This blog is about Biblical Theology (BT). I've come to like the term metanarrative to describe BT. It's more technical that other descriptions (ex, the big picture of the Bible), but I think it's more accurate, as thinking only about the big picture causes you to miss many small stories that don't seem to connect with it. Instead BT provides a framework for reading all of the Bible, whether each small story is a part of the big story or not.
To quote Wikipedia, the source of all infallible knowledge, a metanarrative is
a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge, ... a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemes.
It's about studying the Bible to best determine how to study the Bible.
All of us have a Biblical metanarrative, even if we don't recognise it. I think there are two common, but non-deliberate metanarratives, and if you haven't studied BT before I think you'll approach the Bible with one of these.
The Old Testament (OT) is outdated: if this is your perspective you probably don't pay much attention to the OT, because the New Testament (NT) is where it's at! Those old laws and sacrifices are clearly irrelevant now, and the rest is just a bunch of Sunday school stories.
Now not everyone is quite as dismissive as that: many will say that some of the laws are timeless, and the ones that aren't can still teach us about God. Many people recognise that a lot of the OT presents analogies for what is taught in the NT, and of course the prophecies lay the ground for the coming of Jesus.
There's almost no difference between the OT and the NT: this view is probably rarer than the first, but still quite common. A lot of the time it doesn't present any problems, but once most people start reading some of the laws which instruct the stoning of their children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21 for example) they realise something is wrong with the way they read the Bibles.
These views could also be called the No Continuity and the No Discontinuity perspectives. I can't presume to know why people take these beliefs, though if they are non-deliberate, then in many cases there may be no good reason. But to speculate, I think the first has arisen because of a confusion about what "Old Testament" actually means. Now it's just the name of the Hebrew scriptures, but originally it meant "old covenant" refering to the Sinai covenant, using the language of Hebrews 8:15. It is that covenant which is called old and obselete, not the rest of the Hebrew scriptures. I think the second has arisen from the desire to affirm that all of the Bible is God's true word but without recognising that God spoke different messages to different people at different times. Instead they believe there is only one audience, us.
I believe that a good BT model will have elements of continuity and discontinuity. The question is, how do we determine what should be read with continuity? My belief is that all of the Bible was given to us in the context of various covenants. We must study these covenant agreements to determine who God made each covenant with, and it is on that basis that we can know what applies to us as Christians now.
