Toward a Metanarrative

“This too shall pass away.” a mighty monarch was told, after he had charged his sages to come up with one grand and concise truth that would always and forever hold true. Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote a poem so entitled, and Carl Sandburg picked up on the phrase for one of his poetic gems. Every thinking person knows that change is inevitable and continuous, even so, do you think or get the feeling that there has been a huge crescendo of overall change of late?  (I do understand that many older folks’ favorite pastime is playing  “Ain’t It Awful,” but that’s not what I am doing.)

     

Change has been in constant motion since the Fall; it's rate has been sporadic. Throughout history there have been epochal changes, and I believe that for several years, our culture has been and is now experiencing exactly that. It's not just that our way of saying and doing things has changed, but in a deeper way our culture’s manner of “seeing” all things has greatly changed. Twice in the Old Testament book of Judges it is stated that everyone did what was right in his/her own eyes. In other words there was no longer an accepted grand cultural standard; no world view for determining what was right and wrong. There was no metanarrative. Actually, the people of the Book of Judges had been given a godly standard for measuring and evaluating, but many  chose not to live by it.

    

 I believe that from earliest American times right up through my childhood and youth there was something of a Judeo-Christian societal mentality and ethic overarching most of life. My high school homeroom teacher read from the Bible to our class everyday, and we prayed the Lord’s Prayer. That wasn’t because my teacher was a Christian, that was just what we did. I am quite sure those practices had been common in public schools from their beginning. (We also said the Pledge of Allegiance every day.) The “rule” calling for all that may have been de facto, but it was there. And, even from the nonreligious, there was little, if any, opposition, at least in mid-America.

      

Oz Guinness, Christian social historian and philosopher, has postulated that from somewhere in the 1960’s on, America has entered a Post-Christian Era. That is, he says, Christianity is no longer the cultural influence that it was in an earlier time.  One evidence of that was the “Sabbath” observance for almost everyone and everything. In my youth, businesses closed on Sundays as they had done historically. There was usually one gas station and one Pharmacy and perhaps a small grocery store that stayed open on Sundays, but generally commerce shut down on the “Christian Sabbath.” Was that because there were more Christians in business then than today? I think not. It is  clearly part of the big change that has come about; there is just not any overarching standard proscribing Sunday commerce.

In this post-post-modern time, there is no grand (gold) standard for determining truth and morality--there is no TRUTH; there is only truth; there is no MORALITY; there is only morality. With no overarching standard for truth and morality, we have no framework for determining purpose (teleology). So, on and down like falling dominoes it goes. We can determine what is  LAWFUL, because we have the U.S. and State Constitutions that provide a standard to measure actions and proposed legislation against. Constitutions also afford a means for change.  Lawful and moral, however, are not necessarily synonymous--abortion is lawful, but it is not moral. The point of this writing is that we have lost or been robbed of any societal, cultural, overarching, grand standard for determining what is true, moral, good, beneficial and proper for all people. By design and/or by default, Western Civilization and American culture has lost any semblance of a metanarrative that we might have had. Of course, it’s  not that we don’t have moral people and morality; there are millions who are and so live, but my point is that as the Constitution of the United States is an overarching code--a metanarrative--for what is lawful in our country, we need a universal, societal standard for measuring what is moral, just and good. This transcends a morality code by which individuals would live, important as that is, it is a call for a grand, metanarrative.

And, it just happens that a time-tested document exists that would be exactly what is needed--the Ten Commandments, which may be found in Exodus and Deuteronomy.

(“Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies, and walk in it….” Jeremiah 6:16) The Decalogue--the basis for English jurisprudence, is a summary of all the Original Law which was intertwined with God’s call upon and to Israel, to put the creation to rights, but it transcends Hebrew religion and culture. The Commandments are a perfect moral code for individual living, but they rise far above that and provide a framework for the issues of human existence. Humans have always asked: 1) Who am I? 2) What is my origin? 3) What is my purpose? 4) What is right?,etc. The Ten Commandments provide a framework for answering these fundamental issues.

     

Two truths that are very obvious from the Books of Moses are that God’s concern for His creation was multifaceted--He established standards for all of life from personal diet and health issues to family relations to governance matters as well as living with His created family in an earthly paradise. It is also very clear that one person’s sin has a polluting effect upon larger society. We should not be content with saying, “Whatever they do in the privacy of their own circle is OK….”  Humanity, Western Culture, American Society has a great need for a metanarrative, and this is a call for making The Ten Commandments that. It will start by one person  (I’ve already started.) familiarizing him/herself with The Decalogue, living by it,  and becoming an advocate of it as an overall standard for determining and measuring what is just, moral and good for all people--a TEN COMMANDMENT METANARRATIVE.