The world is flat

Thomas Friedman's new book The World is Flat is fascinating isn't it?


It of course restates what Giddens, Castells, himself in Lexus and the Olive Tree, et al have said about globalization, the networked society, and all the implications of globalization on the economy, national and self identity. Doubtless, Friedman has some updated insights.

More interesting to me are the implications of changing conditions in the world for the church, its identity and its mission. In a flatten-ed out world where there are exchanges of old myths and stories and the propogation of new interactively mediated myths (such as narratives found in MMORPGs), can the claims of particularity be upheld in a way which is not arrogant while remaining compelling and persuasive?

Connecting the grand narrative to every day life

Eugene Peterson has a wonderful book entitled Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work where he explores the work of pastors in proclaming that Christian metanarrative at the pulpit and then having the challenging task of helping even those who feel excluded from that narrative connect to that larger narrative, which is the history or the story of God's salvation in space and time.



Peterson's book explores how the Megilloth (the five books which form "The Scrolls" in Jewish tradition, the five being Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther) can be fruitfully explored to guide the five critical tasks of pastors: 1)Prayer-directing, 2)story-making, 3)pain sharing, 4)nay-saying and 5) community building.

The announcement in church has usually been clear enough; it is God's will to save every person, to incorporate each created man and woman into the people of God, to graft each private history into the stock of salvation history. But many disqualify themselves, supposing that their individual experience or unique circumstances exempt them from the general truth. Guilt or willfulness or accident makes a loophole, and they assume that what is true for everyone else is not true for them. They are left out. They conclude that they are, somehow, "just not religious" and so unfit to participate in the way of faith. They form negative or neurotic identities, self-understandings unrelated to God's will and love. They feel disorganized; they experience alienation; unable to comprehend their lives as connected narratives that have meaning and make sense. The pastor knows that the story of Gods revelation is a comprehensive narrative that include everyone - how can he provide the insights and incentive to get such persons to understand their own lives as chapters, or at least paragraphs, in the epic narration of God's saving history?

The means by which pastors help the hoi polloi reconnect to the biblical metanarrative would be through the agency of pastoral visitation and pastoral counselling. As would be expected, a very critical skill involved in the art of listening, for it is through listening that people reveal their stories, mundane details and all. The pastoral role is to take the details of articulated stories and try to help members make sense of their stories within the larger framework of God's creation/salvation history.

Peterson's choice of the book of Ruth is no accident too. In that story, Ruth is the outcast outside who eventually finds her place in God's salvation history, and it is through the drama of this particular story that Peterson draw's inspiration for this particular pastoral task.

Actually, this chapter raises an interesting question for me: What is the more effective way of helping people to splice their personal narratives into the larger Christian metanarrative? Through the pastoral work of proclaiming the story at the pulpit, or the pastoral work of listening to other stories and helping them to make sense of their story in the light of biblical salvation history? Which has a deeper, more long lasting and transformational effect? Why? What are implications for the educational ministries for churches?

Danger of losing the story?

"In the post-conservative, post-Christian, globally connected, pluralisitc era, local congregatons of story-formed communities face the danger of a diminished realization that they do not possess or embody the story which is supposed to form its identity and the deepest sub-conscious values of its members"

Explore this thesis.

What are the mechanisms and the pull-push factors which might contribute to this condition?

The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell)

Bill Moyers' interview with Joseph Campbell is a really powerful book/video which suggests

how myths (used in the technical sense) has power to shape values and group identity.

Greek and Latin and biblica1 literature used be to be part of everyone's education. Now, when these were dropped, a whole tradition of Occidental mythological information was lost. It used to be that these stories were in the minds of people. When the story is in your mind. then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you. With the loss of that, we've really lost something because we don't have a comparable literature to take its place. These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems inner mysteries. inner thresholds of passage, and if you don't know what the guide-signs are along the way, you have to work it out yourself. But once this subject catches you, there is such a feeling, from one or another of these traditions, of information of a deep, rich, life~vivifving sort you don’t want to give it up. Campbell, 2

The Genesis "myth" is included in Campbell's collection of myths highlighted, and if you look at the bottom of the picture, you will see the words "Bonus Interview with George Lucas on Mythology." Yes, Joseph Campbell was very interested in George Lucas's work (and vice versa) because Star Wars represents a modern powerful, almost universal narrative which captures the elements of myth. My sense is that the most pervasive, shared contemporary myths have to be those propagated through the synergistic video-gaming/movie industry -which is why I am mindful of the power of the creative, knowledge class!!!

In a postmodern society, there is a sense that all stories matter and have the same function. Grenz writes:
In a pluralistic age, belief is "in." This is a good thing. Indeed, an important contribution of our pluralistic context has been its reaffirmation of the importance of believing. Yet, many voices assert that it really doesn't make any differece what you believe so long as you believe something–anything. Therefore, we ask, "Do beliefs matter at all? Is what you believe important?"

Christian apologists argue that there must be reason to trust the story you commit yourself to. So the big question is, if the Christian myth (used in a technical sense again) makes claims to be trustworthy, what in the story is so compelling and powerful?

Lecture notes by Dr. Thomas B, Leininger

Lecture notes on how stories shape morality

Draws from Hauerwas's A Story Formed Community

Another article

http://www.insearchofworship.com/articles.html

Congregation: Stories and Structures by James F. Hopewell

http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=491&C=435

A Question of Revival

A Question of Revival - an essay by by Ed Searcy

A multimedia essay on electronic visual narratives

A multimedia essay on electronic visual narratives

Here's a paragraph from this really fascinating essay:
The media and forms of communication facilitated by computers are opening us further to persuasion by virtual experience. They change the scale and structure of our experiences. The World Wide Web goes on and on, chaotically, with virtual lives available in innumerable linked but different dimensions. Multiplicitous in its times and multimediated in its experiences, the allure of its learning far exceeds the labyrinthine library that Umberto Eco used The Name of the Rose to evoke the amazing resources of Western civilization.[29] Yet the Escher architecture of the medieval library tower surely stands also as a postmodern emblem of the coming Net(work). Internet time can be a web crawler's or spinner's, with advertisers already are scrambling to exploit its capacities for persuasion. Computer time is active and playful. Virtual gambling has some advantages over visiting the neighborhood casino. Unhappy about that? Then engage some of the Web sites with activities to alter your moods. Doing persuades, and electronic activities do more than stories.

Quotes from Naisbitt and Giddens

The New Asia, forged by economic integration, technology, especially telecommunications, travel and mobility of people, will increasingly look like one coherent region…Networks are at the core of the new global economy.

John Naisbitt Megatrends Asia, pp. 11, 21

Transformations in self-identity and globalization, I want to propose, are the two poles of the dialectic of the local and the global conditions of high modernity. Changes in intimate aspects of personal life, in other words, are directly tied to the establishment of social connections of very wide scope.

Anthony Giddens Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age p32.

Andrew Walker - Telling the story

In the modern world, this story is now either forgotten, half-remembered, distorted, fragmented, or misrepresented. (Walker 1996, 2)

There was once a time when the Christian story had few competitors in the West, and its ideological dominance was assured. Now, in a pluralistic society, it is merely one story among many in a culture which is overflowing with stories. However, in a world of ‘soaps’ and commercial advertising, where brand loyalty is notoriously difficult to establish, the stories we tell that are so crucial to our cultural identity, and which are so important in giving us values to live by, are easily disposed of or exchanged for others. (Walker 1996, 4)

Grenz, Hauerwas and Newbigin

The idea about the sociological nature of value formation that Prof Grenz espoused there is actually not that new.

Stanley Hauerwas, in his essay "A Story Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down" already wrote about the relation between character and the community socialization. The essay is found in his book A Community of character: toward a constructive Christian social ethic.


What is interesting is how he introduces the book:
My wish is that this book might help Christians rediscover that the most important social task is nothing less than to be a community capable of hearing the story of God we find in the scripture and living in a manner that is faithful to that story (1)

In the same way, Leslie Newbigin also wrote about this:

The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God’s promises concerning what will be in the end. The church affirms the truth of this story by celebrating it, interpreting it, and enacting it in the life of the contemporary world. (Newbigin 1993, 76)

I had a very interesting discussion with Edmund Chan in a Chinese restaurant in the northern suberbs of Chicago sometime in Aug or Sept 2003. We were discussing Alan Cole's article 'At the Heart of A Christian Spirituality', Reformed Theological Review, 52 (2, 1993)where Dr Cole wrote about orthodoxy, orthopraxis and orthokardia as indicators of a biblical informed spirituality. Edmund mentioned the additional need to include as a criteria, orthokoinonia.

I wrote to Dr Cole about the matter and this was his response at the end:

PS: I have been teaching for some time the need for a spirituality quadrilateral that includes orthokoinonia.

Great to know these great Christian leaders are emphasizing the same thing and setting some parameters on what might be a biblical informed ecclesiology.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that the role of a biblically informed community, ie a community that not just espouses the Biblical metanarratives but lives out the values of this narrative is critical to sustaining Christian faith.

What do our beliefs come from?

The late Stanley Grenz, professor of Systematic Theology at Regent College, Vancouver wrote in 1998:

Contemporary sociologists have discovered that what we hold to be true does not arise in a vacuum. We gain our fundamental beliefs from a variety of sources. Above all our convictions are related to the way we are socialized, the society in which we live, and what we have come to accept from what others tell us. In short, beliefs arise out of the community in which we participate.

Therefore, our quest for beliefs that sustain us leads us to search for a community that embodies the answers to life's deepest questions. And where can I find such a community of faith?

From What Christians really believe and why?, pp 18-19