Living the Story got off to an excellent start this morning with an engaged group and fascinating parallels and contrasts found by Philip Ritchie in the engagement with the Bible's narrative of Nick Cave and Bono. My introduction to the course, which preceded the main content of the session, was as follows:
Consider yourself and your family, or your circle of friends:
• What are some of the stories you might tell together which give you a sense of who you are?
• What are the types of events they focus on?
• Do stories in the Bible work in the same way for you?
From earliest times human beings have told stories. The stories we have been discussing initially are personal or family tales (we could call these micronarratives) but they will often, as with many tales, have been stories which say something about or identity; who we understand ourselves to be, either individually or within our family. As human beings we also commonly tell stories which, either explicitly or implicitly, seek to answer questions such as, “How did we get here?”, “Where are we going?”, and “What is the meaning of our existence?” We call these overarching stories metanarratives or worldviews and we live within the meanings which they provide.
So, for example, a humanist may tell a story of a universe which comes into being by chance leaving human beings free to create their own meanings for life and society. By contrast, Stanley Hauerwas has argued that Christians are “a people who have been formed by a story that provides them with the skills for negotiating the danger of this existence, trusting in God’s promise of redemption.” In other words, the church is founded on the premise that the creator God decisively calls and forms a people to serve him through the history of Israel and through the work of Jesus Christ to bring about the redemption of the creation.
We must constantly remember that we are a story formed community and that story is what defines our existence. To quote Stanley Hauerwas again: “The story of modernity is the story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story. We call that freedom. But as Christians we believe that we are creatures born into a story that we haven’t chosen.” Our story derives from the Bible and Tom Wright has provided us with a simple means of describing the Bible’s metanarrative and the way in which we are to be shaped by this story. Wright has described the Bible as being like a five act play containing the first four acts in full (i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus). He continues:
"The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to."
Wright concludes that he is proposing "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."
Living the Story in this way is something that artists and writers have done throughout Church history and continue to do today. For example, the curator and art historian Daniel A. Siedell has noted that:
“the Bible … is a dynamic and powerful cultural artefact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature ...
to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation.”
In the course we will examine a selection of mainly contemporary uses of the Bible and the Christian story in popular culture (film, music, novels, poetry and visual arts) and consider whether or not they can be said to be 'living the story’.
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat.
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