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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