Learning Our Story

"Stories define who we are together, and the story of the Church is the gospel, which is the whole story of the Bible, which is the story of the totus Christus. By defining ourselves as "New Testament" Christians, we are attempting to define ourselves by a small fraction of our story. We have institutionalized amnesia; it is a form of insanity. Is it any wonder we do not know who we are?" - Peter J. Leithart

It isn't just the stories that define who we are either, it is the manner in which that story is written as well. What greater or better written story is there than that which we find in the totality of God's word? Leithart makes an important point here, perhaps the key point of this entire book (Against Christianity) in pointing out that Christians are uneducated when it comes to their own culture. Not only this, but we are taught this way in our churches. From a very early age we are taught the stories of the Bible but not the Story of the Bible that underscores them. We learn all about Abraham and Isaac and about how God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and how the angel stopped Abraham and God providing the ram in Isaac's place. We even learn that Abraham calls God Yaweh-Jireh and this will continue to be true of Him when He ultimately provides His Son for us. We are taught that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son because he had faith that God could even raise Isaac from the dead in order to keep His promise of establishing a great people through him. What we are not taught, however, is that we are the great people. That Abraham is the father of our faith because we, as Gentiles, have been grafted into the Vine and adopted into Israel. That we are Isaac, bound before God underneath the knife of His righteous judgment and Jesus is the substitutionary ram who receives the killing blow.

Abraham's story is my story and your story; Israel's history is our history and the culture of the Scriptures is our culture. The Greeks had their stories, so did the Romans and those nations before (Egpytians, Babylonians, Persians, etc.) where they played an important role in the peoples' understanding and experience of everyday life. Leithart explains, "Myths not only embodied a political and religious vision of the city, but somtimes had direct political cosequences." He offers the example of Alexander the Great associating himself with Achilles and aspiring to obtain such a heroic status; he goes on to conquer the world. America, also, has her own stories and the problem of Christianity today is that it has adopted a story that is not its own. Christianity has abandoned the stories which should be determining and affecting how we experience and interact with all other stories, i.e. the world's stories. I like Leithart's use of the word "embodied" here as this is precisely what we are called to do: embody our faith. Paul admonishes us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices and that this is our spiritual act of worship (Rom. 12:1). What does this entail? Primarily it entails not conforming to the pattern(s) of this world and renewing our minds (v. 2) so that we are able to approve what God's will is.

Is this what Christianity does today? A quick browsing through you local Christian bookstore should be enough to answer this question. Sure we pay lipservice to "going against the flow" and being "counter-cultural", we've all seen the T-shirts and bumper stickers. The problem is that we aren't called to go against the flow or be counter-cultural; we are called to not be in the flow at all, we are called to reform culture and bring it to Christ by making it conform with the culture Scripture has already established for us in the story of the gospel. In other words, we are to bring the story of the gospel to the world, not bring the story of the world to the gospel. The story of the world isn't big enough to contain the story of the gospel. What we, as Christians, need to do is learn and know this gospel story as our identities in Christ are defined by it; we need to make this story our story.