Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

I like to think of the Eucharist as “a tale of two feasts,” encompassing the grand sweep of salvation history. The Passover/Exodus echoes root the church deeply in the ancient covenant narrative of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The prospective dimension of the feast looks forward to the end-time banquet, celebrating the final victory over death, announced poetically in Isaiah 25:6–8. When I participate in the Eucharist, I participate in the sweeping metanarrative that runs from Exodus to New Creation. According to Robert W. Jenson, recovering the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper and its surrounding liturgy may be the single most important task for any church that wants to communicate with the postmodern world.696 Jenson points out that postmodern people no longer inhabit a “narratable world.” (Recall our discussion, in chapter 5, of postmodernism as the loss of the “grand narrative.”) For postmodern thinkers, there is no big-umbrella story under which all humanity can shelter. There is no overarching coherence to world history. Accordingly, the claim of the Christian gospel frequently falls on deaf ears. In this context, Jenson offers a thoughtful response: “If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.”697 How, exactly, can the church be the embodiment of a narrative world? Through the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, which symbolizes and enacts the great drama of Scripture, the true story...