Month: August 2026

TADB 165: The Missing Context for the Gospel

John Eldredge, in his book Epic, suggests that our lives are torn pages from a book — we hold onto our pages, desperately seeking the rest of the story. Even though the prevailing dogma shouts that there is no grand Story, only little ones, we know deep in our hearts that there is more. God has written His story into our hearts, and we are restless until we discover it.

The postmodern mind rejects metanarrative, but its insistence that only our little stories matter never quite fills that deep hunger to be part of something bigger.

Epic Story

Every great story has certain elements. It starts with “once upon a time” and ends with “and they lived happily ever after.” In between, the story contains love, adventure, danger, heroism, romance, a villain, unlikely heroes, insurmountable odds, hope, sacrifice, and finally, the victory of good over evil. The metanarrative of the Bible—God’s Story, what many have called “His-Story”—is the Story from which all others are but copies.

The biblical metanarrative is best understood as an epic love story: a story that includes kingdom, covenant, redemption, and restoration, all flowing from God’s desire to dwell with and be loved by His people.

A relational God of love created humanity to know and experience that love. But when mankind was created, the Story was already underway. “In the beginning” of Genesis 1 is not the beginning of the Story. The biblical drama begins before humanity ever enters the stage. By the time Adam and Eve appear, a rebellion is already underway and a conflict is already raging.

Since Satan could not defeat God, he turned his attention to those created in God’s image. He introduced a lie that cast God’s love and goodness into doubt — and the first humans believed it. As any parent knows, you cannot demand love. It must be freely given, or it isn’t love at all. Mankind, like Satan before them, rejected God’s parental love and joined the rebellion, losing our place in God’s epic love story.

Without this biblical metanarrative, the gospel becomes detached from history — an existential experience, a little story disconnected from the grand Story. Without the grand Story, the gospel turns inward until it becomes little more than “it’s all about me.”

Severed from its historical roots, the gospel casts Christ as a cosmic genie rather than the King of His kingdom. An ahistorical gospel — one cut off from its historical roots — reduces the good news to a tool for self-improvement rather than the power that transforms lives and transfers people into Christ’s kingdom.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a concept floating in time and space. It is firmly anchored in a grand metanarrative that runs from Genesis to Revelation.

For centuries, the biblical metanarrative provided the cultural framework of Western civilization, even among many who never personally embraced Christianity. But those days are over. For the first time in American history, large portions of the population are growing up without the Christian metanarrative as their default cultural framework.

Postmodernism, as a gospel pathogen, has eroded the biblical metanarrative through direct challenge and quiet neglect. For the unchurched, postmodernism has stripped away this rich heritage, leaving people with nothing larger than their own personal story. When the gospel gets filtered through a therapeutic, self-help lens, the Story of God shrinks into a resource for personal fulfillment — and the King becomes a life coach.

As a result, we can no longer assume our gospel audience has the context to understand what we’re saying. Many have never read the Bible, know little of its storyline, and carry only fragments of Christian vocabulary. If we assume the metanarrative, we may be communicating words without communicating meaning. Like the first-century evangelists, we need to firmly anchor the gospel in the grand Story if it is to be understood.

Gospel Expansion and the Story

If recovering the biblical metanarrative is important, we should ask how the first Christians introduced the gospel to people with very different worldviews. Fortunately, Luke gives us several case studies in Acts.

As the gospel spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria to the nations (Acts 1:8), it reached three distinct audiences: Jews, God-fearers, and Gentiles. Each group brought a different metanarrative to the conversation. Luke records how the gospel and its backstory were presented to each one.

Jews and Ethnic Hebrews

Our first recorded message came from Peter on the Day of Pentecost. Before he says a word about Jesus, he develops the metanarrative from the prophet Joel. Once he has reminded his audience of their Old Testament storyline, he connects it to the gospel of Jesus the Nazarene — and as he tells of Jesus, he repeatedly returns to King David and the promise of a coming Redeemer.

God-fearers

In first-century Roman culture, some Gentiles had abandoned polytheism for the Jewish God, Yahweh — accepting Him without fully adopting Jewish practice, particularly circumcision. Cornelius, a centurion from Caesarea, was such a man. Through a series of visions, Peter is sent to him with the good news of Jesus of Nazareth (Acts 10). Although Cornelius already knew the Old Testament storyline, Peter is careful to link Jesus to the prophets who had foretold exactly what was now happening. Jesus wasn’t the beginning of the story — He was its convergence.

Gentiles

One of the clearest Gentile audiences in Luke’s account is Paul’s address to the men of Athens on the Areopagus (Acts 17:22–34). Unlike the previous two groups, these men had no Old Testament backstory to draw from. So before Paul introduces his main subject — Jesus — he carefully lays out the biblical metanarrative in terms his audience could follow. He starts with their altar to an “unknown god,” builds the creation story, establishes God’s transcendent nature, and then develops His right to judge the world for its unrighteousness.

Then he introduces Jesus of Nazareth as the One in whom Yahweh’s grand narrative reaches its climax.

Paul didn’t assume his audience had a correct picture of the God he was proclaiming. The response was mixed — some scoffed, some wanted to hear more, and some believed (Acts 17:32–34). But his metanarrative created the platform on which the gospel could stand.

The gospel is not primarily an invitation to make Jesus part of our story. It is God’s invitation to become part of His.

The Jesus Film

One of the most successful gospel presentations of our era is The Jesus Film, sponsored by CRU. This adaptation of the Gospel of Luke, launched in 1979, has been translated into more than 1,800 languages and seen by billions of people across every kind of cultural metanarrative.

Anticipating both pre- and post-Christian audiences, the film doesn’t begin with Luke’s opening chapters. It begins with the metanarrative of God and creation.

The preamble opens with God as Creator of the cosmos and of humanity, made in His own image. Satan enters the story, tempting Adam and Eve to rebel and go their own way. God — loving and just — must deal with their sin, and the result is separation from Him and exile from His presence. The Old Testament story, from Abraham to David to the prophets, traces the promise of a coming Messiah who will reunite God with His image-bearers.

“Who was this Messiah?” That question hangs in the air — and the film answers it by launching into Luke’s account of Jesus and His kingdom.

Increasingly, our neighbors look more like Paul’s audience in Athens than Peter’s audience in Jerusalem. Many have never opened a Bible, know little of its story, and carry only scattered fragments of Christian vocabulary. If we assume the metanarrative, we risk speaking words that carry no meaning for the person listening.

Coming Next — The Internal Challenge to the Metanarrative

How we read and study the Bible ultimately affects how we share the gospel.  We can know the parts but miss the story.

For Reflection

1.  Why do people naturally seek a larger story that gives meaning to their lives?

2.  How does postmodernism’s rejection of metanarratives affect the way people hear the gospel?

3.  What happens when the gospel is disconnected from the larger biblical story?

4.  How does seeing the Bible as one unified story change the way we read Scripture?

5.  In what ways can Christians unintentionally present Jesus as a “cosmic genie” rather than a King?

6.  How can we help others understand the gospel within God’s larger story?

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TADB 164: Postmodernism and the Loss of God’s Story

The Theory of Everything (TOE)

Physicists have spent decades searching for a Theory of Everything — a single explanation that unites all the forces and laws of the universe. Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life looking for it.

But what if the ultimate explanation of everything is not an equation but a story?

What if reality is best understood through God’s story — a metanarrative that explains who we are, why we are here, what has gone wrong, and where history is headed?

As science continues to search for the Theory of Everything, postmodern thinkers have given up on the idea that such a thing exists. Their claim is that there is no grand narrative — perhaps in science, but not in life. People have only individual stories.

Within every heart

King Solomon, who wrote Ecclesiastes, conducted his own search for a Theory of Everything. What ultimate experience would give life real meaning? His conclusion after trying everything: God has put eternity — the desire for ultimate meaning and purpose — in the heart of every person, yet we cannot find it apart from God (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

The longing is universal. The Story that answers it is not.

While other pathogens attack the gospel itself, this one attacks the gospel’s context. Postmodernism doesn’t just reject Christianity; it dissolves the narrative grammar needed to understand it. It rejects the very idea that there is one true story explaining reality. When the metanarrative disappears, the gospel becomes just another personal opinion rather than God’s explanation of the world.

When the metanarrative disappears, the gospel shrinks. The King becomes merely a Savior. The Kingdom becomes a personal afterlife. The story of God’s restoration of creation becomes a story about my private spiritual experience

Denying a grand metanarrative, postmodernism encourages people to discover, define, and express themselves — to find meaning in the existential moment, since there is nothing larger to belong to. The gospel offers something different: an answer to the deep questions that everyone carries, not always consciously or all at once, but always there, pulling us toward the eternal. Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?

What is a metanarrative?

A metanarrative is a grand, overarching story that claims to explain reality for everyone.

Postmodern thinkers grew skeptical of all such claims. Instead of one true story, they favored many smaller stories. Instead of universal truth, they emphasized personal perspective. And instead of certainty, they embraced ambiguity.

The metanarrative of the gospel is what God was doing from Genesis 3 through the incarnation. Biblical history is not a parenthetical account of a small minority people. It is God preparing the way for the promised Redeemer, Messiah, and King — and it is Jesus announcing that the wait was over.

The gospel is not merely a story within God’s story; it is the climactic announcement of God’s story. Yet most of our gospel presentations have little connection to God’s grand story. We have, perhaps without realizing it, fallen for the postmodern pathogen ourselves — making our little stories the main story. The gospel cannot be understood apart from its metanarrative. Since our postmodern audience either lacks that metanarrative or carries a distorted version of it, an effective gospel presentation must connect to the grand story. The Gospel of the Risen King is unapologetically a metanarrative.

Postmodernism — Suspicion

Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” In plain terms, people stopped trusting the big stories that claimed to explain everything. That suspicion didn’t stay in the academy. The claim that metanarratives are harmful or irrelevant infected the Church and quietly reshaped how we understand and present the gospel.

Silently, the pathogen eroded the biblical storyline. Generations raised within a Catholic or Protestant worldview began to lose it. As people drifted from church attendance, they drifted from a biblical metanarrative as well — until, as George Barna notes, only 10% of Americans now hold what could be called a genuinely biblical worldview.

Without His Story, the questions don’t go away. They just get different answers. Identity becomes self-constructed. Purpose becomes personal fulfillment. Destiny becomes self-direction.

The questions remain. Only the Story has disappeared.

Postmodernism’s antidote: His Story

Here is the irony postmodernism cannot escape: the claim that no metanarrative is valid is itself a metanarrative. Postmodernism doesn’t eliminate the competition between grand stories — it simply enters the contest with its own.

The gospel has always entered cultures that already possessed their own explanations of reality. Missionaries quickly discovered that evangelism was never simply about introducing Jesus. It was about inviting people to exchange one story for another. The same challenge confronts us today.

If postmodernism has dismantled the biblical metanarrative and replaced it with its own, the answer is not to abandon the category of grand story. It is to tell a better one — the true one.

The biblical metanarrative insists that history is neither random nor cyclical. It is moving in a sovereign direction toward a climax in which God will restore and reunite heaven and earth.

Which leaves each of us with a haunting question: Whose story are we in — ours or His?

The biblical metanarrative is not merely the story of Israel. It is the story of the Creator revealing Himself and preparing the way for the promised Redeemer. Those two themes—God’s self-revelation and God’s promise of redemption—run like twin threads through the entire Old Testament and converge in Jesus.

We will explore those themes in our next article.

For Reflection

  1. How would you explain “metanarrative” to someone unfamiliar with the term?
  2. In what ways does postmodern culture encourage people to create their own identity, purpose, and meaning?
  3. Do you agree that postmodernism attacks the context of the gospel rather than simply the content of the gospel? Why or why not?
  4. Why is it difficult to understand the gospel apart from the larger story of Scripture?
  5. What happens when Jesus is presented merely as a personal Savior rather than as the promised Messiah and King within God’s unfolding plan?
  6. How does the biblical metanarrative answer the questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?