The stories we tell….

My reading project for 2025 is N. T. Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God”. But because I managed to finish my 2024 project (Calvin’s “Institutes”) early, I decided to get started on Vol 1 of “Origins”: “The New Testament and the People of God”. Now admittedly there’s a lot of ground clearing goes on in the early chapters, but it’s useful for getting one’s bearings. And central to a lot of it is the issue of “story”. Of course the Anglo-Saxon scientist in me began to bridle at this point. But I managed not to get to the stage of chanting “just give me the facts” under my breath. Of course, had I been better educated (which is my aim in reading Wright in the first place) I would have realised that such a chant would simply be evidence of my capture by a particular story, the “modern” story. This is a story on an epic scale that still has quite a lot of us in its grip. It’s a tale about facts being true statements concerning things that exist absolutely, and phenomena that can be established in their totality using data (observations, measurement etc; for further discussion of facts, see here). We need to busy ourselves collecting such facts and once we have enough (although the threshold for “enough” is rarely explicitly stated) we can know some things for a certainty (because we’ve established the facts). Anything that doesn’t fit with this scheme (ie anything that can’t be measured and weighed, prodded and poked) probably isn’t meaningful, possibly doesn’t even exist and certainly isn’t worth bothering about. Therefore, basically only science can be trusted (because this is the sort of thing that science “does”), anything else is junk. This general view is a holdover from a particular philosophy that no longer impresses philosophers (and their fellow travellers in the humanities in general). But it holds sway in the minds of more than a few scientists I have encountered. And you’ll find it in the popular books they write (usually at or towards the end of their professional scientific careers). So more than a few non-scientists, otherwise normal and intelligent people, have made this their story. The problem is that as a story it is self-refuting. It itself is not a fact or collection of facts, it’s not science (even although it usually involves science) it cannot be measured, and therefore if true it must be false. 

Having calmed myself down, I returned to thinking about stories more widely. Wright’s contention is that “stories are important as an index of the world-view of any culture”. Which got me to thinking about the stories that are current today, those stories that might reveal the world-view of the contemporary culture. This is not a task I am capable of carrying out in any great detail. Others have spent more time and expended much more effort on projects like this. Carl Trueman and his “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” comes to mind (well worth a read, published in 2020, but by now probably obtainable second hand). What is the defining story of contemporary culture? It clearly cannot be the 18th/19th century story of humanity’s inevitable progress. The bloody 20^th century, with its world wars and atrocities, surely provided ample evidence that inevitable progress was a cruel fiction and could not be a story worth investing in. Its bankruptcy has been amply confirmed by the early disasters of the 21^st century. The story that elevates science and assumes that anything not approachable scientifically (ie most of life as we live it), while widespread, is now only held tentatively. Science itself is in a spot of bother, assailed by crises of reproducibility (what should have been one of its hallmarks turns out to be surprisingly rare) and integrity (a proportion of scientists turn out to be thoroughly untrustworthy). The results range from climate crisis denialism to falling vaccination rates with the consequential return of once banished diseases. Or maybe the more recent story that denies that there is any overarching story, and the nihilism to which this inevitably leads, is in fact the current prevailing story.

How this came to be is precisely what Trueman and others have tried to track. By his account, the efforts of a number of “story tellers” have brought us to where we are, of whom the most familiar are perhaps Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The particular stories they originally told have themselves largely been discredited and discarded. It’s the residual, cumulative influence of their stories and their cumulative effects that are still with us. For each of these three, part of the objective was the destruction of one particular competing story. Nietzsche was perhaps the most obvious and knowing of the three as far as this aspect of the project was concerned. God might have been killed, but Christianity still had to be dealt with; it would in time “perish”. He was happy to initiate, or at least be in at the beginning of its demise. He knew (or suspected) that this would be a long-term project. In his preface to “The Dawn of the Day”, written in 1881, he writes of “a ‘subterrestrial' at work, digging, mining, undermining.” He probably didn’t realise how long it would take, in part because he was thoroughly dismissive of Christianity’s intellectual merits. After all, key Christian truths originated “in nothing but errors of reason”. He had a substitute story, and yet this story, along with those of Marx and Freud, have faired and aged arguably much worse than Christianity (and indeed other religious “stories”). The churches that these thinkers had so little time for, the centres from which the Christian story was and is (in theory at least) proclaimed, while apparently struggling in Europe and North America, appear to be doing rather well in Africa, South America and Asia. And at an estimated 100 million (estimates vary, this is by no means the highest; see here), there are more Christians in China today than in Europe. It appears that the story that Christians tell has yet to fall into the pit that Nietzsche sought to dig for it. If numbers matter, this might suggest that the story that Christians tell, of all stories, appears to be worth investigating.

But I’m not sure that these numbers do matter. What matters is the truth of the stories we tell and their ability to explain things for us; things like the past, the present and even the future. You may have noticed that we’ve been retelling part of the Christian story this week, acting it out, watching our children acting it out. Mind you, some of the versions on display may have been considerably tweaked from the original. Fortunately the original is available and can be checked, along with the larger Gospel story to which it belongs (not to mention the overall Bible story to which both belong). One can go right to the sources, rather than be suckered by caricatures. What will you find there and what world-view will it reveal? Will it be better than other stories that have been and still are told? Well, that’s a whole other story – which is rather the point.

How come you can understand this….?

One of my 2024 reading objectives was to read Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion” from cover to cover over the year. I managed it in eleven months. Obviously I was not reading it in the original 1559 Latin, nor the sixteenth century French translations. Fortunately for me it has been translated into English, and I was enjoying the fruits of Ford Lewis Battles’ labours (along with an army of Calvin scholars), originally published just over sixty years ago. The combination of Calvin and Battles has proved itself to be highly effective and in some places even entertaining. Although separated by over 500 years and a number of intellectual and cultural revolutions (and a lot else), I think I can claim to have understood more than the gist of what Calvin was on about. I’m sure that there are many allusions I missed (notwithstanding the copious footnotes), and no doubt some of the arguments he takes up have lost their force and relevance. Yet over the months it appears I was able to follow along reasonably well. And yet there are those who would have you believe that this really should not be.

We have lived through (and some may still be in) a period in which the claim has been made that communication, particularly by means of texts (which obviously lack some of the information that we have when speaking to each other), is a fairly ropey business, particularly if you want to claim that authors are routinely able to transmit the contents of their minds accurately to their readers. Additionally it has been claimed that communication of ideas is rarely what anyone actually tries to do; more usually they are trying to manipulate (dominate, oppress) you. But even this is fraught with difficulty as words on pages do not carry meaning. Meaning is to be found in interpretations inside heads. So it turns out that I can have no (or at least little) legitimate expectation that you are following what I’m writing, and therefore only a slim hope that you now understand my (admittedly sketchy) outline of postmodernist theory. One wonders in that case why I’m trying. My general persistence in such exercises (this blog now runs to 145 posts) hints at a potential problem. Any theory has to be tested against what actually happens “in the wild”. And when this theory is tested, it turns out that it doesn’t do too well.

I rather like the illustration given by Don Carson in “The Gagging of God” (p102), when he relates what happened to him when he got into conversation with a student after having delivered some hermeneutics lectures. She took him to task for being stuck in a 19^th century positivist mindset, and listed all the reasons why he should be more open to the new (ie postmodern) approach. He tried to defend his position (which it should be said was neither modernism nor positivism), but with no success. Then in a burst of what he calls “sheer intellectual perversity” he changed tack and congratulated her for using irony to demonstrate the “objectivity of truth”. She began to get rather exasperated, at which point he congratulated her further for adding emotion to irony. Close to incandescence she finally worked out what he was up to. He quietly pointed out that in practice deconstructionists (the spear-point of postmodernism and her own position) only thought that other peoples’ writing could not communicate the thought of authors in any meaningful way. The writings (and 'speakings') of the deconstructionists themselves were mysteriously exempt from any difficulty with the transmission of their meaning, which is why we were all expected to pay careful attention to them.

If communication of ideas (and other contents) were all but impossible, presumably we would have all given up trying to do it a very long time ago. And yet the opposite has been observed. Language is one of the defining features of human beings; we want to communicate, we must communicate. Once the spoken word was all that we had; we had to speak. Writing, communication of spoken work in written, symbolic, form, appears to have developed several times in history, independently in different human civilisations. In Mesopotamia and Egypt symbolic representation of information developed some time before 3000BC. Once a minority sport, with the invention of printing writing (and reading) exploded. And for all that technology is claimed to be the death of writing, who can resist a good written caption on their Tik Tok video (just so it's understood).

 It was a while after the invention of writing that  Moses, who lived around 1300BC (probably), started to record the history of a particular group of people who would come to be known as the Jews. He clearly did so believing his efforts were of some value, and, it turns out, lots of folk throughout history (if what they have said and written are to be believed) have tended to agree with him. Such communication is not perfect (no human endeavour is). What Moses wrote, and indeed whether he actually wrote it, is contested territory. As with me and Calvin, you’ll probably have to read it in translation. Some of it will seem very odd, some perhaps disturbing. But have a go at reading it. The first five books of the Bible are attributed to him. Decide for yourself whether he says nothing, or whether you can make that particular material mean anything. You’ll certainly find it considerably less obscure than Derrida.

In seeking to communicate truth, Moses was doing no more than reflecting the truth that he claimed he was writing: that he (along with the rest of us) was created in the image of God (recorded at the beginning of his writing in Genesis 1 – easy to find). God is a speaking god. He has communicated by means of the spoken word, and of course the written word. Many other words have been written (and not just by postmodernists) to explain why this can’t really be true. And yet, in the experience of many of us He continues to speak. And if written words don’t impress you, consider this. Here we are approaching another Christmas, full of the usual nonsense. But at its core is a celebration of the event that demonstrates that God is not limited to words, written or spoken. To quote some words written in the New Testament “..in these last days he has spoken to us by his (lit: in) son…” (Hebrews 1:2).

If you’ve understood anything so far, have a go at understanding that.