Faith Story: How a New Faith Narrative is Revolutionising Christianity

By David Guthrie

The traditional Christian faith story encompasses creation to consummation, with the story of Jesus as its central point. However, the story as traditionally told fails at every point to be credible today. Without a credible faith story, Christianity cannot survive. What is happening is that a new narrative is arising that is radically reshaping Christianity and its future.
Faith Story looks first at why the traditional narrative has failed and the environment of ambiguity and knowing that any new narrative must meet in order to be credible. The exploration continues into the understanding of 'beginning', of human culture, of the radical reshaping of the Hebrew narrative, of Jesus and the early church, the vision of spirituality in global culture and the projection of faith into the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Guthrie
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301159796

David Guthrie

David Guthrie is a resident of Auckland, New Zealand. Ordained into the ministry of the Anglican (Episcopalian) church in 1966, married in 1967, he has served as parish priest and hospital chaplain before undertaking a major project for the Auckland health authority in 1990 and subsequently into commercial life. In 2003, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer from which he was given only a small chance of recovery. He survived, however, and now lives in the Auckland suburb of Titirangi.

Book preview

Faith Story

How a new faith narrative is revolutionising Christianity

David Guthrie

Faith Story by David Guthrie

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by David Guthrie

All rights reserved

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, recording, by information storage and retrieval or photocopied, without permission in writing from David Guthrie.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Our faith story is the upper meta-narrative of our lives, whether as individuals or communities. Without a faith story, we are nothing. The central crisis in Christianity today is that its traditional faith story has failed. The central imperative for the Christian community is to rediscover of a credible faith narrative.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Prophetic Word

Chapter 2: Ambiguity

Chapter 3: Knowing

Chapter 4: The Traditional Faith Story

Chapter 5: Legitimacy

Chapter 6: In the beginning – no beginning

Chapter 7: What is the world?

Chapter 8: The Ape becomes naked

Chapter 9: The Hebrews

Chapter 10: Jesus

Chapter 11: The Human Story

Chapter 12: The Future

Chapter 13: New Stories

Case Study

Conclusion

Introduction

At the heart of being human is a story that says who we are, how we came to be and where we are going. Every culture has its story: every religion has its story: every family and individual has their/his/her story. Without our story, we are nothing. That is why dementia is such a tragedy. The individual ceases to know past, present or imagine the future and effectively ceases to be a person at all.

We experience alienation when we lose confidence in our story or we live among a culture that does not recognise our story. It is the deepest definition of ‘tribe’ that it comprises people who share the same story. The greatest offence one can commit against one’s tribe is to call the tribe’s story into question or denigrate the story in the eyes of other tribes.

We live our lives with many different stories, running simultaneously. There is our faith story, upon which I will shortly focus. There is our culture story, which may be broad (Western European, Maori, Chinese, etc.) or narrow (our gang, our football club). There is our national story, our family story, extended or nuclear; then there is the host of stories around the many dimensions of our life such as our work, our golf or our sex.

Some stories live and die with us (some we dare not tell!). Others we share in the wish that people might be interested or learn from them. There are stories, however, that we believe it is imperative to share. They convey essential identity, values, information or principles that others, and especially the upcoming generations, must hear and embrace.

Faith stories belong to that last category. Faith story is the top-level meta-narrative of life, the story that encompasses how the universe and everything in it came to be as it is, including the story teller and the story hearer. It positions the story teller and hearer in the world, defining our place, our nature, what we are and should be, and how we relate to everything and everybody else. It states where we are going to end up, with respect to the universe and life, and specifically the destiny of the story teller and hearer.

Every person, every culture, every tribe, every family and every individual person has such a faith story. Only the very young and the intellectually disabled or demented lack such a story. ‘Religion’ is a word we use to describe adherence to a faith story, and in this sense everyone who has a faith story has a ‘religion’. The secular world has become almost obsessed with building its faith story which is why accounts of the origins and evolution of the universe and life command such attention and energy; why history interests us; why we want to know what is going to happen in the future to our planet.

Christianity, like every faith community, has its faith story and cannot exist without such a story. The story tells us how we came to be, who we are, what we are meant to do and how we are to live, and what is our destiny. This book is about the Christian faith story.

The greatest crises we face in life occur when our stories, and especially our faith stories, come under threat or collapse. We can no longer tell them because we no longer believe them. This is the real meaning of what happens when we say we lose faith. What has happened is that we have lost our connection to the faith story that used to give us our identity. In losing the story, we also lose our connection with our ‘tribe’.

This loss of story may happen suddenly, when a new fact emerges that overturns a story we had previously believed in. This happens, for example, when an adult learns that he or she was adopted as a child and not the natural offspring of his/her ‘parents’. At other times, the loss of the story may take place over a long period of gradual but progressive decay until the day comes when it is apparent that not only is the story no longer believed but also that in reality it hasn’t been believed for a long time. The outward form had been professed but the inside flesh had vanished some time in the past.

Sometimes it is just details of the story that change. We adapt to the modification, leaving the meta-narrative essentially intact. Over time, however, modifications accumulate that start to stretch the outer fabric of the meta-narrative. The fabric stretches and stretches until one day it fails, spilling all its contents into a heap of chaos, never to be restored to the old order.

Faith stories are always intimately connected to power. Within a group, a ‘tribe’, it is those who hold the keys to the faith story who wield the power. They are the ones who control who is in and who is out of the tribe. They are the ones who shape what is and what is not acceptable behaviour, what the priorities are for action. The source of all power lies in faith story. The most power resides with those who are able to command the inner adherence of the whole group to the faith story that they control. Even when power over the group rests on coercive might, the exercise of that power still demands a corps of adherents to the faith story who are willing to be agents of coercion on behalf of the power centre. The greatest threat to power comes not so much from external enemies but from erosion of belief in the faith story within the tribe. When a faith story changes, the centre of power shifts.

What is happening within Christianity today is that its traditional faith story has changed, and changed dramatically. The tensions within the faith community globally are a direct response to this change. On the one hand, there is the division between those who hold determinedly to the old story in the belief that it was divinely given and therefore cannot be changed, and those who embrace change or have lost faith in the old story. On the other hand, there is an immense power struggle as the centres that once controlled the faith story make a determined effort to retain their old power, while new power centres are growing up around new faith stories. Especially in the West, vast numbers of Christians are giving up altogether, walking way from any version of a Christian faith story.

In this book, I address the state of the Christian faith story. Put baldly, the old faith story is dead. The future of Christianity rests on whether a new faith story can be found. It is the contention here that such a new faith story can be found. It is already in existence.

Christianity tells a story and that story is the centre of our faith. It is a story that begins at the beginning of all things because it embraces the entire universe, all life, the whole of humanity. It is a story of how God came to be known to humans and, in the telling the story, establishes for us the nature of God, God’s relationship with us and presence in the world. It is our story, because we are in it, the present actors, so the story places our own lives in the context of what the universe means. Finally, it is a story of what the future holds for us and for the universe. When we tell this story, we tell our faith story.

This story as told by past generations, however, is no longer our story. The traditional story has five great ‘acts: Creation, the Hebrews (Old Testament), Jesus, the time of the Church, and finally, the Consummation and the end of all things material. In the course of the following chapters, it becomes clear that the narrative of each of these acts has changed, such that the whole story no longer looks anything like the traditional narrative.

Outside of the circle of fundamentalism, we no longer tell the story of creation as something that happened 6000 years ago, every species appearing in six days. We do not even tell the story as if some Being, 14 billion years ago, waved a wand and created matter out of nothing. We tell the story differently and out of that difference has emerged such a changed understanding of God that it has become an anachronism even to use the word, Creator.

The traditional story of the Hebrews, the narrative embodied in the Old Testament, is now seen in a completely different light and told differently. We see the way the Hebrews adopted all the elements of their faith and religious practice from other religions and cultures, especially from Babylonia but even possibly from India. Such a perception changes the way we tell the story with relation to other religions and cultures. Most dramatically, we understand the whole Hebrew story in a vastly different factual light that changes every facet of the story.

While the gospel story of Jesus remains central to the Christian narrative and our understanding of faith, yet we recognise that we see Jesus only through the eyes of later generations, not even those who knew him directly, and that they wrote, each of them, with specific agendas and points of view. We know nothing about Jesus, not even what he taught, in such a way that we can make his words and actions absolute and unambiguous. The Jesus of our contemporary faith story would barely be recognised by earlier generations.

The story of the time of the Church, the fourth great act, has been transformed by our understanding of the ambiguity of historical actions, the realities of power, the distortions of culture and the ubiquity of change. Old myths are exposed. We cannot now see the Church as once it was viewed. More particularly, however, our sense of this act of the narrative has expanded to embrace the whole of humanity, not just the church.

The most dramatic change of all is what has occurred in relation to the story as it projects into the future. Although the language of heaven may still be used, it is no longer believed. If there is a single focus to the faith crisis of the present, it is that Christianity is seen as offering nothing with respect to the future. There are no consequences that follow from whether or not we embrace or reject Christianity. Unless Christianity can recover a future dimension to its story it is finished, period.

In the chapters that follow, I will still take the structure of the ‘acts’, though adding a sixth, coming between the Beginning and the Hebrews. Before considering these acts, however, there are some critical issues to be addressed. I begin with what I believe to be the core prophetic word of God to the contemporary world and especially the Church: the overriding priority is to save humanity. In other words, this book is not about some arcane doctrinal dispute, it is not about a power struggle. It is not about the kind of right belief to get a reward from God. It is not even about whether Christianity survives or not. It is about whether humanity survives or not. The core conviction behind everything I write is that the faith story is critical to whether humanity makes it through the immense and threatening challenges of the coming century or goes under, even becomes extinct.

This is not a humanistic exercise. I am not a humanist. At the centre of the whole presentation is the life of Jesus, the God-revealer. The inescapable implication of the incarnation (if that is any more an appropriate term) is the affirmation of the place and meaning of humanity in the cosmos-as-grace. The survival of humanity is not a humanistic exercise but a mission of grace, an imperative of God.

I always have difficulty when it comes to acknowledgements because it is impossible to know where to draw a line. Decades of influences have gone into shaping the thoughts behind the words in this book. Most of those influences have so integrated themselves into my whole conceptual universe, that the connections with their sources have been lost or they have become so modified by interaction that they have become unrecognisable. Just as life itself seems to have arisen from a primeval soup of chemicals, so do our thoughts from a million influences. I thank God for my particular primeval intellectual soup!

And I thank the many, many people who have contributed to this outcome, some known to me and know me, but the vast majority unknown to me and me to them.

In particular, though, I want to acknowledge my Anglican church and the bishops and people of the Diocese of Auckland among whom I have had the privilege to serve as priest.

Chapter 1: The Prophetic Word

If we have to define one single word from God addressed to the Christian community it is this: save humanity. Across the whole face of the globe, excepting nowhere, humanity faces a tsunami of threats that can destroy all vestige of civilised society as we know it today, and potentially wipe out our entire species. This we know even if we do everything we can to avoid facing the facts. The word to save humanity is not a secular cry to save the planet. It is not an environmentalist political agenda. It is a prophetic word and it is rooted in the gospel vision.

At the centre of Christianity stands the vision of the incarnate Christ – God in human flesh. The gospel message is that God becomes human. There are billions of species on the planet, let alone what might exist throughout the universe. Of all those billions of species, present or extinct, God manifested grace in one – homo sapiens.

We do not know the purpose of the physical world, if indeed it has a purpose. All we can affirm is that grace was made known to the universe in the human species. Humanity plays a significant role in whatever the universe means. If, in our stupidity and willfulness, the human species becomes extinct, grace will not be defeated. In another billion or so years, there may yet evolve a new species capable of revealing grace. But at this moment, we are who we are. Our destiny, our