What Narrative Theology Forgot
By Alan Jacobs
One of the chief
themes of the narrative theology that came to prominence in the Anglo-American
world in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the centrality of communal
experience to the life of Christ’s Church. In the work of Lesslie Newbigin,
Stanley Hauerwas, Gerald Laughlin, and many others, the “Christian story” is a
communal one: we Christians “tell God’s story,” or participate in God’s own
telling, in and through the Church. The life of the individual Christian, on
this account, makes sense and achieves meaning through participation in this
communally recounted narrative. Even the various forms of theological activity
can be redescribed in narrative terms, as when Newbigin writes of “the
congregation as hermeneutic of the gospel”: interpretation of Scripture for
Newbigin is not so much what a particular scholar writes as what a
particular community of believers enacts.
These thinkers
typically do not deny that the Christian faith makes propositional claims, but
they tend to understand such propositions as having their proper force only
within the context of the story God tells in history. “Jesus is Lord” is a
proposition, but a proposition that compels assent only when Jesus’ earthly
ministry, death, and resurrection are understood as (collectively) the pivotal
and definitive moment in the long history of God’s covenantal love for His
erring people.
This movement has
been a tremendously important and salutary one; it has had the effect of
reminding theologians of their ecclesiastical obligations, and has reminded
believers more generally of the centrality of common worship to their Christian
lives. In many cases it has energized the lives of congregations.
But something that
has, I think, been neglected in the development of this narrative theology is
the narrative dimension of individual Christian lives. This is somewhat
surprising in light of the fact that one of the key texts prompting the renewal
of narrative theology, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
(1981), is seriously concerned with the narrative integrity of a given single
life. The pivotal section of that book is Chapter 15, “The Virtues, the Unity
of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition,” a chapter that MacIntyre
describes as a “contemporary attempt to envisage each human life as a whole.”
But despite MacIntyre’s eloquent exploration of what makes a human life
coherent, theologians tended to find more compelling what he says about the
narrative coherence (or incoherence) of whole traditions.
In this light it is
significant that four years after the appearance of After Virtue came a
landmark study in the sociology of religion, Habits of the Heart. In
this book, Robert Bellah and his coauthors deployed a fascinating and
compelling range of stories testifying to the damage American individualism has
done to countless human lives and their communities. Taken together, After
Virtue and Habits of the Heart seemed to be saying that the manifest
incoherence of so many lives, including the lives of Christians, could not be
addressed at the individual level, but rather could be ameliorated only by the
careful reconstruction of communal bonds. Lives can be healed and integrated
only within such communal contexts. As Bellah and his coauthors write near the
end of their book, “We will need to remember that we did not create ourselves,
that we owe what we are to the communities that formed us, and to what Paul
Tillich called ‘the structure of grace in history’ that made such communities
possible.” Which in turn means that the sustaining and strengthening of those
communities—or, in MacIntyre’s terms, those “traditions of moral inquiry”—must
be a major task for anyone who accepts these arguments.
Since the
fundamental and indispensable unit of Christian community is the Church, these
trends in general intellectual culture have in the last fifteen years
stimulated a great deal of ecclesiological reflection: one can draw an
interesting line of influence from MacIntyre and Habits of the Heart to
Stanley Hauerwas and then to John Milbank and the other proponents of radical
orthodoxy, all of whom tend to be pronouncedly ecclesiocentric in their
thinking. (I owe the term “ecclesiocentrism” to my colleague Ashley Woodiwiss.)
How much ecclesial communities, or any other communities, have been practically
strengthened by these movements is a question open to debate. What is certainly
true is that in serious Christian reflection, questions about the shape and
fate of community have come to displace the language of personal conversion,
transformation, and development from the central place such language held in
Protestant Christian discourse in the first two-thirds of the twentieth
century. (And, let it be noted, such an emphasis on personal spirituality was
shared by liberal, neo-orthodox, evangelical, and fundamentalist
Christians—though often for different reasons.)
Now, if the “serious
Christian reflection” just mentioned has de-emphasized personal narratives,
that is scarcely true of Christian culture at large. Countless Christian
writers have extended, and continue to extend, their invitation: “Tell us your
story.” Each of us has a story, we are told, a wonderful story that belongs
only to us; it is our task to discover what that story is. And in recent years
a significant publishing subindustry has arisen for the purpose of helping us
in such a “voyage of discovery”: I refer to the many books, tapes, videos, and
workbooks on the topic of journal writing, or, as the less scrupulous stylists
in the movement would have it, “journaling.”
It is fair to say
that recent narrative theology has taken its characteristic forms precisely in
order to counter this sort of thing. But it is also worth noting that, if one
can pierce through the layers of narcissism and sentimentality that so often
deface this talk of “journaling” as self-discovery, these popular writers are
reminding us of something that many previous generations of very sober
Christians, from Augustine of Hippo to the Puritans of seventeenth-century
England and America, would have warmly endorsed: each of us does indeed have a
unique personal narrative, one whose essential shape is not always easily
discerned. As we shall soon see, Augustine in his Confessions repeatedly
wonders at the faculty of memory precisely because it allows us to revisit the
events of our lives and discern the trajectory that they describe. Likewise,
but in a more systematic way, the Puritans developed a comprehensive theory of
personal spiritual record-keeping, with the journal as the key instrument. The
great unacknowledged ancestor of today’s guides to journal-keeping is John
Beadle’s Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian, first published in
1656, which gives comprehensive instructions for the would-be diarist. For
Beadle, it is as important for a Christian to keep a journal as it is for a
businessman to keep a ledger; indeed, it is far more important: after all, the
“account” we will be called upon to make before God some day is more
consequential than any businessman’s.
Beadle’s recommendations
were widely heeded in the seventeenth century. As William Haller pointed out
many years ago, the diary became an effectual Protestant substitute for the
ancient Catholic practice of auricular confession; but it also enabled people
committed to the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints to keep
tabs on their own perseverance. Near the end of the sixteenth century, the
English Puritan Richard Rogers wrote that studying his diary was necessary
“that I may so observe my heart that I may see my life in frame from time to
time.” This is an important concept; Rogers
is describing the inevitably retrospective character of self-understanding—what
Hegel meant when he wrote that the Owl of Minerva flies only at night. The
“frame” that Rogers
refers to is the narrative shape that can only be discerned after some
development takes place. Discrete events by definition have no plot, and even
several of them (like numbers in a sequence) may not seem to add up to
anything, but as the events accumulate sufficiently, patterns become more and
more evident. The passage of time provides the “frame” necessary to discern
those patterns—but only if the events themselves are faithfully recorded,
“plotted” as on a graph. Slowly, the picture (the story) emerges. For Richard
Rogers and the other Puritans, the function of the journal was to plot the
graph of God’s work in our lives.
A life story, in its
full and complete form, can of course only be understood after that life is
over—indeed, dying may be the experience that gives final clarification to a
life, either by confirming or by countering the pattern that had seemed to rule
the life up to that last point. In explaining the importance in Mexican culture
of the Day of the Dead, Octavio Paz writes, “Tell me how you die and I will
tell you who you are.” The desire for the perfectly clarified and clarifying
view from beyond the end is particularly strong when we cannot discern a
meaningful pattern in the events of the moment; no more sad and beautiful
testimony to that lamentable situation can be found than the end of Chekhov’s
play Uncle Vanya, when Vanya and Sonia (the insulted and ignored, the
poor relations who fill the servants’ roles in the family, the ones to whom
nothing significant seems ever to happen) sit alone at a table, and Sonia
muses:
We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall
live through a long, long chain of days and endless evenings; we shall
patiently bear the trials fate sends us; we’ll work for others, now and in our
old age, without ever knowing rest, and when our time comes, we shall die
submissively; and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered,
that we have wept, that we have known bitterness, and God shall have pity on
us; and you and I, Uncle, dear Uncle, shall behold a life that is bright,
beautiful, and fine. We shall rejoice and look on our present troubles with
tenderness, with a smile—and we shall rest. . . .
There can be
something sweet and even radiant about Sonia’s hopefulness (as in Brooke
Smith’s lovely performance in Louis Malle’s film Vanya on 42nd Street);
but there is certainly something deeply sad about her resignation to
incomprehension, to the failure of understanding, on this side of the grave.
The Puritan use of the spiritual journal to “frame” life is a technique to
prevent this incomprehension, to achieve some sense and articulation of a
life’s shape even as it is being formed—to see, if only through a glass darkly,
something recognizably meaningful.
The triviality, even
fatuousness, of many current ways of talking about “our stories” has led many
thoughtful Christians to abandon the traditions of personal narrative or
testimony as tokens of misbegotten “individualism.” But such an abandonment is
unfortunate. What we need is better and more responsible and more coherent
personal stories, not the complete subsumption of all personal narrative into
group narrative. In this context the work of Walter Benjamin—the great
German-Jewish cultural critic who died while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940—is
vital:
Every real story . . . contains, openly or
covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a
moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim.
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if
today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is
because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have
no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer
to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is
just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell
the story. . . . Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art
of storytelling is dying out because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying
out.
In the great essay
(“The Storyteller”) from which this quotation is taken, Benjamin explains how
the various forces of technological modernity have gradually reduced the power
and value of experience—have made personal experience less “communicable.”
Properly understood, Benjamin’s argument reveals that the proliferation of
bland, solipsistic personal “stories” in our current cultural situation does
not indicate a recovery of “communicable experience,” but just the opposite. We
tell our stories, all right, but we don’t think of them as offering counsel in
wisdom: I “journal” for myself, not for others; the only counsel I can offer
them is to do their own “journaling.”
In this light it can
be seen that the formulaic “testimonies” of evangelical and fundamentalist
Christianity, while they may appear to some communally minded theologians as a
manifestation of individualism, are in fact almost the only remaining cultural
form of the kind of storytelling Benjamin praises. An impoverished form of it,
to be sure—primarily because it is inflexible in shape and confined chiefly to
testimonies of conversion rather than testimonies of imitation and vocation—but
a valuable form nonetheless, because it preserves in some fashion the idea of
storytelling as the passing along of wise counsel. Such a form of storytelling
needs to be strengthened and enriched, not abandoned.
It is important that
Benjamin says this of the true storyteller: “It is granted to him to reach back
a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own
experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller
knows from hearsay is added to his own). His gift is the ability to relate his
life; his distinction, to be able to tell his whole life.” Christians would do
well to become storytellers in this sense. In short, what is currently needed,
it seems to me, is a narrative theology that draws on the great resources
provided by the thinkers I have mentioned—MacIntyre, Newbigin, Hauerwas, and so
on—but which also understands what Augustine and the Puritans understood: the
importance of thinking narratively about individual lives. If we are to achieve
this goal, we must cultivate, as our primary resources, a faculty and a virtue:
memory and hope.
Many readers of
Augustine’s Confessions have noted a dramatic change at the beginning of
the tenth of its thirteen books. Up through Book IX, Augustine has been
relating in a pretty straightforward manner the key events of his life leading
up to his conversion to Christianity and, following soon thereafter, the death
of his mother Monica. Then, abruptly abandoning the autobiographical narrative,
Augustine embarks on a series of theological and philosophical speculations
about time, memory, and the opening chapters of Genesis.
Or so, at any rate,
the common view goes, though especially attentive readers of the Confessions
have asked whether the first nine books are really so straightforward, and the
last four so completely disconnected from them and from each other. I will not
enter that debate here, except to say that the reflections on memory that
dominate Book X have everything to do with the story that Augustine has been
telling to that point. Augustine is fascinated by the faculty of mind that has
allowed him to relate the events of his early life: How is it, he wonders, that
we are able to store events in our minds and retrieve them when we need or want
to do so? Book X of the Confessions repeatedly professes wonder at the
God who has made us with such a capacity:
The power of memory is great, very great [magna ista vis est memoriae],
my God. It is a vast and infinite profundity. Who has plumbed its bottom? This
power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp
the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself,
so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp?
Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind. How then
can it fail to grasp it? This question moves me to great astonishment.
Amazement grips me.
Yet even in this
outburst of wonderment Augustine is pursuing a vital point: the relation of
memory to self-understanding. At the beginning of Book IX, just before
describing the decisive moment of conversion, Augustine had asked, “Who am I
and what am I?” Now, at the beginning of the next book, he explores the faculty
that enables him at least to attempt answers to those questions. Indeed, some
chapters later than the passage I have just quoted, Augustine repeats his claim
that “Great is the power of memory” and follows that claim with a renewal of
the question of self-knowledge: “What then am I, my God?”
These reflections
lead to a point that is of particular importance for our purposes.
Augustine—being concerned with his “ascent” (a word used repeatedly in Book X)
from sin to salvation—is preoccupied with the relationship between memory and
sin: he makes a point of noting that we are able to remember our sins without
committing them over again. For him, this is one of the most important of
memory’s characteristics, and an indication that it is a special gift of God to
those who would repent of their sins. Indeed, if the recollection of sin
inevitably drew one back into that sin, memory would be a curse rather than a
blessing: there would be no possibility of responding to one’s past experiences
so that one could “ascend” to a higher and better life. (Augustine knows
perfectly well that the memory of sin can lead one back into that sin,
but it need not do so—for him, the miracle is that recollection of sin is not always
a renewal or repetition of that sin.)
Therefore, Augustine
is led to conclude that memory is not simply a passive function: it is not mere
recollection. Memory allows one not only to recall but also to restructure, to
reinterpret past events, to discern a pattern in them that was not visible when
they occurred. (Thus Richard Rogers’ attempt to “see [his] life in frame from
time to time.”) As James O’Donnell has written, “Memory has the power to
supplant ‘reality,’ or at least what mortals know of reality: indeed, the whole
argument of this half of Book X is that it is through memory that, after the
fall, we encounter a more authentic reality.”
Through memory,
Augustine explains at various points in Book X of the Confessions, we
are able to review our past actions and discern a variety of important themes:
we can see when we were moving towards God and (conversely) when we were moving
away from Him; when we discerned the good rightly and sought it properly and
(conversely) when we misidentified the good and sought experiences or
possessions that were bad for us; when God was calling us towards Himself,
whether we heard His voice or not; and so on. Indeed, we see Augustine
employing this notion much earlier in the Confessions; for instance,
when he describes how his friend Alypius, as a young man come to Rome to study
law, had been captivated by the crude and vicious spectacle of the gladiatorial
games. Addressing God as always, Augustine writes, “You taught him to put his
confidence not in himself but in You. But that was much later.” Nevertheless,
“This experience . . . rested in his memory to provide a remedy in the
future”—as did the next incident Augustine describes: Alypius’ arrest for theft
when he was still living in Carthage
and studying under Augustine.
Since the English
word “memory” usually connotes merely the passive storage of information, let
us use the Latin word memoria to indicate this more active,
interpretive, constructive faculty that Augustine celebrates. It is memoria,
in this sense, that enables us to think of our lives in meaningfully narrative
terms: the whole project of identifying and pursuing a coherent life would be
impossible without memoria.
But if memoria
is the essential retrospective faculty for the believer seeking to make a
coherent Christian life, it will only be exercised by those who think such
retrospection potentially valuable—that is, for those who are hopeful.
Hope is the virtue that prompts the exercise of memoria. The believer
hopes that his life is making sense, hopes that the “frame” reveals a pattern
that adds up to something recognizably Christian. Hope enables us—indeed,
commands us—to turn from retrospection to prospection. Here it is good to
recall a famous comment from Kierkegaard’s journal:
It is quite true what philosophy says: that
life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle:
that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it
through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be
understood because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the
position: backwards.
In other words, it
may be true that “the owl of Minerva flies only at night,” but Kierkegaard
suspects that the metaphor hides a profoundly dubious claim: that it is
possible to reach a stable end-point of reflection from which Minerva’s owl can
take off, and to which it can later return. This can never happen, Kierkegaard
says: whenever we look back, we’re still moving forward, and that movement not
only makes our retrospective vision somewhat shaky and uncertain, it also
increases the chance that while our heads are twisted around we’ll run into a
tree or fall into a ditch.
Kierkegaard’s point
is vital because it shows that the work of memoria is always influenced
by the way our prospective imagination is throwing us forward into our future.
Therefore the work of memoria is always imperfect, incomplete, and
subject to revision. We will always be, as Hamlet puts it, “looking before and
after”; it would be nice (or simpler, anyway) if we could do just one, or do
them in a stable, unrepeatable sequence, but that’s not the way life works. We
should never presume that our exercise of memoria is perfect, nor that
the patterns it reveals predict our future with perfect accuracy.
The word “presume”
is important here because presumption is, according to Aquinas and his
followers, one of the two characteristic perversions of hope, the other being
despair. As Jürgen Moltmann notes, “Both forms of hopelessness, by anticipating
the fulfillment or by giving up hope, cancel the wayfaring character of hope.”
In one of his sermons D. L. Moody proclaimed,
You ask me to explain regeneration. I cannot
do it. But one thing I know—that I have been regenerated. All the infidels and
skeptics could not make me feel differently. I feel a different man than I did
twenty-one years ago last March, when God gave me a new heart. I have not sworn
since that night, and I have no desire to swear. I delight to labor for God,
and all the influences of the world cannot convince me that I am not a
different man.
I have no doubt that
God did indeed make Moody “a different man” than he had been before—indeed,
gave him new life. But it is almost impossible for the even moderately critical
reader not to be dubious about this account. Perhaps you no longer swear, Mr.
Moody, but are you humble? Are you perfectly compassionate and loving? And
anyway, if I were to drop this brick on your toe, might you not suddenly
rediscover the “desire to swear”? I find myself suspecting, not Moody’s
regeneration itself, but his belief in its completeness and his assumption that
its moral effect is permanent and irreversible. He seems, for the moment at
least, to have forgotten that he is but a pilgrim, a “wayfaring stranger” (as
the old hymn puts it). He has “anticipated the fulfillment” which comes only to
the blessed in heaven; his statement is presumptuous and therefore not truly
hopeful.
It’s this kind of
Christian “testimony”—the airbrushed past and the sugarcoated future—that
causes Christian “testimonies” to set people’s teeth on edge. We may therefore
find ourselves tempted to neglect or even abandon the practice of testimony,
absorbing all individual differences of vocation and experience into the one
great story of the Church—and to some degree that is just what recent narrative
theology has done. Embarrassed by the presumption, the triumphalism, and the
sentimental self-absorption of the testimonies that have arisen especially from
the evangelical movement, narrative theologians have drawn our attention back
to the great narrative arc of God’s work among His people in the world. Yet
Christians are commanded to be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks
you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), and unless one is
determined to do no more than mutely wave people towards the nearest church,
this can only be achieved by giving some account of the coherence (not
perfection) and development (not fulfillment) one discerns in one’s own life.
Moreover, no healthy
and mature Christian is simply a generic church member, but instead has some
specific role to play in the life of the community:
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God
has appointed in the Church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers,
then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in
various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers?
Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with
tongues? Do all interpret? (1 Corinthians 12:27-31)
For this reason
Christian witness (both to unbelievers and to young Christians) must involve an
account of the particular genre which one’s Christian life embodies. So the
remedy to the problem of presumptuous or otherwise deficient testimony is not
to stop bearing personal witness, but rather to refine and develop our
understanding of what such witness should be. And here is where the Church’s
great communal story offers its aid: for it is the responsibility of the “many
members of the one body,” who collectively celebrate and enact that story, to
guide each individual member into paths, into life genres, that harmonize with
the great melody of God’s redeeming work in His creation. How can the Church
bridge this gap between the Christian metanarrative and our own individual life
stories, in such a way that all such accounts are faithful to each other and to
God? That is the challenge facing anyone who would take narrative theology to
the next level of critical and prophetic power.
Alan Jacobs is Professor of English at Wheaton College . His most recent book is A
Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Westview, 2001). This essay
is adapted from his book Life Genres: The Personal Dimension of Narrative
Theology (forthcoming from Eerdmans).
Source: First Things 135 (August/September
2003): 25-30.
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