The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world are not all they’re cracked up to be. However much we want to believe we live a coherent narrative, where the endless succession of events of life have clear meaning, the stories we tell are invariably based upon the (mistaken) premise that we have a grasp, or understanding, of how it is the world works and what the best outcome should be for the narrative of our lives. Yet there is an almost indescribable gap between the logic that shapes our choices and their ultimate outcomes, one that cannot simply be attributed to a faulty GPS device. Hindsight is 20/20, they say. The retrospective Monday morning quarterbacking of our lives should lead us to the conclusion that most consequences could not have been predicted in the first place. Many remain inexplicable.
Looking outward at the various spheres of community, we observe movements of change, the coalescing of human will into the collective decisions of politics, economics, and culture. We struggle, with varying degrees of success, to narrate how our society unfolds. Supply and demand, the invisible hand, the Trump effect, or the social media disconnect. We hypothesize theories from the surveys and polls to speak of millennials or ‘religious nones’ to make sense of the ever-shifting ground upon which we stand. If the laws of physics are immutable, we think, then perhaps social systems function in a similarly predictable manner. Yet the sheer accumulation of social theories, outliers, and unforeseen elections should give us pause—or at least humility–before offering up a fresh formulation.
The root of our misunderstandings in these necessary ventures lies in a failure to understand the nature of the world itself and a belief that it functions solely according to the schema of cause and effect. The world and ourselves are explainable, we believe, if we tell the right story. All we need is the right data to make sense of it. As children of the Enlightenment (if only distantly at this point), we project the supposed rationality of nature upon the entire documentary of human existence.
To these reasonable, yet imperfect, hypotheses of the world, Paul offers an emphatic critique that relegates them to penultimate significance. This isn’t because Paul believes the world to be an absolute enigma. Nor is it because Paul has come to believe in a more profound, antiquarian narrative of creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the future resurrection — as if these events can be mapped out in a logically causal chain. For Paul, we find so often that human existence is inexplicable because there are other Actors on the stage of human history for which we cannot fully account.
These Actors go by many names: Sin, the Flesh, Death, the Law, the Spirit, etc. and they constitute what is called Paul’s “apocalyptic” worldview. It is this apocalyptic battlefield within which humanity exists as pawns and infantry soldiers, willfully yet unknowingly doing the bidding of their respective lords.
Within this battle, humans are blind to knowing or predicting the outcome of their actions. The individual who is “of the flesh, [namely] sold under Sin” does the precise thing they do not what to do (Rom. 7:14-15). Whatever one wishes to do, whether good or evil, is coopted by the power of Sin to produce evil. No matter what strategy one employs, within a world that can be dominated by anti-God powers the end result is all the same: suffering and death. In short, in a world ruled by Sin there is no purely good outcome to anything. There is always a gap between even our most idealistic intensions and the unexpected outcomes. The insufficiency of common explanations of ourselves do not strictly arise from self-deception, as if an accurate diagnosis of the situation were openly available to us if only we could look. Instead, for Paul, we are deceived and commandeered by Sin itself. In theological terms, the will is bound by these hostile powers and the terrain of life is one in which we and they jointly operate. As the New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann wrote, the individual is “in the grip of forces which seize his existence and determine his will and responsibility at least to the extent that he cannot choose freely but only grasp what is already there” (Commentary on the Romans, p. 147).
What is true of the individual is simultaneously true on the wider scale of human history and society. In Galatians, Paul says that he and the Galatian church were rescued from the “present evil age” (1:4), an age marked by slavery to evil powers (what he calls stoicheia in 4:3-8, often translated as “the elemental principals of the world”). It’s not simply, for Paul, that the world is fallen. The world has been taken hostage and enslaved by cosmic lords of evil that manifest themselves across human history in many forms.
Paul attributes the church’s return to life under the Law to their falling under a curse (3:1), one that coincides with their submission to the stoicheia (4:9). Paul is at such a loss to explain the behavior of his former church that the only plausible explanation to him is their entrapment by the cosmic evil forces from which he thought they were free. The inexplicability of communal decisions is, for Paul, only intelligible in light of his apocalyptic framework. The dividing live between the church and “the world” is not as clear as one would hope.
If these anti-God, apocalyptic powers can commandeer a church, there’s no telling how they might also influence the secular spaces of economics, politics, or social media. The language of powers helps to explain why even altruistic endeavors of social change so often have unintended negative consequences. If the power of Sin is the Law (1 Cor. 15:56), it’s no wonder that repeated attempts to ease the troubled consciences afflicted by impossible societal standards paradoxically end up raising the standard higher (see, for example, the recent Mockingcast discussion of the “True Beauty” movement). The days of fat-shaming are over, we are told, but the demand of self-acceptance is now a more exacting taskmaster precisely because it should be more attainable. It seems that the moment society attempts to absolve you of your failures, Sin somehow makes the burden greater. For all our cultural stories of progress and enlightenment, the legal tools of social change often exchange one form of oppression for another, one more insidiously disguised. Meet the new Boss (read: Sin), the same as the old Boss.
The apocalyptic Paul might sound like a strange relic from an unenlightened, pre-modern age; he is, and it’s fabulous. But highlighting Paul’s belief in powers is not meant to convince the reader that your garage door is possessed by demons. Paul wasn’t that naïve and neither should we be. I instead wish to suggest that the old mythological language Paul used should be reclaimed and re-appropriated. Whether or not Principalities and Powers actually exist — and I should say that jury is still out on that — the myth still has value for how it explains the gap between expected/desired outcomes and what actually happens.
To return to the question of offering a coherent narrative of life and the world, the language of apocalyptic powers is employed by Paul to suggest that there isn’t a direct correlation between the kind of cause and effect which narrative demands. If there is a story to be told, it is discontinuous and full of unresolved tensions, gaps, and contradictions.
It’s not so much that Christianity needs an alternative, almost escapist narrative, beginning with creation, the fall, redemption in Jesus, and the future resurrection of the dead — into and within which we can imaginatively find our place. What is needed instead is an alternative account of the world we see and the lives we live, one that makes sense of the obvious fissures of them and the occasionally rival interpretations. Paul does not ever narrate the Christian faith through the logical sequence of cause and effect. For him, there is no primordial plan of redemption that enfolds over time; there is only the interruption of history through the revelation of the grace of God. Because this grace is given unconditionally, it is only revealed as a disturbance of a previously sinful equilibrium that has no causal relationship to grace itself. If grace is a repair job or a medicine that heals, then we would have the best of stories to tell ourselves as we move from somewhat good to great.
Grace, instead, always comes as a surprise—to move us from death to life. It is an alien invasion of the enslaved cosmos itself to condense our storytelling to this singular event that divides time into a simple before and after. The life under grace is not a narrative, but a testimony to an event of resurrection. For I once was blind, but now I see. We once were dead, but by the grace of God are dead no more. If we have story at all, if we have a song, it is of God’s unforeseen intervention to unseat the Powers of evil by the blood of the lamb who takes away the sin of the world.
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19 responses to “The World Is Not a Story (According to Paul)”
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I don’t mean to detract from the great pastoral wisdom that shines through this piece in commenting thus— I truly do find much to appreciate in the resurgence of apocalyptic, much that reinvigorates old insights from farther back in the great tradition— but I would ask, where does Israel fit into this? I don’t pose that question as a defeater, me genoito! It’s just there is an incipient Marcionism in many strands of contemporary apocalyptic that yanks apart things that, in some manner or another, belong together.
In no way do I see that happening here. I understand the burden of the piece is pastoral as this emphasis on other actors on the cosmological-historical stage tells us the truth, that there is not a linear development from A to B and B to C, organically arriving at a savior who gives us what we were at bottom expecting all along. The inscrutable mayhem of the world truly is opaque and defies our attempts to comprehend it or map it on to the arc of our character’s development (or the world’s) in the movie of History. Absolutely, utterly with you, amen and amen. So what I really want to ask is: how would you affirm all you have written above and incorporate the idea that Abraham and Israel were somehow necessary in getting us to where we are now, and that the things we have experienced, good and bad, were (dare I say it?) necessary for the… erm… it seems almost any word I could use insinuates a plot or trajectory, and I guess that’s part of the point I wanted to raise.
I understand some demur at the question and fire off comparisons to special relativity and quantum mechanics, but I cannot bring myself to believe there is a fundamental incoherence between the covenant belonging to and having a history and the apocalyptic in-breaking of God’s eschatological reign.
After three paragraphs I fear it sounds like I’m a critic, but I’m really not— I dug the piece, I just wanted to poke at a nest and see what happened ????
I agree there is much here that is good, but the issue isn’t whether there is a story or not, but whose story matters and is true. To speak of the resurrection is senseless without the story of sin, death and the devil, as Luther used to put it, the story that we find in the creation, the deliverance of Israel and Jesus Christ, crucified and raised does matter or it isn’t this world or our lives which are redeemed by grace. Baptism places us in this story so that we might know that the breaking in of God’s reign is our story, even if God brings us in kicking and screaming by Grace. What is needed instead is an alternative account of the world we see and the lives we live, one that makes sense of the obvious fissures of them and the occasionally rival interpretations. Your statement that “Paul does not ever narrate the Christian faith through the logical sequence of cause and effect.” isn’t exactly true if one reads his Old Testament references to Abraham or Romans 9-10 or even the first two chapters of Romans. That he has a different way of narrating the story may have something to do with the purpose of the letters. My New Testament teacher Roy Harrisville has written of the Fracture that is the crucifixion, but that didn’t keep him from telling his students the story of the Gospel in light of the crucifixion when we read Romans with him. I find Robert Jenson’s Story and Promise more persuasive here — a promise needs a story to work itself out and it needs to be a true story, even if it the story of grace is “the interruption of history through the revelation of the grace of God.” I didn’t know Ernst Käsemann, but my reading of his work doesn’t seem to bear out the use to which you have put him, “Man is always faced with a call — a call to which he must respond in his thinking, his speaking, his acting and his suffering. He is a created being in that he experiences the divine address, which compels him to earthly pilgrimage. This fact makes him a historical being: he stands beneath the sign of exodus and his horizon is hope.” (Perspectives on Paul, p. 5) There was much to think about, so thank you for the post, and yes I could be wrong.
I think Charis means something rather specific by story here that I’m not sure falls under this critique or not. But that’s not why I commented. Mostly I’m just pleased to see someone else mention Uncle Roy’s book, Fracture.
Ian: How can Lutheranism not be Marcionite? 😉
I kid, but I think part of Charis’ theological platform rejects much of what you’re taking for granted. But I agree with your ponderings.
So…‘stories’ are things that have no interrupting antagonists. Right. And ‘Paul’s view of the world’ takes the interrupting antagonists SO seriously that it makes narrative ways of looking at the world actually impossible. Right. In fact, cause and effect itself, according to Paul, is mere illusion. Right. Glad we got all that straight. We should definitely quit it with all our silly storytelling and attempts at reason and meaning. You know, all that silly stuff. I’m sure what Paul would have us do is just sit back and rest in the wonderful arbitrariness, I mean, ‘grace’ of God.
A more charitable reading: You seem to be fed up with the over-narrativizing of Paul/Scripture. I can probably get behind that. Your correction just seems heavy-handed. Do you really think that Paul’s theology has no narrative or even causal elements?
Forgive me if this reply is long! There are few things to address…
It seems I struck a nerve and I’m more than happy to engage in conversation – which is the whole point of blogging in the first place. My blog post here is admittedly (though not intentionally) provocative, if only because I recognize it to be a gadfly within the current trends. “Story” or “narrative” have taken on a supreme significance as an almost panacea to the disillusionment of modernity (one exemplified by Netflix’s “Jim and Andy”), whether it be Reformed covenantal theology, Reformed NT Wright, Alan Jacobs at the recent NYC Conference, Stanley Hauerwas, or those who misread Hans Frei. What better way to deal with cultural skepticism than to have people swallow the religion whole under the pretense offered by story.
But before Marcionitism is banded about about me (see pasts Charis posts), I have few minor clarifications. Firstly, I was very specific about how I defined narrative/story as it relates both to apocalyptic powers and grace. I was clear to define story in terms of causality, rather than something more bland like a sequence of events. Secondly, this is important because Paul’s belief in powers makes our own autobiographies and understanding of causality premature or imperfect. Finally, a causal story is inadequate for Paul he does not speak of the Gospel in this way. Paul is not a storyteller; he is a theologian of the singular, unconditioned event of Jesus’ life/death/resurrection. Matthew is a storyteller of the Gospel, as well as Luke, and Hebrews. Paul does not incorporate Christ into a single scriptural narrative. Perhaps more provocatively, those who do seem to espouse such a narrative reading of the Hebrew scriptures find themselves in Paul’s cross-hairs. Even narrative theologians of Paul will speak of an underlying “narrative substructure” to his writings, but this is an appeal to silence which is somehow necessary to his thought.
Paul does employ scriptural antecedents to elucidate the gospel, but this is a question of epistemology, rather than something inherent to the eschatological event of Christ itself. Scripture is employed by Paul as a testimony to Jesus, he can only makes sense of what happens in the death/resurrection of Jesus by way of scripture, but he does map this out in a causal way. Or, Christ did not die *because* of the promise to Abraham (or even to fulfill the promise to Abraham!), but the promise to Abraham testifies to God’s act in Christ. The reasons for this seem to be his understanding of grace as well as the radically new, invasive, and unexpected nature of the Christ-event itself.
Following Paul along these lines to a criticism of our own autobiographies, Paul’s model of Philippians 3 is instructive, where there is no positive precondition for his reception of grace. Not his heritage, not his understanding of scripture, not his family, and not his good works. If there is anything before grace, it falls on negative sign of the ledger and the similarity to this and the apocalyptic event of Christ should be revealing.
As exemplified by the other aforementioned New Testament writers, this is not to say that there is must not be a place for story in our theologies or evangelism. These have their strengths and utility. Rather, it is that Paul cannot be pressed into service to do so and there are, perhaps, very good reasons he avoids the story business altogether.
So grateful for these theological provocations! “Narrative” and “story” have become rhetorical crutches that now carry loads they can’t bear.
Agreed that conversation is the point of blogging! Thanks for engaging. You have helped clarify some things. Two questions:
1) Forgive me, but I cannot help but see in your interpretation a particular reaction to Wright and his ilk. Do you really mean that Paul’s theology is either unaffected by or in opposition to a narrative/historical/story-like understanding of God’s relationship to his people? To me, even ignoring Wright’s POV, the narrative lens is so powerful and present throughout the rest of the biblical texts, even if Paul is silent about it (which is debatable), we would almost have to conclude that it is assumed. To claim that he is doing away with the narrative lens demands an extremely heavy burden of proof. Of course, whether or not the narrative lens should be emphasized to the extent that Wright does is debatable. But the claim you’re making seems to be a hefty swing of the pendulum toward another extreme.
2) Perhaps it is your particularly radical view of grace that is driving you to this conclusion? Is it your view that Paul’s idea of grace CANNOT fit within a narrative arc? Or simply that he does not frame it that way? I would assume the former. Are you saying something like, “If grace is truly unconditional, it cannot be understood to have any cause or origin within our relationship to him (either as individuals or as a people) but only in the mysterious kindness of his own nature”? Something like that?
1. The absence of narrative in Paul is an interesting oddity in comparison with other NT writers. He is capable of doing so when offering a reading of the Torah, as demonstrated by his temporal distinctions in his discussion of Abraham and the Law in Galatians. The key difference for me even in this text is Paul’s categorization of what is given to Abraham as a promise- instead of a covenant. This is a striking shift of terminology, one that circumvents the whole Reformed mono-covnenant vs. two covenant debate altogether. Abraham has faith in the promise of Christ and stands justified because of Christ. There is no grand plan for his people within which Christ functions as a protagonist. Or, to switch metaphors, the root of the olive branches broken off or grafted in is Christ, the one who is holy, rather than the covenant to Abraham.
2. Relatedly, I would surmise that Paul’s non-narrated Gospel has its origins principally in his own complete reversal of expectations through both his conversion and his missionary activity. Perhaps Paul did hold to a grand narrative at one time, but epistemic disruptions of a crucified messiah, the gift of the Spirit to the Gentiles apart from the Law, and the rejection of Jesus by his fellow Jews were all such seismic shifts that made the Christ-event an almost self-authenticating revelation. Likewise, his doctrine of grace is the coalescing of these intertwining events. Paul searches the scriptures to make sense of what occurred and the scriptural testimonies to Christ he unearths are necessary or essential precisely because his conviction that Jesus is the same God of the Old Testament.
What resonates with me and I think cannot be emphasized enough is that the sending of the Son is not the logical outcome of an immanent, linear process in the way that the normal flow of historical causation along the lines of, say,
1) Pearl Harbor is bombed
2) United States declares war on Japan
3) United States manufactures arms and armament on massive scale
works along that linear, sequential logic. Reiterating this keeps us from crowning the mission of the Son as the vindication of our (whoever our in-group is) project, much the way liberal Protestantism had prior to that whole Great War thing. But it’s still wickedly simple to derive the worthiness of some cause or immanent process in human history from a re-narrated cross and resurrection if and when the cross and resurrection are not confessed as the divine surplus entering the closed circle of human affairs that it actually is.
Therefore I am enormously sympathetic to what is on offer in this piece, it’s just that I want to work out some of the details of what that warping of process/sequence/causation looks like on the scale of a human life. I know I dropped the “M” word in my first comment but only with regard to some contemporary presentations of Pauline apocalyptic as I don’t read that here. I guess what I’m more concerned with is an existential Marcionism, if I may coin a probably terrible phrase.
Ian, I appreciate your tone. I also appreciate you offering some logical reason why it might be important NOT to place the sending of the Son in some kind of historically-causative framework. Obviously, we shouldn’t do it to the extreme (we do not know the mind of God). But (I kept thinking) why insist on not doing it AT ALL? Your answer: It keeps us from (falsely) crowning the mission of the Son as the vindication of our own in-group project. Very true. That’s super helpful to the part of me that’s asking, “Why? Why this intense deconstruction of narrative?” Because we’ve seen bad ideologies arise from this framework. Fair enough.
But…is that really the fault of historical causation itself? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that the bad ideologies arise from a MISUSE of this framework, not merely from the framework itself. (I mean, to some extent, reason itself relies on discerning chains of causation.) Isn’t it just as imaginable–if not more so–that bad ideologies can arise from a-historical frameworks? I am not arguing that a narrative framework is the only way to read Paul (not even that it’s necessarily the best). Just trying to understand why it CAN’T be one of a number of important elements in Paul’s thoughts.
So, in my mind, there must be some deeper ideological reason for bashing narrative. Is there for you? A particular theology of grace maybe: grace that cannot be rooted in any non-monergistic cause?
I think this issue of how we construe the nature of the Christ-event and how we interpret our times are linked (this is the heart of the post), but you’re right that a salvation-historical approach need not lead to a kind of triumphalism seen during the world wars. I’d say that this fatal inference arising out of salvation-historical projects have this inherent *tendency* or potential in a way that is not true of apocalyptic. Käsemann’s criticisms of Stendahl on this front are only true if we hold all historical phenomenon accountable to what they ultimately bequeath to the world (a point that is highly debated today). Now, apocalyptic isn’t immune to having its own difficulties, such as Marcionitism (Campbell), or a pronounced ambivalence toward discerning the activity of God today. Both are included within the canon, and perhaps their joint witness makes the whole knowledge-of-God’s-actions-today enterprise an impossible possibility.
Love the post. Enjoying the comments. So easy for us to be trapped because we are so convinced and defensive of our epistemology. I think of the really great preachers of the 20th century… Donald G Barnhouse, Gaebeline, Wilbur m. Smith, D.L. Moody, Ironsides and the list goes on Who were resolute in their Dispensational narrative. There are more church going people today who are carrying their Scofield Bible and have never read a page of N.T. Wright.
I’m in deeper waters than I’m capable of managing but something about this post says, Yes.
t.
Thank you, Charis, for your thoughtful responses. To some degree, I may just be having trouble understanding. It’s probably because you’re coming from a technical academic context with which I’m not quite familiar enough. At moments I’m with you, and at other moments you lose me completely. For example…
1) When you say: “There is no grand plan for [Abraham’s] people within which Christ functions as a protagonist,” it feels like a direct contradiction not merely of the N.T. Wrights of our time, but of almost every traditional Christian reading of the OT in the last two thousand years, including the NT authors themselves. In fact, it feels like a contradiction to the very idea of messianic prophecy. Do you think that Paul disagrees with Matthew’s belief that the OT foretells Jesus’ coming? Perhaps that’s where I’m getting thrown off…because I’m uncomfortable with that school of thought that presents Paul’s arguments in, say, Galatians, as standing in contradiction to much of the rest of the NT. Is that where we differ?
2) You say: “Nor is it because Paul has come to believe in a more profound, antiquarian narrative of creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the future resurrection — as if these events can be mapped out in a logically causal chain. For Paul, we find so often that human existence is inexplicable because there are other Actors on the stage of human history for which we cannot fully account…Sin, the Flesh, Death, the Law, the Spirit, etc.” Yes, these powers are central to Paul’s view. But why (oh why) must they lead to epistemic despair? Do they really make human existence ‘inexplicable’, as you say? Perhaps that would be so if the powers of Sin and Death alone took the stage. But is not the very purpose of the Law to bring interpretation and explanation to what might otherwise be inexplicably disorienting? The Law does orient, even if it doesn’t save. And the Spirit, of course, does much more.
Sorry I don’t mean to belabor this. I understand if you’re tired of answering my questions.
Excellent.
How am I supposed to comprehend the premise of this article if I don’t approach it as a narrative? How can we entertain these complex concepts without placing them within a larger framework of understanding? Is there such a thing as non-narrative comprehension?
I loved the conversation here so much that I decided to write a follow up post, this time on Luke. It’ll be up as soon as it’s ready!