Embracing a Foreign Identity

This weekend, I will be meditating on the meaning of humility with pastor Ryan. Jill's devotion for today is a fitting context for remembering who we are and the world we live in are only a rediculously small part of history and reality. Humility is a response to knowing God and the story he has unfolded throughout history, giving context to today's reality and our identity in it. Knowing the story also reveals what tomorrow holds and toward what we should be striving. The story is about God, not about us. He has but granted us the honor of playing a part as it is told, as well as the priviledge of being a member of the audience who sees it unfold.

11/7/08
Embracing a Foreign Identity
Jill Carattini

The human world is “story-shaped,” espoused Brian Wicker in his 1975 book The Story-Shaped World.(1) That is to say, we live our lives amidst a sea of stories and storytellers, our own stories indelibly shaped by the narratives we embrace consciously or otherwise.

Like the story of Marxism or modern progress, consumerism or atheism, the Christian narrative invites the world into a story that shapes the world in which we live and see. It is a foreign story in terms of time and space; we cannot enter into the world of first century Palestinian Jewish living anymore than we can literally embrace the person of Christ. And yet, it is a story that claims to tell a universal tale, and it is Christ who speaks as clearly to our humanity today as he pulls us into stories and cultures far beyond our own.

In fact, the story of Christ invites us to see human nature, human history, and the “really human” in ways most meta-narratives cannot. As Richard Bauckham notes, “[The biblical narrative] does not, like the modern myth of progress, describe the human achievement of human goals or even a process of immanent reason at work in the historical process.”(2) But it does offer a glimpse of humanity in relation to its creator, God’s purpose, God’s covenant, and human freedom to interact with these realities. It offers a glimpse of our human nature by telling the story of the “truest” human. In a world where countless ideologies vie for our allegiances, the biblical narrative invites us into an understanding of human history where we encounter the one whose authority is ultimate and whose humanity is perfect. We who respond to Christ and join his story realize we have found more than a storyteller; we have found the story that tells us who we are.

Thus the biblical narrative is more than a worldview in the way that it narrates. Lesslie Newbigin describes the embrace of the Christian story as a commitment that must act out “in the whole life of the whole world the confession that Jesus is Lord of all.”(3) Christian mission, too, is therefore far more than the sharing of merely another story among many. For far more is conveyed than simply one more spirituality or worldview, and far more is at stake than offense or political inappropriateness. What is at stake is nothing less than the full integrity of our nature as human beings. For if the biblical narrative correctly shares what is truly human and invites us to follow the one who perfectly lived this humanity, then salvation is that which not only restores us to the divine but is also an action that restores us to humanity itself--to ourselves and to one another.

While pluralism, humanism, secularism, privatization, and countless other stories might speak convincingly into our culture, world, and individual identities, the story of Christ is the only story that offers such a holistic picture. As opposed to the dominating narratives whose concern is neither for truth nor the individual, the story God tells is one we are asked to evaluate in terms of truth and then invited to see our own stories completely within. In the words of Christ, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). While the missionary direction of the Bible is certainly one that meets us within a story, and the God we discover within it indeed embraces a story-teller identity, far from disappearing within a dominating narrative, we are invited to truly live within this story and the very kingdom it proclaims. We are invited to true and abundant humanity within a narrative that is continually moving us from the particular to the universal, from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Brian Wicker, The Story-Shaped World (London: Athlone Press, 1975).
(2) Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 91.
(3) Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 17.

Politically Correct

My pastor's response to the election inspired me. His reflections have helped me see how truly detached I am from our country’s political arena. I’ve taken for granted the blessings of our country’s heritage and political structure. I’m compelled to become more aware and get involved.

Like Ryan, I am also concerned about government getting bigger, especially in the areas of responsibility that should be performed by the Church. Historically, the Church has played the greatest role in meeting the needs of social welfare. Public education was founded by the Church and evolved into what we now know as universities, from which some of the oldest and most prestigious schools today were founded. Modern medicine is also rooted in the Church’s long history of ministering to the sick. Providing for the poor is not only a deeply rooted ministry of the Church, it is a biblical mandate. The very principles on which our nation was founded and from which our laws were inspired were overwhelmingly informed by Scripture. Much has changed. Public welfare, state funded education, and the proposed government health care are out of context and reflect the misplacement of responsibility. Those on welfare need a hand up, not a hand out. Public education has been ransacked by secular, anti-theistic academics on whose altar we willingly sacrifice our children. The biblical definition of family continues to erode as well, leaving for the government the responsibility of caring for forgotten, elderly parents and wayward, fatherless children, shattered remains of broken homes left to feed on the scraps of institutionalized philanthropy. Believing the state can provide such ministries is as nonsensical as believing a machine has feelings; the intentions are good but the vehicle is hollow and heartless.

I don’t have a strategy but I’m confident of the answer: the Church has to take back their responsibility from the state in order to set things right. Such a proposal is almost laughable; the perfect God-sized project. Impossible is what God does best and what most glorifies him. Politically, it is what is known as a grass roots movement, the same context from which revivals and revolutions have grown, the context that leaves the instigator unknown. Coincidence and mystery are the ways the world defines the inexplicable movement of God of which only believers are able to enjoy the awareness of being a part and the only ones able to see who is responsible. Such times are known to us as awakenings, times the Church woke up from their slumber and recognized again the source of their identity and author of their purpose. No political system produces results like a theocracy. No political leader has the power to invoke change like our all-powerful, unchanging God. Therefore, my involvement begins by declaring as the psalmist:

Psalm 82:1-8 God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the “gods”: 2 “How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked? 3 Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. 4 Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5 “They know nothing, they understand nothing. They walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6 “I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ 7 But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler.” 8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth, for all the nations are your inheritance.

In God will I trust, by his power will I move, and on his platform will I stand.

The Flavor of the Martyr

Since my late teens, after a first-hand exposure to third-world missions in Brazilia, Brazil, I have been enraptured by the testimonies of those who have given up everything for the sake of the call, especially those called to martyrdom. One who came to be one of my favorites was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, author of The Cost of Discipleship. During World War II, he was a formidable antagonist to the socialistic/fascist regime of Hitler both as a spiritual leader and participant in the German underground. His friends, knowing his uncompromising faith and character, feared for his safety as war broke out and tried to convince him to flee to safety within English borders. They managed to convince him for a time, but the compassion for his fellow believers in Germany who were being persecuted, his sense of duty to combat tyranny in his homeland, and his righteous anger against the apathy and indifference of the Church, drove him back to endure the hardship of battle on the front lines. In the article “Death of a Martyr,” written by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book Christianity and Crisis, Bonhoeffer is quoted from a letter he wrote to Niebuhr before returning to Germany as to his reasoning that drew him back:

“I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people. . . Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make this choice in security.”

Years later he wrote in prison, “You must never doubt that I am thankful and glad to go the way which I am being led. My past life is abundantly full of God’s mercy, and, above all sin, stands the forgiving love of the Crucified.” In 1945, in a German concentration camp that was liberated only a few weeks later, Bonhoeffer was killed for his role in opposing the existing regime, for opposing the forces of darkness.

Let me be clear by saying my purpose in posting Bonhoeffer’s testimony is not to compare Obama with Hitler; my purpose is not about Obama at all. We as the Church are asleep and our country continues to reflect the results of our apathy. Bonhoeffer was a major contributor to the ecumenical movement given his understanding of the powerlessness invoked by division, however he knew ecumenism would not happen until individual believers came to terms with the living God in whom they professed faith and the gospel they claimed to profess. Just as it is not possible to be in the presence of God without being changed, it is equally impossible to be in his presence without being called to action. As Christians we are made salt to be used as salt. “Naysaying Christians who would prefer to be salt kept in privatized bottles on isolated shelves must be reminded that the reign of God we proclaim calls for radical commitment to our identity (we are salt) and sacrificial immersion (salt must be dispersed in order to season).”* Like Bonhoeffer, let us go forth as salt, adding to our world the same evocative flavor.

*Jill Carratini, A Slice of Infinity, “Living With a Foreign Worldview.”