(Ir)religiosity

From my discussions on this issue, Christians are very quick to say that Christianity is a metanarrative....a bit less quick to have a reason why this is so.....I think in general (no matter where you stand on the issue) it seems to be the case that Christians have been trained to read their Bibles as though it were one, totalizing metanarrative: A personal God who has a plan for all of history.

I think that this may be the case; this view is not without support in both the Hebrew scriptures and then the "New"/Christian Testament. But I do think that there is also a good deal of support to suggest that Christianity is not a metanarrative. One such case is Paul's view of the spirit. Christianity is centrally a movement of the spirit. Paul clearly replaces law with spirit. The spirit is central to both corporate and individual expressions of worship, spiritual growth, and faith. But the spirit is ambiguous. Paul doesn't define it very well, he leaves it open-ended. Purposely, I think, in order to advance freedom over and above legalistic obligations.

Another evidence is the approach that the New Testament theologians have toward the Hebrew Scriptures: they recontextualize the Jewish stories to fit the new era of Christ. The implication is that each new generation must follow suit, recontextualizing the stories of the past in order to advance the work of the spirit in the present.

This emphasis on spirit and recontextualization leads me to ask this question:
If we totalize the Christian story, if we convert it into a metanarrative, what happens to the centrality of the spirit (who seems to be radical, open, and dynamic)? Secondly, whose metanarrative do we believe? (Because, after all, if you gathered together all of the leading theologians into one room, each would have a different metanarrative! =)

I don't know if it's a metanarrative in the sense that Lyotard speaks of metanarratives. I haven't read "The Postmodern Condition," but in the brief secondary literature I've read, I understand a metanarrative to be something that attempts to be self-justifying. I think if we give faith the dynamic role that it deserves/needs, Christianity doesn't purport to be self-justifying. Certainly there are kinds of Christianities that would offer themselves up as self-justifying, but I don't think it is always the case for Christianity.

Maybe there's more to explore here. I like your idea of a new category, but I'm fresh out of creativity.

That's a great point, David. I don't believe the Christian story -- at least as it is to be reified in a postmodern context -- to be either self-legitimizing or foundationalist. It just is. And on a certain level it is absurd to even talk about it outside of type of communal embodiment that exemplifies its transformative and very odd way of being in the world.

Sometimes I wonder if the project of onto-theology is foundationalist. There are definitely some expressions of the Christian faith that I admire and "subscribe to" that aren't foundationalist, but I wonder what the dominant expression of the Christian faith is. I suppose we need to have some kind of statistical evidence to talk about this, because our experiences are inevitably too limited. Having said that, it my experience, it seems like many Christians I know have a vague sense of foundationalist belief, even if it isn't articulated exactly in those terms. Maybe this is just because I've mostly lived in very conservative areas my entire life.

Still, I wonder if the project of an onto-theology is necessitated by foundationalist claims. I'm not sure, and I'm a little over my head in even bringing up this Heideggerian terminology. But I guess it's food for thought.

I think you're right. I don't really have enough technical knowledge to talk about it in depth either, but based on my experience and background, which sounds very similar to yours, it seems that any onto-theology will necessarily be foundationalist by virtue of the metaphysics it acquiesces its theology to. That's one reason why I'm really drawn some of the discussions (John Caputo, for example) going on in the continental philosophy world surrounding what a theology might like after Heidegger and after metaphysics proper.

Metanarrative all the way. Not because, as you said, it is controlling, or domineering in anyway. But because it allows us to see the interconnectedness of everything. It's not that we all should be doing the same things or believing in exactly the same way. That's not how I see the metanarrative. I see it much as a reminder that we cannot separate ourselves from Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, nor can we separate ourselves from those in Darfur, or those in China, or those in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan. We are all living in the same story in different places. Christ's liberating message will be different for different people in different contexts, but it is still Christ's message, and it is still the Christian story.

I'm with you...sort of. I agree about the interconnectedness and the message of liberation and how it will look very different depending on the context. It's probably more semantics for me than anything else. It just bothers me that when we label it as a metanarrative we are forced, by the nature of that term, to compare it with the more violent and totalizing narratives of modernity (the hegemony of reason, faith in human progress, deference to global neo-liberal capitalism and so on). That's why I find myself looking for a different category that holds together the redeeming qualities of both meta- and micro-, as something that is both universal and localized. To me, that is closer to doing it justice. But I definitely get what you're saying. I guess the question is how to maintain the tension between context and universality.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from. I hadn't really encountered the term metanarrative in another context than that of God's metanarrative for the world, so I'm not dealing with any other baggage with the word. And that makes a LOT of difference!

I actually incorporated the concept of metanarrative into my project for Bryan's class. My demographic was rural, Southern young people, and I believe part of the gospel for them is the understanding of metanarrative AS interconnectedness rather than the ethno- and geocentric understanding they've been brought up with.

So maybe metanarrative is only a helpful idea in certain situations?