One of the central difficulties that we face in devising a postmodernized theology is the need we have to assert an overarching metanarrative. I came across the problem in Robert Webber’s book Ancient-Future Faith and found his approach unsatisfactory:
This commitment to the Christian metanarrative will not be received well by postmoderns, who believe in the relativity of all narratives…. Evangelicals take the universal character of the Christian metanarrative as an essential aspect of the framework of Christian faith? (104).
Webber’s response to the problem of the authoritative metanarrative is to fall back on the traditional approach of reaffirming the intrinsic and absolute truth of the Christian story of creation-fall-redemption-consummation. I don’t think that this is an invalid response, but I wonder if there aren’t more subtle and more useful ways of addressing the problem. One alternative, for example, would be to differentiate between the historical narrative and the ‘mythical’ narrative, between history and super-history. This is not an easy distinction to draw: it is not always clear what is history and what is myth, and the relation between the two is a primary cause of confusion.
The historical narrative is an empirical account of what actually happened. I don’t think we can equate this narrative directly with the factual content of the Bible. It is a narrative that exists only provisionally, as the evolving and elusive product of the process of historical investigation. It also exists along a spectrum of trust and suspicion. We may think that the Bible is a reliable source of information about the history of ancient Israel and the emergence of the church, or we may seriously doubt that it provides us with any accurate information at all; the assumption is, nevertheless, that we are looking for observable historical events, no different in kind from any other historical events. But this is relatively unimportant. Allowing for all the empirical uncertainties, the historical narrative is that part of the total biblical story that believers and unbelievers might in principle be expected to agree on.
The ‘mythical’ narrative has been woven into and around the historical narrative. It is in this narrative that the claim to universality is asserted: the Word became flesh, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and so on. It is largely, perhaps entirely, at this level that God enters into the story. It is at this level that historical events become acts of redemption or judgment. That a Jewish religious leader called Jesus was crucified by the Romans around AD 30 is more or less accepted now as a fact of history. That this death was a sacrifice or a victory over the powers of darkness is a fact of myth. It is an interpretation on the basis of a position of faith, and we can go a long way towards explaining how that interpretation arose.
The mythical narrative is both a reinterpretation and an extension of history. In the first place, it is, like metaphor, a redescription of circumstances and events as they may in principle be perceived and described by all people. If the departure of the people of Israel from Egypt can be constructed as an historical narrative, it can also be redescribed, from the perspective of faith in the God of patriarchs, as an event of redemptive significance. A psychologist taking notes on the day of Pentecost might describe the ecstatic experience of the disciples in terms of a thorough-going empiricism, but on the basis of certain biblical and christological presuppositions, the observable events can be redescribed ‘mythically’ as an outpouring of the Spirit of God. Mythical discourse, however, can also be used to extend history, either by describing heavenly events that are not directly mirrored in historical circumstances (eg. the debate between Satan and God in Job 1:6-12), or by projecting the narrative into the future as prophecy or apocalyptic.
What I think might be useful about this distinction is that the historical narrative, although fundamental to Christian faith, makes no intrinsic claim to be universal or normative. At this level we are bound to acknowledge the particularity of the story about Israel and Jesus-and for that matter, the inglorious particularity of the story of the church. There is no reason why this story should not be retold, explored, and affirmed in a postmodern context as one religious story among. It then becomes necessary to be much more candid and self-conscious about the truth status of the mythical narrative that Christians superimpose on the historical. We are forced to bring our presuppositions into the open and take moral and intellectual responsibility for how we see things. The truthfulness of the mythical narrative, therefore, is to be found not in the text but in the perception of faith that discovers the power of the reinterpretation.
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