Looking through Scripture: Finding a New Master Story

This morning I was struck by this section in Live to Tell, a wonderful book on rethinking evangelism in a postmodern world.

“For Calvin, Scripture is something to be looked through rather than at. The scope of the gospel story is of such magnitude that it leaves no non-narrated place for us to stand to get a bird’s-eye view of its veracity. For the master narrative of the Scriptures laces the Old and New Testaments together in a single story. This story not only affirms continuity between the Old and New Testament worlds, it also tells and eschatological tale. In other words, the plotline of this single story races underneath the reader’s feet and off into a future whose final end is the reconciliation of creation with Creator under the reign of King Jesus. This is the story that has been embraced and embodied in Christian communities since their inception. As a consequence of the magnitude of the story’s scope and the unbroken chain of its historical embodiments, it borders on the asinine for a lone reader to judge the truthfulness of the story by the meager criterion of his or her own untutored experience. On the contrary, argues Calvin, the scattered details of our lives are brought into focus by reading them through the lens of the story’s setting, characters, plot, and ending.” – Kallenberg, 109

We often read the Scriptures through our own lenses, allowing it to reconfirm our suppositions and support the foundation of our own lifestyles and choices. We often find in Scripture support for our critiques of others, but a smug comfort of our own lifestyles and religious and political choices. But what if we gave Scripture the freedom to read us, to critique our lives to re-create our vision of the world? What if the world of the text truly became our story, its plotline racing from Creation underneath our “feet and off into a future whose final end is the reconciliation of creation with Creator under the reign of Jesus Christ”?

In 2 Corinthians 5:16-17, Paul describes the impact of the Christ event on the lives of Christians in a powerful way. He writes, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” For Paul, the Christ event (the Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ) forces, demands a major epistemic shift on those who are “in Christ.” In light of the Christ event, the early Christians had to look at the Scriptures through different lenses. The paradigm had changed. The old ways of looking at things were broken; they no longer worked.

The Christ event, the Gospel story, continues to shake and shatter, to challenge and critique our myopic, cataract-laden ways of looking at the world today. We must allow ourselves to undergo the scrutiny and challenge of the Scriptures until they so transform our lives and our understanding, until God completes the work of new creation on our lives, that there is no place in our lives that can escape being narrated by the life of Christ and the master narrative of the God who continues to work his salvation in the world through the inbreaking kingdom of God in Christ. Then maybe we will have the vision to see the world through Scripture, through its master story.