Big Narrative

NT Wright on the Big Narrative

Almost everybody in today’s world is living on an implicit narrative that says that the modern world came of age in the enlightenment era. We can now make and do things. We are the super race, so we run the rest of the world, and if they do things we do not like, we tell them off, or go and drop bombs on them, or whatever. Even the people who are trying to subvert that narrative are subverting from within the narrative, so you get westerners going around saying “We in the West are so wicked, we should be doing this”, because there is no other narrative.

The ultimate post-modern thing is that you collapse the narrative, and then all you do is look inwards and you play with electronic toys.

As human beings we function best in the big narrative, and the bible gives us that.