I’m keenly aware that in order to ‘harvest the drama metaphor’, we first need to ask the prior question - can we actually speak of the Bible’s story as a metanarrative, or taking it one step further, a metadrama?
In this regard, Richard Bauckham’s essay ‘Reading Scripture as a Coherent Storey’, in The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 38-53, is insightful. Bauckham highlights that opposition to the idea of reading Scripture as a unified narrative stems from two perspectives – such a reading does not do justice to the diversity of biblical texts in terms of its message and its genre; and such a reading seems to smack of the oppressive metanarrative which the postmodern audience are adverse to.
For the first perspective, Bauckham recognises that while the Bible contains material that is non-narrative – which in its widest category would include the prophets and apostolic letters – it is not hard to see that these material constantly refer, sometimes even summarising and retelling parts of the larger narrative. “The biblical narrative of God, his people, and the world structures their theology and is presupposed in the way they address the present and the future.” (p.39). The apocalypses (e.g. Daniel, Revelation) presuppose a unified narrative in envisioning its eschatological conclusion; and books like Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, while seeming to lack connection to the story of Israel, nonetheless is framed around a theological context which ‘recognises God’s general relationship as sovereign Creator to the whole creation and all people’ (p.39).
In addressing the second perspective, Bauckham first highlights the reason for the postmoderns' adversity to metanarratives. Citing French philos
opher Jean-Francois Lyotard, Bauckham shows that postmoderns see metanarratives as any ‘totalising theory that aims to subsume all events, all perspectives, and all forms of knowledge in a comprehensive explanation’ (p.45). Such metanarratives are often seen as the birth child of the enlightenment, with a heavy emphasis on human rationality towards achieving a universal criteria by which to order society and to liberate humanity through technology. The result is necessarily authoritarian and oppressive, since such metanarratives subsume differences by only suppressing them – that’s why postmoderns are so adverse to them (p.46). Bauckham’s counter-position is summarised below:
- What justifies the usage of metanarrative to describe the Bible’s story is that this story is a story about the meaning of the whole of reality. Bauckham states, “Just as surely as it must be disentangled from the modern metanarratives of human rationale mastery of nature and history, so it can
not be reduced to an unpretentious local language game in the pluralism of postmodernity.” (p.48). The biblical story makes a thoroughly universal claim, which combines the ‘universality of the one Creator and Lord of all things with the particularity of this God’s identification of himself as the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ’ (p.48). Seen from another perspective, there is too much at stake to give up the term ‘metanarrative’. As Webster states, “[the metanarrative] is so deeply embedded in the canonical texts of the Christian faith that it is almost impossible to envisage forms of Christian belief and practice, forms of theology, prayer and pastoral nurture from which that theology has been excised.” (Word and Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 273). In this sense, we should not run away from calling the biblical story a 'metanarrative', for to do so would mean us succumbing to popular postmodern thinking and inevitably denying the authority of our God who has revealed Himself to us.
- The way forward, rather, is to clarify and redefine what kind of 'metanarrative' the biblical story is, distinguishing it from the kind of modern oppressive ‘metanarrative’ which postmoderns are adverse to. For one, the biblical metanarrative is driven more by the initiative and freedom and purpose of God than by the mastery and actions of men (which characterise the modern metanarratives) “Human agency, of course, is important and is celebrate where appropriate, but its success follows divine initiative and requires divine concurrence.” (Bauckham, 49) Understanding is also found in divine revelation rather than purely an exercise of human rationality. A good way this point is seen is in the problem of good and evil. According to the biblical metanarrative, ‘closure – meaning a finally satisfactory resolution of the problem of God’s goodness in the world – is found in trust and hope, not in some explanation of the world that makes sense of evil, and still less in the claim of human power to eradicate the evil that human reason has understood’ (p.51). For another, the biblical metanarrative itself often confronts other kinds of metanarratives – that of the other existing imperial and militant empires of its day – but yet not falling into the vicious cycle where the oppressed turns into the oppressor (p.51-52).
All in all, Bauckham’s conclusion is insightful – we need to continue to see the biblical story as a metanarrative, which tells of God’s action of creating, judging, and saving the world, but yet reclaiming this biblical story in ‘a way that expresses its noncoercive claim to truth without imposing premature eschatological closure’ (p.53). The biblical metanarrative is one that ‘invites trust, not mastery’ (p.49); one that ‘is promissory, not possessive, in character’ (Webster, 275).
