REstory 2: Courageously Considering the Contrasts
Story A and Story B: different narratives have different views of God hidden inside them
Last week I asked us to consider the possibility that we have been off track concerning what God is like and what God wants in the world. What if churches have put their focus and emphasis in the wrong place?
Today I will begin to unpack the “what next” questions that unfold from last week’s video. Please know that every paragraph in today’s email could be its own post! There is delicious, deliberate depth to come, but today we are still on the surface, unfolding the permission to see how these stories are different, and honestly name how those differences will become the lenses that we use to interpret everything else.
((In case you didn’t have time last week, you’re going to want to watch the video (you can find the video linked in this post) before you keep reading))
The illustration with the chairs helps us x-ray the assumptions hiding inside the stories we’ve inherited. Is God apart from humans until Jesus convinces God to be reconciled to us (Story A)? Is God pursuing humans to dwell among them (Story B)? Is God like Jesus? The visual contrast helps us realize that different groups have been taught to summarize Jesus’s work in the world differently, and that we need to give each other the space to investigate how we were taught to summarize those narratives. This post will name five significant contrasts between assumed stories about God.
First, the illustration with the chairs underlines that different ways of telling these stories have different views of GOD as their foundation. Story B has a more focused view of revelation than Story A — meaning it is Jesus who reveals God to the world. Our lens for God should always be Jesus — it is Jesus who shows us what God is really like. When we hear Jesus say in John 14 that “if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father,” we are invited to adjust our assumptions about God if our mental pictures of God don’t match up with Jesus.
Another way that Story A and Story B are different is what they present as the primary attributes of God. Story A often insists that “holiness” is God’s primary attribute, saying that God is too holy to be near sinful humans. However, this is a distorted definition of holiness — defined by distance — as if human sin might infect God. Unfortunately, this view is often (sincerely) portrayed by a drawing of two cliffs separated by a chasm, with humanity on one side and God on the other. In that caricature, the chasm represents sin that separates humans from God, and Jesus on the cross serves as a bridge across the chasm. That caricature is built on misinterpretations of Romans 3.23, Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, Habakkuk 1.13, and the whole book of Leviticus, among other passages.1
However, in Story B the primary attribute of God is faithful love. Since Jesus shows us what God is like, Jesus is demonstrating the radical faithfulness of God’s love — a God who pursues living among humans, even when humans kill God. Story B is not denying holiness or perfection; at the end of Matthew 5 Jesus says “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect,” but this comes right after he has just described how the definition of loving enemies is God’s own sending of rain and sun on the just and the unjust! Jesus’ life lived among regular people testifies to God's desire to live among regular people, suggesting a reversal of the assumed direction of the contagious flow of God’s holiness.
A third significant contrast between Story A and Story B is their approach to sin or evil in the world. Many of us who were raised with Story A were also taught that any gospel that sounds too loving probably “doesn’t take sin seriously.” But that is simply not true. In Story A, sin is an individual legal record that needs to be pardoned or punished.2 That’s just too small. Story B helps us see a much larger view of sin and destruction in the world that includes pervasive multi-generational selfishness and structural violence that need to be healed. Healing comes through presence and attachment, not punishment and detachment.
A fourth major contrast between these two narrative summaries is how they practically shape daily human life and choices. If in Story A Jesus HAD to die in order to trigger God’s forgiveness, that becomes a one-off transaction to appease God, and it’s hard for me to practically imitate that forgiveness. BUT in Story B, if God-IN-Jesus through the cross AND resurrection is defeating death with extravagant co-suffering love, I can learn to imitate that love, and begin to learn that forgiveness, even in the face of violence.3
So the first four contrasts are: 1) revelation (in Story B God is like Jesus), 2) God’s primary attribute (In Story B it is faithful love instead of holiness defined by distance), 3) what’s wrong in the world (Story B sees evil as much larger than individual sin records), and 4) daily ethics (instead of a transaction, Story B gives us a love we can learn). And I’ll mention a fifth contrast.
Because it is usually at this point in the conversation that someone who is listening deeply will ask, “Wait, what is the point of it all then???” Because that person, like many of us, has been told that “salvation” is The.Main.Idea. We have been taught that personal “salvation” was the point of everything, and the only question that mattered was “Where will you go when you die?” That meant that “salvation” was often defined as the eternal destination of individuals, and the goal was to avoid hell. But we need to widen the scope, because that understanding of salvation is entirely too small.
If we have been taught the assumption that personal salvation is THE main point, then we have already made the scope too tiny. Salvation is much bigger than individuals avoiding hell. Salvation is not hard for God. We will continue to unpack this next week, but for now let me say that salvation is not God’s ultimate goal. Instead, salvation is penultimate. (Penultimate means something that comes before the Ultimate).
What God’s ultimate goal is — what God really wants — is to transform us into a new humanity who love neighbors and enemies. That’s hard — that’s the real challenge, and that’s the End Goal (the telos in Greek). That is God’s big idea — the urgent plea to love each other is thick throughout the New Testament. Forming a new humanity who love neighbors and enemies is God's Ultimate goal.4
This is a different story than the one I inherited. Whatever we think the “main point” or the “ultimate goal” of the story is will become the lens that we use to evaluate the rest of scripture and the reality around us. God-in-Jesus is demonstrating a love so faithful that it is willing to suffer (and even be killed) in order to defeat death with life, teaching us to imitate that selfless pursuing presence of God. Then with that God’s Spirit inside us, we can begin to learn to move our chairs towards others.
We will discuss “holiness” in the Hebrew Bible in another post.
In some groups, the “individual sin record” comes as a result of the doctrine of “Original Sin,” in which all humans are born totally depraved because humanity is already corrupted with Adam’s Sin. Check out Danielle Shroyer's book Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place to engage a helpful corrective the harmful doctrine of Original Sin.
The main point of the Christ-hymn of Philippians 2 is that Jesus’s self-emptying shows us the self-emptying of God, and that we are invited to imitate that self-emptying. See Michael Gorman's book Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology . Changing our assumptions about atonement theories brings profoundly richer resources for forgiveness among humans, and I will write more on forgiveness in another post. However, it is super important to say here that imitating Jesus does NOT mean submitting to someone else’s harm or manipulation. Please find support near you for enforcing boundaries to protect yourself from abuse and neglect.
This perspective on penultimate/ultimate goals of God is from Michael Gorman's book The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A Not-So New Model of the Atonement. I waited for the gifts within this book for ten years, and I am deeply grateful.
In Matthew 7:13-14, the gate is often interpreted as a symbol of salvation, and because it’s small, only a few will access. I think this is one reason Story A focuses so heavily on salvation being THE point.
However, perhaps the gate is Love—which is supported by much of the Gospel and NT teachings. Love is the “greatest command”because it requires so much of us (I Corinthians 13). It is harder to love than to be saved because we have to DO it, not GET it; yet, God and God-in-Jesus gives us examples of how to show it, give it, act it, etc., if only we are willing to look at the Story through lens B.