I believe the properly told Christian metanarrative is liberating, not oppressive, and actually deconstructs the notions of power/weakness and authority that my PoMo peers shun with their deconstruction of all metanarratives. But this post is not meant to be an apology for promoting a metanarrative, merely an attempt to summarize what I think the Christian story is (of course, after a lot of my own deconstruction of how it is usually told). So on we go . . .
I have written a lengthier discussion of the Christian story that was written in format of a week-long devotional. One can access it here, and click on the file called "devotions." Briefly, the story is as follows (with many important details missing in the summary version): The cosmos owes it's existence to the Creator of everything. The Creator made the creation very good. The Creator's position toward the creation is one of complete love. It was within the loving, good plan that the creation should be cared for (looked after, stewarded, ruled wisely) by a creature that would reflect the creator's own love and wisdom. This life and task was given to humanity, who has since turned away from the creator and ceased to reflect it. Humanity has thus become inhuman and creation has been thrown into chaos. Because of the Creator's love for creation and desire to see order restored for the benefit of what was originally created good (and still has wonderful echoes of that goodness in it), the original plan has never been abandoned. Humanity will, God determines, reflect goodness and love and justice and wisdom and thereby order creation properly. A man and his family are chosen to carry on this plan (Abram and the Hebrews). They fail as miserably as original humanity. But the plan is not abandoned that it will be through this family that all the families of the earth, and thereafter all of creation, will receive the wonderful life that only God can give. All the failure of humanity and Israel, and all the power of God to undo that failure, are focused on one Man, Jesus, whom God has chosen to be the truly Human One, the true Israelite, the human that rightly reflects God's own character and nature, intended for humanity all along. The crucifixion if a reflection of what it means to be god . . . and human; powerful; authoritative; in control. The misery and futility of creation are exhausted in Jesus' death, and then reversed in his resurrection. The body, God's creation, is not abandoned, but given new life, fuller life, death-conquering life. The Resurrection was the beginning of God's promise to renew, to make new, his creation. The Age to Come has arrived and now the Messiah's people are given the task of looking to that event in the past and anticipating how that will work itself out in the future. Please see the devotional I mentioned for a fuller exposition of all this.
What that means, then, is that Christians, the Messiah's people, should not be looking to escape the rest of creation that is doomed to destruction (as in many Evangelical tellings, including the Rapture theory). Nor is our goal to live an eternity in some place called Heaven. Our mission, our raison d'être, is to be the people who, while looking to what God has already done in Jesus, anticipate it's final outworking in the present. We are called to live the life of the Age to Come now, the life in which justice prevails, the poor and widows and orphans are cared for, the rest of creation is tended wisely and taken care of, heaven comes to earth. That is, after all, what we should hear when we say the prayer the lord taught us to pray. We are not called to 'tithe', as if 10% is God's and we can do what we like with the other 90%. Our entire lives, including our finances, need to be reordered around the fact that our lives are not our own; that we were chosen, as was Abraham and his family, not merely for our sakes, but for the sake of the rest of the world (human and nonhuman creation). It is not merely about proselytizing enough people to get them out of an eternal hell, it is about reflecting God's love and wisdom to the rest of creation and thereby partnering with the Creator in that plan to have creation rightly cared for, reflecting God's own beauty. The 'tithe' doesn't have a place in this story. Only a creative reimagining of what it means for each of as individuals and as a community of faith to participate with God in his New Creation project.
2 comments:
The "post has been removed by the blog administrator" makes me think that some well meaning fundamentalist got on here and started damning us all to hell. Which leads me to my comment: there is something about this story that sounds wonderfully conspiratorial. In other words, it's so unempowering to the "strategies of man"--i.e. insitutions, organizations, denomonations, temporal governments or political theories, etc... it gives so much leverage to God, and takes so much away from man, that it must be rather true.
No, I would welcome comments from well-meaning fundies if they help us all work out together what it means to be God's people today. The comment was a strange sort of spam (2nd from the same source in 2 possts). The key word seems to have been 'rapture'. The comment was actually a link to a nutty, incoherent site. I have had to start moderating the comments because of it, so some of your comments may not appear for a couple of days.
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