Metanarrative & Fractal Encoding
If the metanarrative is unknowable, what does this say about the Bible? I guess that the Bible points to, proclaims, but does not delineate, the metanarrative. After all, there is no linear narrative in the Bible. Biblical theology may try to 'extract' such a story - that, after all, is part of the Enlightenment enterprise. But, in truth, this does injury to the text. The Bible is full of contradictions such as an unchanging God (Ps 59:19, Mal 3:6) who has to put a rainbow in the sky in order to remember, who is beaten down by Abraham in a haggling contest and who changes his mind constantly. The two creation stories contradict each other, and so on.
This is important. Instead of trying to harmonise these different strands we should let them interact and see what emerges. It is significant, though, that we often find the metanarrative fractally encoded in individual stories.
Richard.
posted by richardseel @ 9:34 pm
1 comments
1 Comments:
Jackie,
I hear an implied gentle rebuke here and it is entirely justified. I was being overly intellecual and 'clever'. Or, rather, trying to find some language would could at least point to the insights I seemed to be having.
You said, "But the disappointing thing is ... whereever I read about this postmodern church concept I am thrown into a discussion on how to discuss concepts rather than dealing with the concepts themselves."
Perhaps this is because one point of the postmodern adventure is that the 'concepts themselves' now seem more fluid and less constant than they used to. Indeed, it may be that the notion of concept is a modern one, belonging to propositional knowledge and situated 'in the head'. Postmodern church is more experientially based: you need to experience it rather than think about it. And you may also need to accept that any 'truth' we come up with is provisional and context-dependent (but this is talking about it, isn't it?)
Fresh expressions of church are often tentative (and by no means always rooted within a postmodern matrix); I like to think of them as 'holy experiments' - some will enable people to come to a living faith in Jesus, others will not. Those that 'succeed' will continue and may flourish. The others will wither. (The parable of the sower in Mark 4 comes to mind.)
Richard.
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