MysteriousFaith

Story - Friend or Foe?

Looking for a break from studying this week I took some time to read a message board I frequent and saw this quote:

“What if faith is a story? A true story not a myth, of God’s unending love for humanity and our restless wandering away from that love. A story of the brokenness that the wandering bring. A mystical story of God’s supernatural natural power and beyond human love that can transform even the most broken situations.

How would that change the way we view and use Bible? The way we share faith with others? The way we live?

Would the Bible be more than a book of facts and legal rules of how to get into heaven? Would sharing faith be more about helping others to find themselves in the great story? Would people of all cultures and nations find the connections of their stories with the great story? Would living for God mean following Jesus pattern of living deeply into the story, until the biblical story becomes the story we live? Would faith be tied to prosperity or would the poor see themselves in this story of faith?”

These words are commonly employed within the Emergent movement; however, they have left me confused over what I believe is the mistake of using admittedly poetically rich words for intellectual questions (some those the texts themselves propose and others that are created by the machinations of fundamentalists). The use of “story” is one of the predominant techniques the Emergent church is using to define its theology from that of mainstream evangelicals and their more fundamentalist brothers. I deeply wish I found it more sustaining; to me, the central role story plays in statements like that above are like a French pastry – beautiful to look at, savory at the first bite, but ultimately empty and insufficient if one wishes to be sustained only on pastry!

I wonder when I read something like this several things: would those making the proposition in the first sentence be equally willing to test the opposite (i.e. what if faith is just a story, not true, but has value because story serves as a mediating metaphor for people to find resonating value, or a means of reflecting on the internal dimension to their lives through symbolism / metaphors / allegory)? We fear losing the historicity of our beliefs out of fear of what we can not know (eternal security, fate of the soul, etc.) and as an inevitable consequence of this, by elevating facts (story inevitably does this – it is a weaker version of fundamentalism – it still says this / our story is superior) above transcendence. Story is a last means of defending sacred texts from fundamentalists who, by taking them literally, expose them to scrutiny they are unable to withstand. Perhaps missed most by people such as me is this point: story has value because we all need means by which we can wrap questions of meaning, purpose and change around. Story does this most effectively for the masses. Philosophy does this most effectively for others (yours truly being among them). So story has value; however, story is being misapplied and misunderstood as it is used in this comment and as many in the Emergent movement apply it. Story is used as putty by which inadequacies and contradictions can be glossed over. In doing this, or in any situation where story hides certain facts from being tested and held to standards of factual accountability, it is ineffective in becoming a viable tool against fundamentalism or the milder form of conservative evangelicalism common in America. Wherever we find story being used in this way it only buttresses the illogic that predated the Enlightenment, leading to the cries “Remember the Cruelties” where religion could not prevent itself from over-reaching.

N.T. Wright was brought into the discussion so let us apply this question to his third volume in his COQG series: Wright would have us believe the only reasonable explanation for the rise of the church is that what the church claimed as real, specifically the resurrection of Christ, was in fact real. Fair enough; a well established apologetic defense for the historicity of the resurrection is on the table. Let us subject it to the same logic, but reversed: what if this was just a story? Could we ever conceive of a situation where someone coming back from the dead would be “the most reasonable explanation?” Certainly not. Coming back from the dead is unreasonable by its very implausibility. No amount of evidence would ever make it the most plausible explanation (hence the need for faith as that which makes what is implausible and unreasonable tenable). If we go further with this we then ask if it is “most reasonable” to believe that the historicity of the church’s claims serve as viable explanations for the church’s rise. If we strip this down to its bare logic we get something like this: the notable growth of a group of people identifying themselves with a specific belief system is explainable most consistently on the basis of the specific belief system having historically happened. It should be obvious to see that this logic forces upon itself the “proof” of quite literally every organized religion in the world. Are we to believe in the various literal claims of Islam because of Islam’s rapid rise after Mohammed’s death? Are we to believe in the various literal claims of Buddha because of Buddhism’s rise after Buddha’s death? The Christian church should be able to see the fallibility of this logic most specifically by applying it to the voracious growth of Mormonism. Or, by looking at the literal claims of the church, could we more reasonably say that the story of any group of rapidly growing people who wrap themselves around a particular set of ideas is because of a variety of reasons – some of historical factualness and some of sociological significance. Again, what is more reasonable: to believe in the resurrection of someone who died as being evidence of the church’s truth (which as a logic you must be willing to apply equally to every religion), or that historical factualness (a leader, or a set of leaders, of unique insight and wisdom) and sociological significance (these leaders engaged a people desperately looking for meaning as people back in their homeland but under the foot of foreign rule and detatched from their cultural center of gravity).

The post that initiated this essay said the following: “Tell someone to do something and you change their life for a day. Tell someone a story and you change their life.” This is atrocious reasoning and a perfect example of word-smithing at its worst. “Telling someone a story” is a more subjective and more easily corrupted process than is teaching. Being factual, rational, empirical and quantitative are not necessarily inconsistent with story-telling, but they are more easily skewed and misrepresented simply because story telling is not the same as instructing. How does instructing someone on what to do only change their life for a day? What can be at best argued for is limited to valuing story as a mnemonic device of unique benefit: what people remember most is a story. On this point, and on this point alone, employing the centrality of story is right. However, the emphasis on story confuses the device (here, story) with meaning (here, story, but wrongly so). Meaning is truth and truth may be remembered by story, but story is nothing but a choice of venue.

Story is being unconsciously moved into the mainstream of cutting edge Christian theological discussions for a simple reason: it is a deliberate word choice that presents the best chance at taking two disparate camps – one who believes Christianity (as with all other organized religion) is myth and the camp that believes the statements of Christianity are all historically true. How to unite these two groups? It is no coincidence that N.T. Wright, in the midst of the English agnostic culture (even within the church itself), has developed a theology employing words, images and approaches that are designed to accommodate language that expresses some commonality with the claims that religiously historical statements are all myth. Story, seen rightly, is an attempt to coalesce those who view religious dogmas questionably with those who view those dogmas as essential. Here, again, do not make the mistake of thinking this means that myth is all bad – it can be constructive, helpful and essential to reflecting on our interior lives, our very spiritual beings. What is the piercing insight of “story” as the mediating metaphor within certain theological discussions? It is, most simply put, that if we build our language around that of “story”, religion has the best chance of surviving in a world increasingly hostile to its insights and truth claims.

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• September 1, 2005

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