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.