Telling a different story

[on Chapter 7, "Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World"]

If I understand Wright correctly here (and I might be mis-reading more than anything), he's uses this chapter to answer the question, "So what? Why do I care about all this stuff?" by contrasting the plight of the modern (conservative) Christian with our culture's decentralized world view. The Christian he paints is the Christian I was taught to be, the one who knows what God wants because it says so in the Bible, the one who understands about Heaven and Hell, who can answer questions with confident certainty because there is one God, one Heaven, and one path to salvation.

But this is a difficult story to sell to our postmodern culture, which is characterized, for simplicity's sake by three things:

1. loss of neutral/objective knowledge and truth
2. the deconstructed self (who am I? nothing but a collection of signs and signifiers, perhaps)
3. the loss of an overarching metanarrative (previously we moved toward progress, know we 'know' there is no forward)

Seems like a decent summary. Anyway, in a world that does not recognize objective truth, has no confidence in the idea of a self, and is not willing to buy into a narrative of sin and redemption, what can a Christian say or do that will not fall on deaf ears?

Wright suggests that perhaps we have bought into the wrong story, a metanarrative formed as much by our modern worldview as by Biblical truth. For backup, he returns to Jesus and his disciples, pointing out that the disciples also had the wrong story. They believed in a Messiah who was coming to save the Jews, not one who was coming to save all mankind. They believed in a Messiah who was coming to bring about an earthly kingdom with earthly power,  not a kingdom that called them higher. And the famous pair that was walking down the road to Emmaus that first Easter morning--walking in despair away from Jerusalem and the hope that had died with Jesus on the cross--did not recognize Jesus because they had already seen their story's end.

And what of our story? Wright suggests we need to look back to Jesus, the man who healed the sick and loved the poor. We are to be, he says, Christ to the world, not by speaking truths which cannot be proved or known but by living lives of love that cannot be denied, by living a truth that cannot be spoken but only experienced.

Sounds a little hokey to me, but also inspiring and beautiful (and you should probably just read this chapter for yourself, actually). The final chapter of the book allegedly puts a practical spin on exactly what this might look like, so maybe that will shed some light on things!

And, I kind of like it, because I have always resisted rote evangelism (despite that oft-quoted "go ye therefore into all the world..."). This seems very much like an argument for the social gospel, of sharing God's love through actions rather than words. It also rings a bit like the "everyone has their own truth" (at least in practice) which i don't want to embrace. Maybe it doesn't matter as much what we think, exactly. Do I have to call Jesus by name to see his face? And I do think that what we know in our hearts--even if we can't articulate it--is much more important than any prayer we can consciously recite.