Narrative has exercised many biblical scholars and theologians over the last forty years looking for ways to be faithful to the form of Scripture and to resist the temptation of a strong philosophical foundationalism. The emphasis for several of those years has been on the importance of narrative, but it also needs to be asked: how is it important? And, how important is it?
Our contemporary culture, floating free in the weightlessness of identity and arbitrary, ungrounded choice, utilizes the narrative concept to bolster our senses of self and to deflect reflection on principles — how they fuel our action and reactions in the world. We reflexively retort that our challengers are twisting the narrative. But sometimes we do so as well, to avoid the question of whether or not the charge is true.
Story is necessary but not sufficient. Any story is secondary to the events it narrates. The telling of that story, however, can unveil the significance of those events. Such events, typically, are behind us, so it is story that can connect us to or reactivate their meaning. Yet the story must be a true one for such significance to influence the present rightly and beneficially. A story without fidelity to the event it is supposed to narrate can impact the present as well but for ill.
“God’s humanity introduces itself into the world as a story to be told,” Eberhard Jüngel asserted. And because it is God who enters and impacts the world, the stories we tell of it and ourselves are likewise impacted. We may deny it to be so and resist the implications of God’s mission into our world but the final recounting of the world’s story will disclose the truth some of us suppressed and the truth some of us embraced as well as the permutations of both.
How, then, does narrative serve the communication of the gospel? Can it eclipse the gospel? It seems both possible and likely that it can when it is not disciplined by the substance of the gospel it is meant to announce. In his essay “Paul’s Story: Theology as Testimony,” New Testament scholar John Barclay sees narrative as the mode in which God’s saving action in Christ comes to speech. Paul’s and our stories,
embody ‘the truth of the gospel’. The grace of God is not, for Paul, an idea, or even primarily an attribute of God, but the action of God in history. God’s grace is always, and inevitably, ‘storied’, working in history (though often concealed within it) to bring life out of death, power out of weakness, salvation out of sin. Thus Paul’s stories convey the gospel inasmuch as they carry the pattern of grace, of justification of the ungodly, and of God’s critical judgment on human pretensions. Paul does not tell his stories and then transmit their meaning: the meaning is embodied in the shape of the stories themselves. (p. 154)
As he examines the Letter to the Galatians, though, Barclay contends that narratives flow out of the gospel rather than serving as its foundation. On this reading, the coherence of our stories comes about only through the disruption of the gospel. The apocalypse of the cross is, to Barclay, a singular point in time which becomes a paradigm for reshaping all of reality and thus all of our narratives. Because Paul “does not trace linear lines through historical processes or human continuities”, it’s more a matter of a “common ‘syntax’ or pattern” that renders the world recognizable as what it really is. Barclay writes,
Just as Paul sees no humanly visible line of continuity through his own life, but rather an interruption, when the ‘I’ is overwhelmed by the agency of God (or Christ), he finds no line linking Abraham to the present except that of the faithfulness of God… Paul’s stories are neither plotted on a common timeline, nor linked by some other ‘organic’ principle: they are connected only by the common thread of the grace of God, which weaves its own independent patterns in history. (p. 155)
This is especially important for Christians to take to heart in our present ideological climate which stresses the uniqueness and importance of all our individual stories: the paradigm of Christ crucified is the fund from which our stories, both individually and collectively, gain their deepest significance. The passage into life is cruciform and brands the believer’s existence as antithetical to the story the world is telling. The implicit warning is that if your story finds continuity and coherence within the story of the world, then you stand in the same danger as that world whose only destiny is death.
The divine action that negates that destiny is the death of Christ, a death which disrupts the world’s story and our own in order to open them to a previously impossible resolution. One consequence of this is that none of us should waste our time seeking some organizing principle in order to smooth out the splintery gradient of our lives. There is no such organizing principle; there are only stopgaps of relative emptiness that cannot forestall destiny.
Another, however—one that is routinely misunderstood or ignored—is that our goals, our hopes, can only come to fruition through their being crucified with Christ. Saul of Tarsus’s zeal to live before God and adhere to the Law with the utmost integrity (Galatians 1:14) only became possible through the death of the Saul that was subject to a system captive to Sin and Death (Galatians 2:19). There is no straightforward accomplishment of any good goal: the fulfillment of any good requires crucifixion in order to become something of lasting difference. We cannot ourselves close the gap between intention and consequence, between imagination and ability, between knowledge and motivation, even between the selves we wish we were and the selves we actually are.
Narrative, therefore, while an important means for interpreting Scripture and experience, is nonetheless susceptible to characteristic forms of abuse. Any object, whether a person, an event, or an institution, dwells within time and unfolds its meaning across time. To understand that thing its story must be told in accordance with the truth of what it is, what it has done and what it has had done to it. Narrative is essential for apprehending reality but the need for explanations and for control can lead us to concoct false ones.
Human subjects are unique in that we are capable of giving accounts of ourselves. Our story cannot be told apart from our input, yet we are not the authoritative interpreter of that story. We are the protagonists, doing and accomplishing and failing at many things, but we are not the hero by which that story achieves resolution. Resolution is a feature of the eschatological future, not of the present, and as such our stories are only ever incomplete and unsettled.
Agency is real, but it is fallible and it is limited. Character is real, and it matters, but it is not the most decisive factor in anyone’s destiny. Intention is real, but as Saul’s murderous zeal demonstrates, it does not transform wickedness into its opposite. However noble your intentions, however virtuous your ideals, if you convince yourself your story is complete on the plane of your activity and your willing, you will undermine your intentions and ideals and further the ambitions of the Sin and Death.
Paul recounts his own story to the Galatians to demonstrate that that story is only brought to completion by its encounter with the crucified Christ. He does not present himself as an exemplar of heroic decision-making or of superior wisdom: he depicts himself as one who was undone by an event he could not control or manipulate. His story illustrates the impasse of human subjectivity and activity in a fallen cosmos and how the impossible overcoming of that impasse nevertheless does take place because God submits himself to death. Death to secure a future that is more and better than the sum of our actions.
The collision of the death of Christ with the pitiful fragments of our lives brings the confusing data of our inscrutable and often self-serving stories into narratable alignment with the life of the resurrected Christ. Not perfectly, however: the “already” of our union with Christ through faith awaits the “not yet” of eschatological completion.
Most of us sense that our stories are jagged and fragmented. It is the cross which reveals the shape of that jaggedness when it reconfigures the brokenness of the world’s norms. And because we have spent entire lifetimes trying in vain to fill up that fracture, the cross must shatter our crude approximations of wholeness in order to heal that brokenness. The grace of Jesus Christ comes to the lost and sick, providing the freedom to admit our weakness, to decline the impossible urge to be our own hero, and to resist the impulse to narrate our stories as coherent and closed in themselves.
All this to say, we cannot apprehend reality without stories, but the stories we tell can never be complete. The thread that binds our stories to the story of Israel and of God’s rescue mission, that which gives them any measure of coherence is the crucified Christ. Nothing else can suffice: the one who binds together what is shattered and contradictory only does so in the breaking of his body. It is in his life, being broken and offered for us, that our stories and the story of the world is meaningfully ruptured, revealing the rupture that already pervades and devastates all we know, all we touch, all we are.
God does not break apart the Real out of capriciousness or spite: he breaks apart what is ruined so as to overcome that ruin and instill his own life into that which had succumbed to falsehood and death. The Real must be unraveled by the True if reality, globally and individually, is to enter into the life it was meant from the beginning to enjoy. Our attempts to stave off death and ambiguity must be halted by a God who traverses the darkness that cannot be narrated so as to incorporate us into the story he will bring to completion in the age to come.
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