This article was originally published on Proboha.cz.
As a kid, I loved stories about Spider-Man. But the web-slinging hero didn't captivate me because he gave clear, black-and-white answers — he drew me into a world I could explore with my own imagination. It was a world where I could live out my adventurous longings and wrestle with questions of good and evil in all their complexity.
Even though I prayed every night to wake up as Spider-Man the next morning, I didn't come to know the Bible or God until my teenage years. Only later did I realize that the Bible works in a very similar way — not as a cold system of rules and a single universal story with neatly applicable answers to every problem. I came to understand it as a collection of vivid human stories capable of shaping our own experience of God.
We live in an age when grand narratives no longer command much attention. The age of the Enlightenment and modernity brought the conviction that reason, science, capitalism, or Marxism — with their universal concepts — could explain the whole of reality. Experience has shown, however, that the world is far more complicated, and every attempt to flatten it ends unhappily. Isn't something similar happening in our churches too?
Because churches keep telling their grand story with a single valid solution for the world. But the picture of the world to which they're delivering this message no longer exists. How can such an approach resonate in an age that has stopped believing in grand narratives? Jean-François Lyotard, one of the key voices of postmodern philosophy, defined our era by its distrust of metanarratives. These grand narratives are failing; their truths seem too monolithic and manipulative as they try to legitimize "social and political institutions and practices, the establishing of laws, various ethics, and ways of thinking" for the future they envision so ambitiously.
So what about Christianity? For centuries it was presented as the one absolute truth. In today's society, that approach feels all the more out of place. Jesus's words, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6), can sound to secular people more like a dogmatic full stop than an opening onto a new path to God that could illuminate their particular situation.
I'm convinced that, at its deepest core and structure, the Bible is far more postmodern than it is one grand modernist metanarrative in Lyotard's sense. While churches steeped in modernist thinking rack their brains over how to reach a pluralistic society, the solution may come directly from the source of Christianity itself — from the Bible, which is above all a collection of multilayered stories. From the very beginning, these stories have always resonated with the plurality of human experience.
The Bible: A Postmodern Text at the Heart of Christianity
Postmodern critique of metanarratives doesn't mean the end of all storytelling. "That doesn't mean that no story is believable any longer," Lyotard explains. "By 'metanarrative' or 'grand narrative' I mean precisely those narratives that claim a legitimizing function. Their decline in no way prevents billions of small and smaller stories from continuing to weave the fabric of everyday life." (The Postmodern Explained to Children, p. 30)
Small narratives may ultimately be more authentic than grand systems, because they reflect the diversity of human existence. If we give weight to the experiences and perspectives told in concrete situations, we open up a way of grasping the Bible and offering it to today's society so that its content can resonate again. For what is the Bible, if not a mosaic (the Greek τὰ βιβλία refers to an entire library) of stories in which individuals encounter God in utterly different contexts?
Think, for instance, of Abraham, called onto a road he doesn't know. He is invited into a new story. Moses then doubts his own calling — yet, doubts and all, he becomes a great hero. Ruth, a foreigner, finds God through loyalty and relationship, not through universal dogma. Zacchaeus is converted because Jesus calls him by name, not because of some apologetic argument that made him think, "Ah, interesting!"
The biblical stories weren't written down as a universal manual, but rather as an open invitation to transformation. Just as the Bible's heroes failed, searched, won, got lost, and were found, we too are invited to experience an authentic encounter with God in their reflection — not on the pages of a dogmatics textbook, but in our own story, which continues that of our predecessors in faith, as we read about them in the Bible.
Three Key Shifts for the Church in a Postmodern World
How can this understanding of the nature of the biblical witness move the church toward greater clarity and relevance?
1. From Dogma to Stories
The dialogue the church enters through its activity in society can no longer rest on the principle of "We have the truth, and you must accept it." Airtight logical arguments aren't enough. Sharing a personal experience of God, by contrast, isn't imposing truth but inviting others into a shared search. The deepest transformation of our personhood, where the Holy Spirit touches the human heart, doesn't happen on the level of the intellect but in lived experience — experience we can then tell to others, learning in the process to see our own lives from a new perspective.
2. From Argument to Authenticity
Postmodern generations are like the apostle Thomas — they won't believe until they see. Where does Christianity actually lead, what kind of lives do we live in the church? When we talk about forgiveness, do we even know what it looks like in practice? When we say "God is love," can we spell that love out practically through our own lives? If the church preaches humility while its people behave arrogantly, who would still take it seriously?
3. From Control to Trust in the Holy Spirit
The modernist effort to hold the world within one specific interpretation is marked by a drive for control and, in society, tends toward totalitarianism. Something similar can happen to the church if it pours all its energy into fighting culture wars. We need to admit that the church doesn't have answers to everything — and that this is okay. If we can let the Holy Spirit take the helm, he, as a person of the Trinity, works in ways we often don't have under our control.
The Gospel as an Invitation into a Story
These three shifts have the potential to transform the church so that it can once again become relevant to our times. The church is nothing more than a group of disciples following their Master. And Jesus simply wasn't a dogmatist. He didn't teach a system of arguments — he told stories, parables. More often than not, he asked questions rather than serving up universal answers on a silver platter. Likewise, the Bible, our main source of information about Jesus, is overwhelmingly a collection of stories. The gospel we tell our coworkers, family, or neighbors today needs to grasp and live out all of this anew. The gospel is not a manifesto of universal, impersonal formulas, but an open invitation to step into God's story from the concrete vantage point of one's own life.
Postmodern people don't need perfect systems. We've had plenty of those already. What they need is to see transformed lives that inspire them. And that is precisely where the biblical story proves stronger than any ideology.
