The Shortcomings of Story

October 18, 2008

Everybody’s talking about story these days. Or it seems like that sometimes. Narrative Theology and Narrative Preaching are the happening thing–the highest wisdom I can find at my college about writing is that plot governs everything from the polemical essay to the sermon–recently I’ve been bombarded from several directions with the idea that even Christianity has no meaning unless it is considered in terms of our taking place inside God’s narrative. Now don’t get me wrong. I am powerfully affected by the usefulness of all these things. I can see the power of narrative–how it moves people as a rhetorical technique, how it gives things a sense of purpose and forward movement, how it entices people to want to be inside of it when it is a grand narrative.

But I just have to question the wisdom of abandoning ourselves to narrative, of allowing, for example, that it is the meaning of Christ’s gospel. Perhaps it is the enticing reductionism of our age?

The old wisdom–or anyway the old theory–was that things like giving ‘common people’ stories of the lives of Saints, or icons portraying moments from the Bible, or meditative techniques for visualizing the stages of the passion,–the old wisdom was that all these things were useful as an introduction to Christianity. In other words, they led to something greater. They only existed because of the weakness of un-initiated minds.

Of course, this sort of wisdom sometimes led off into strange gnostic fantasies where the real ’spiritual’ believer had achieved some sort of secret knowledge unavailable to your average bear.

But I wonder if it would hurt to reconsider the value of at least part of that approach. Is there a sense in which Christianity is more than a great big story you’re invited to participate in? Is there some kind of Being to offset this manifestation of the philosophical category of Becoming?

The problem with story, you see, is that because it is an accommodation to our conceptual capacities, it shares the limits of those capacities. If Christianity is only a story, then the fundamental problem for someone who is not a Christian is how to get them to want to be part of the story. And in order to get them to that desired point, something other than the mere storiness of this story is required. It is surely the actor in this story, and the teleological structure of this story that’s really important: God and his glory. Maybe the story is just the setting for the jewel?

I love story–and I’m taking its power to heart, especially as I experiment with writing Crucible, my first book (a sort of introduction to Christianity through imaginary monologues from certain Bible characters)–but I think it’s important to keep in mind that perhaps story is a mode of knowing based on our foolishness rather than a glorious object that can be dangerously elevated to an equality with a God whose aspectual abundance bursts out from such restraints.

Posted in Communication, Culture, Faith, God, Narrative, Truth

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