The locus of glory within the Christian tradition is the incarnation of Christ who is the Word, or Logos, made flesh (John 1); therefore, Christians are essentially people of the Word. We find glorious meaning in the divine Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, which are one enormous story, that begins with the first Adam and culminates in the second Adam, Jesus Christ. Jesus was the Word of God, the logos made flesh, who strode the countryside with a mouth full of stories. Most of the stories he told were, strictly speaking, fictional stories, parables. His stories were not real, they were not grounded in a real place or time, but they were true.
The larger Christian community is fond of exhorting believers toward a greater imitation of Christ as seen by the proliferation of What Would Jesus Do bracelets a few years ago. An essential aspect of Christ’s ministry, however, the telling of stories has been strangely overlooked. To regain an appreciation for and appropriation of stories, is to recapture a rather neglected part of the Christo-centric theology.
If we love stories, we imitate Christ. Unfortunately, we have a difficult time imitating Christ in this respect because 1) we have forgotten that God is the Master story-teller and 2) we have forgotten that the imagination is intimately connected to morality.
At the most fundamental level, narrative is simply a story with a story teller. God is the master story-teller-the first story teller. The Christian tradition believes that the great saga of history is a story-the linear story of God working in the world-God’s story. God spoke the story of creation and continues to creatively speak existence into being. We are the realization of his creativity and we live and breathe within his larger story. I believe, ultimately, with Stanley Hauerwas, that “the narrative mode is neither incidental nor accidental to Christian belief. There is no more fundamental way to talk about God than in a story” (The Peaceable Kingdom).
Our lives, therefore, have the elements of narrative and our pursuit of meaning naturally gravitates toward a narrative grasp of existence. That is why Peter Leithart says that, “the stories we read provide metaphorical models for understanding the story that God is telling with us” (Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader). If the way we understand all of existence is narrative in nature, then there must be a master story and a master story teller who has placed that narrative sight in our DNA.
The most reasonable, though perhaps unnatural, response to this understanding is to align our perspective with God’s perspective-to see history and our lives as God sees them, to willingly live within the Master story-teller’s master narrative: the over-arching narrative which we might call the metanarrative.
A metanarrative is an assumed story of which we are a part and by which we interpret everything that happens. Some have fondly called such a vast interpretive and defining framework a worldview, but I think the word worldview, though a buzzword within evangelicalism is far too narrow and does not necessarily account for the narrative structure that God has woven into His creation.
The word “worldview” connotes something categorical, a convenient ideological container into which we might drop various folks depending on how they answer the seven key worldview questions: 1) what is ultimately real? 2) what is the meaning of history? 3) what is man? 4) how do we know what is right and wrong? 5) how do we know anything at all? 6) what happens at death? And 7) what is the nature of the outside world around us?
It all sounds all so very academically neat and that is why the term has become a bit misleading. After all, our worldview is a very complex and fluid thing; far more akin to a narrative than to clear lines of logic. Of course a narrative view of the world answers these seven questions, but our worldview is also full of contradictions, dichotomies, and various other inconsistencies. For these reasons, I believe the word metanarrative is a more accurate and useful term as we learn to see the world as God sees it.
The words narrative and metanarrative have a growing following amongst philosophers and others in circles of higher academia. They have embraced these terms for various reasons, some of them postmodern in nature, but perhaps the rising popularity of narrative in academia is more than a philosophical fetish. Perhaps it is an awakening, gradual and stiff, to actuality; namely, narrative is the very fabric of our lives and our day to day experience merely the individual threads of a much greater story.
The sooner we realize that reality is narrative in nature, the sooner we must conclude that there is a Master story-teller. It is a short step from that realization to the truth and beauty of the authorial Trinity.
Orthodox Christianity, therefore, has a deep respect for narrative, especially as it mirrors God’s metanarrative, and there are three key ways to foster this genuine respect for narrative: first, we must read Scripture more as a divine and cohesive story; second, we must read novels and short stories lovingly and critically, allowing them to nurture a deeper love for and awareness of narrative structures; and third, we must cultivate the imagination as an essential and motivating part of our moral being.
