Meta-Narratives and the Christian Worldview

Meta-narratives are generally defined as a comprehensive explanation of historical meaning, experience or knowledge, which offers a society, culture, or movement legitimization through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea.

One of the chief characteristics of post-modernity is a incredulity towards meta-narratives based upon the belief that they are created and reinforced by power structures seeking self-validation and are therefore untrustworthy.

I am not necessarily adverse to this critique of meta-narratives insofar as it rightly addresses the issue of grand stories told by a group of people in order to legitimize a particular worldview or privilege.

However, I do believe that meta-narratives are fundamentally useful and should not be dismissed offhand but rather critiqued on the basis of how close they correspond to known reality.

Nevertheless, meta-narratives are too often used for social and epistemic validation and are the driving force buttressing a particularly cherished worldview.

Christianity, of course, has its own meta-narrative told through the stories of the Bible, the person of Jesus, and the Gospel message. However, the main difference between the Christian narrative and most others is that instead of a meta-narrative propping up a worldview, Christianity is a narrative in search of a worldview. It's a complete reverse. Christianity already has a definitive, over-arching story to be told and understood; it is not telling new stories in order to validate a pre-existing social order or conception. At most, Christians are continually re-examining the established story in hopes of creating a worldview and social order that corresponds with the narrative.

This is why telling the grand narrative of God's redeeming work to our children is so central to establishing  a proper worldview for Kingdom work. Without a proper foundation in a proper, grand narrative, children will develop worldviews (usually unauthentic, self-serving worldviews) and then seek the stories, the narratives, and the "truths" that seems to best validate that worldview. The worldview is now buttressing the ego.

Ultimately, all false narratives crack and eventually crumble when unavoidably confronted with reality, casting doubt upon the worldview and threatening the individual's self-validating conception.

It is at this critical juncture that the individual has a choice: either 1) to pursue the truth in the submission of the self towards a relationship with God in Christ and adopting the proper meta-narrative or 2) to try continuing with a false, deteriorating narrative with spurious thinking, self-justification, cognitive dissonance, and a reprobate mind.