The Power of Story: Part 1

If you’ve been playing Buzzword Bingo with the emergent Christian crowd you’re in luck if your score card includes the word “story”. Spend any time at a worship service or in conversation with an emergent, po-mo Christian, it won’t be long before you hear the word. And why not? It doesn’t the baggage associated with older terms used to describe the experience of being a Christian (Christ-follower?) and it’s a versatile word capable of conveying an ample array of meanings.

For starters, it gets used to describe one’s conversion experience. “Once I was lost, but now I’m found…let me tell you my story of how that happened…” For those without a killer conversion experience, it can be used for the ways that God has been at work in their life. “I grew up in household with Christian parents. We went to church every Sunday. Even though it’s been a good life, it’s had its ups and downs. Let me tell you that story…”

Beyond the realm of personal experience, it’s a term that gets used to describe the events narrated in the Bible. This can be narrow. “Let me tell you the story of Abraham…” Or it can be broad, such as the broad meta-narrative that comprises the full scope of the Old and New Testament.

A third area of use is a bit trickier, but it’s broadly theological in context and usually refers to matters of salvation—how and why God saves. Those in the Reformed tradition (i.e. denominations influenced by John Calvin and followers) might describe this in terms of covenant: God’s story is that of binding himself to humanity in such a way that he would be their God and they his people.

A final area of use is where two of the above get liked so that personal experience meets the objective reality of God’s interaction with the world. Perhaps you’ve heard something like this: “…where God’s story and my story meet…” In this use of the word the theological use (story as a catch-all term to describe what God has done for humanity) meets the personal (my life events).

Full disclosure: I’m as guilty as the next for (over?) using this particular word. In the realm of the personal, it is certainly a modernization of the old term “testimony.” Of course, testimony has the strength of testifying about something. More specifically it’s testifying about someone. Ultimately a testimony tells about what God did for us or me. “My story” sounds strangely narcissistic. Still from an evangelistic point of view, the use of story in form and in term is powerful. One hears stories and is shaped by them. Rarely do we hear and story and ask “is that true?” The power of story is in its power to influence. Further, in its purest form, story is testimony or witness. Concerning God, to tell the story of God is to tell the narrative of who God is and how God has shown Himself to be. Often it was the way of Jesus himself: “You want to know what God is like? Here let me tell you a story: ‘there once was a man who went and scattered seed…’”. From our perspective this is still powerful: “What’s God like? Let me tell you about a man from Nazareth who came proclaiming a message…”

It’s also a fair term to use in its Biblical and theological sense. Story is a useful synonym for that which Biblical and Systematic theologians have often termed “salvation history”. As a God who has revealed Himself and acted in History, God has entered into a covenant partnership with the created order. In this partnership God has made himself the God who is for his creation. And this partnership has unfolded over the course of history in such a way that we are justified in calling it a story.

Lastly, we are justified in calling the Biblical narratives stories. For that it is what they are. As a champion of creedal and dogmatic theology, I must not forget that at the center of the Christian witness is the story of a man from Nazareth named Jesus Christ. This is seen most clearly in the gospel narratives that are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Much to the chagrin of so-called source critic fundamentalists that wish desperately to wrench the individual incidents out of their narrative unity in order to discern the historical kernel, the narrative must be read as a whole. While much has and will be gained by trying to discern the historical through source critical means, it seems most natural to read the gospel accounts as a literary whole. While they may have emerged from various sources (what historical narrative hasn’t?). They were compiled in such a way to tell the story of a particular man, in a particular place, at a particular man. And, I might add, to invoke a faith response on the part of the listeners. As a particular man, the man Jesus is a unique, unsubstitutable person.

Thus, I argue, reading the gospels as a unified whole is their most natural reading. Natural does not mean easy however. We need all the help we can get. And this is where the late theologian Hans Frei serves as a most useful guide.

Ivan Karamazov, Jurgen Moltmann, and The Crucified God

Lately, I have been thinking about Ivan Karamazov. As one of the three protagonists of Dostoevsky’s The Brother Karamazov, Ivan, the intellectual, represents humanity’s striving to move beyond God. Ivan envisions a post-religious world dominated by the rationality of human reason. While God may have had his moments, the use-by date of God has long since expired. Ivan asks, “how can one look upon the world and confess faith, love, and admiration of God?” The world has been forsaken by God. The human plight is so abysmal, Ivan had no choice but to reject the God that rejected the world. Of course, the rejection of God left a moral vacuum. A vacuum that left Ivan to opine, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

For quite sometime Christians have used this conclusion as an argument against an atheistic morality. The argument goes: With no moral arbiter, there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, everything is relative. If everything is relative, it is impossible to evaluate ethical choices in any meaningful manner. As Ivan put it, “everything is permitted.”

Although atheistic ethicists have fought to counter this argument, there is some truth to it. In a 1946 lecture on Existentialism and Humanism, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called the aforementioned quote by Ivan Karamazov as the “starting point” of all existentialist thought. There is no determinism in which we can appeal. Nor may we describe a person’s choice with reference to nature. Instead, humans are radically free to do whatever he or she wants. And as a radically free creature, it is only the individual who is ultimately responsible for his or her actions.

In what would bring Dostoevsky sadness, it appears Ivan has won. It does not take much imagination to believe we live in a time and a place where everything is permitted. Looking beyond the random acts of violence that occur ever day, we might point to the radical inequity of resources where some eat and drink wastefully and many more go without basic necessitates. In the United States, our pets are treated better than many people the world over. Let us not forget the increasing polarization of ideologies. One wonders if it is possible to engage constructively in any political dialogue, especially when the final arbiter is me. Add this all up and I can’t help but hear Ivan Karamazov and feel sympathy: how can we honestly look at the world and affirm the existence of God?

In November of 1969, six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in a university in San Salvador. As they dragged the bodies back into the building they pulled one into an office, bumped a bookcase, and dislodged a book which became drenched in blood. The name of the book: The Crucified God by the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann. When reflecting upon that horrible incident, Moltmann found it reassuring that it was his book that was soaked in an innocent man’s blood. For a profound, rich, and complex book, the thesis is simple: only a crucified God can provide relief, hope, and salvation for a world stained by radical individualism and ceaseless violence. For Moltmann himself, it is the words of the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Only a suffering God can help.”

Ivan Karamazov sees a world abandoned and forsaken by God. In the world’s godforsakeness, Ivan saw no alternative but to reject the very existence of God and turn to himself.

As a theological work, The Crucified God is an extended meditation on Jesus’ last cry from the cross “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” In the cross of Jesus, the Godhead experiences death. There is a death within God.

There are many explanations for Jesus’ death. In one version, he died as a blasphemer. In another, he died as a political dissident. But in another, Jesus died as the godforsaken. On the cross, Jesus was the true innocent suffering the sins of humanity. And what did he find in his suffering? A God who looked the other way. On the cross, Jesus was utterly abandoned by God the Father and exemplifies a Godforsaken world.

But Jesus’ death upon the cross was more than the death of God who became flesh. The death Jesus died upon the cross was a death “within God”. Within the triune life of God, the Godhead experienced death. In the Trinity, the second person Jesus Christ suffered death and abandonment. Yet, the first person of the Trinity, God the Father experienced the heartbreak and loss of his only beloved and begotten son shamefully murdered upon the cross.

On the cross and within the life of God we fix our eyes on Jesus who suffered and experienced our own Godforsakeness. But on the cross and within the life of God we also encounter the Father who suffered and experience the loss of his only begotten and beloved son. When we approach God in faith, we approach a God who identifies and experiences the heartbreak and suffering of this world. God takes it upon Himself and suffers along with us. In the suffering of God, we have a God who helps and saves and transforms this present age.