Tools of Judgement: Guns and Narrative Idenetities

This paper argues that within American cultural identity the gun functions as a mythic instrument of final judgment, authorizing moral and existential agency through violent force. Against this, Christian eschatological identity rejects the narrative coherence of guns. Employing narrative identity theory and narrative theology, the paper offers an applied theological assessment of firearms in American life. Part One draws on Paul Ricoeur, to show how identity-forming stories construct guns as guarantors of autonomy and justice. These narratives grant firearms an implicit eschatological status within the American imagination. Part Two turns to postliberal readings of Karl Barth and the biblical metanarrative, framed by Eden and the new creation, to argue that tools of lethal violence have no place in Christian eschatological hope. Whatever use guns have in the present is due to the conditions of sin. There is no final eschatological value for guns in the Christian story.