A New Story? #2 - Questions

The line begins on the left-hand side of the page and works its way across. It drops straight down until eventually heading right again. Then comes a fork in the road. One prong goes directly up to the level where the line began, and then continues to the right indefinitely. The other way goes down - not straight down, but veering downwards, again indefinitely.

It looks like this (with explanatory words attached):


How did we get to this diagram?

McLaren begins his journey towards A New Kind of Christianity by tackling what he calls "The Narrative Question". "What is the Overarching Storyline of the Bible?" is the foundational question posed by McLaren. This question assumes the Bible to be telling a story, which is an assumption I share. At its heart, Scripture is not an instruction manual, though it does instruct. It's not a repository of doctrine, though it does teach. It's not a book of divine wisdom dropped out of the sky for our enlightenment, though it does contain wisdom and it can enlighten. Scripture is story -- God's story about...well...we'll get there in due course. But McLaren notes that,

To be a Christian...has required us to believe that the Bible presents one very specific storyline...

This storyline, which McLaren seeks to dismantle, is the one diagrammed above. It begins with perfection in Eden, it descends into a fallen world of sin, and then comes the divide - salvation which leads to eternity in heaven, or damnation which leads to eternity in hell.

Does that sound like the story of the Bible in a nutshell?

It does to me. Or at least it sounds like the story that I've been taught, which is a story that seems to be created by Scripture itself. But is this really the story Scripture tells? In the midst of some caricatures, McLaren makes a simple observation and asks a profound question:

Few of us acknowledge that this master-narrative starts with one category of things, good and blessed, and then ends up with two categories of things, good and blessed on the top line and evil and tormented on the bottom....Can we dare to wonder, given an ending that has more evil and suffering than the beginning, if it would have been better for this story never to have begun?

This is a heartfelt question that musn't be swept under the rug. A story depends on perspective. Ask Hitler to tell you about World War II and you might get a sob story about how he failed in his mission and now lives in permanent disgrace. Ask Eisenhower or Churchill the same question and you'll get a very different answer, though they are all talking about the same event(s). Can it be that most people's story -- if we take the above outline to be more or less true -- will turn out for the worst, with the few living to tell a tale with a happy ending? If the story the Bible weaves will largely end up with individual stories of anguish and defeat, why even begin to tell it?

Or perhaps we don't quite have our story straight. Maybe we have misread the Bible; misunderstood what the Storyteller was saying, about both himself and his purposes. Our lines might be going the right direction, but our insight into what they entail might be too narrow in some places and not narrow enough in others. Or, if McLaren is on to something, our lines may be missing the point entirely.

The following questions, asked by Daniel Kirk, are the reason why I am interested in what McLaren has to write, even if he is wrong:

Again the question comes to us how the gospel is actually good news for someone who has experienced nothing but injustice, whose life is defined quintessentially by her status as a victim. Is the gospel good news if it means that such a victim, upon death, will meet a judgment that makes her life of perpetual rape seem like paradise in comparison.

I am not about to abandon everything I once knew, but I do want to be open to a re-shaping of the biblical narrative as it springs from the character of the God who is over, above, and even in, the story: the God revealed to the world not primarily in words on a page, but in the person of Jesus.