them together. This would also have a profound impact upon the practice of the Lord’s Supper.
In many of our plastic narratives the heart is deceived into thinking that it gets what it wants. The context of that deception is often that the individual is supreme and thereby is the rightful source of all final choices. The church needs to be reminded that in a kingdom the king has final authority. The church is not a divine democracy. Not everyone gets a vote. And as the old adage suggests, a benevolent ruler is in fact the simplest and most efficient form of government. Individuals do not govern the church – God does. We all need to be reminded that the major decisions facing the church have already been made. And therefore the day-to-day logistical decisions must not be so emphasized that we lose sight of the eternal principles that have already been laid down for us by our Lord. I think this means helping people understand that their central stake in the church is not their right to express their opinions or to vote in a congregational meeting.
These suggestions should not be the specialty of church consultants or theologians, but of ordinary pastors and ordinary churches. Abstracted from the life of the church the biblical narrative loses its heart and soul. The confessions of the church inevitably become merely a statement of doctrines that protect the church from the outside world – defining simply who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, rather than giving identity to the church by giving to the church an entire ‘way of looking at the world and living in the world’.
The gospel too often functions as one of the many competing and artificial narratives of our age – even and especially for churchgoing folk. Theologians have become technicians and engineers of the gospel, no longer finding their identity in and with the church. Pastors too quickly burn out in the midst of church conflicts and cultural insignificance. It is true that the church abandons the biblical narrative only at great peril to itself. It is also true that Christians abandon this narrative when it is only an abstract and artificial confession.
How is the biblical narrative to regain a place of prominence in a church that often thinks of it as irrelevant? Christians must first become convinced that it is good to regain a sense of the centrality of Scripture. This cannot be accomplished without much more deliberate biblical-theological strategy to reinvigorate our identity as images of the living God, in whom our greatest satisfaction can be found. We must also cease thinking of this as abstracted from the everyday living concrete realities of life. The gospel is to be lived out on the pages of ordinary life, reflecting the God who has acted out redemption on the pages of history. It cannot be sequestered behind the walls of the church, though the church must function as the means to recover the living vitality of the biblical narrative.
If all of us are called to think theologically about the concrete habits of the church in which the gospel is narrated for our life in the world, it should also be said that we need to challenge the intellectual structures that give plausibility to the plastic narratives of our time. In our day this means, in part, confessing a mega-narrative in a time when all narratives of transcendence are suspect. But the attempt to deny all narratives of transcendence is of course itself a metanarrative, and if any lesson has been learned in the twentieth century it is that arguments of relativism are almost always self-referentially incoherent. We must also be willing to say that the plastic narratives of the present moment are fatally flawed, even if they are the most common today. Our cultural conscience is one of many historically available forms of consciousness and cannot be privileged simply on the grounds that it is ours.
If we are honest we must admit that there is an inherent dislike of the self-disclosure of God in every human being, and it is this reason that leads too often to a thousand different interpretations. We must expect that there will be different cultural instantiations of unbelief and idolatry. We should not expect our idols to look the same as everyone else’s. If the lesson of the nineteenth-century secular prophets was that we are capable of creating God in our own image, the twentieth century has given us good evidence that we do this all the time. The human heart will always be restless until it finds the living God of the universe.
What the preceding argument has sought to accomplish is a slight cultural reconceptualization of sin for our time from that of breaking a law (since the notion of law is such a culturally contested notion) to the notion of idolatry – chasing after things that will not satisfy our deepest longings. We are controlled in our world by an implicit affirmation that our desires are worth satisfying. Christians need to make the apologetic case that not all our desires are worth satisfying and many of them are conflicting ones. The greatest and deepest desires, for significance, for security, for eternity, can be satisfied only by being found in God’s redemptive grace in Christ.
To the contemporary flattening of all truth claims we must affirm that it is God who is universal and not the human interpretation project. All perspectives are not equal if there is a God who creates every living thing. His perspective ultimately is what counts. Put positively the biblical narrative, the story of God’s redemption from Genesis to consummation, ought to be the heart of the church’s identity and all those who find a place in that community. Without it we will be for ever defined by the plastic narratives of our times. Ironically it is the challenge of contested narratives in our time that may well reawaken us to the power of the mega-narrative of being images of the living God. And for that we thank the Lord for his strange providence.