Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, famously stressed the importance of interpreting the Bible as “narrative.” By this he didn’t mean it isn’t true, but that its underlying meaning is grasped in the form of story.
Noted for his almost indecipherably dense Germanic writing style, with dependent clause upon dependent clause, our assignment in divinity school was to read only about ten pages at a clip of his landmark four-volume tome, Church Dogmatics.
So, years ago, I based a children’s story on it. With the youthful trusting faces surrounding me up in the chancel, I asked them if they liked a good story. They did.
I then started to read from Church Dogmatics. This is not the exact quote but is, believe it or not, one of his more lucid:
“Sin and evil have an ontological being, an ontological being of its very peculiar own kind, a kind of being which can only be described in purely negative terms. As, for example, I should say, ‘Sin and evil, and the devil himself, are impossible possibilities.’ Or, if you prefer, unreal realities. It can’t be helped, that’s their nature, because sin means living a lie.” (This is one of his more famous lines.)
Early on, none too surprisingly, the kids started looking at me and one another with stunned disbelief. Their parents at the same time were likely thinking it was time for the pastor to get his resume up to date.
Then I hit them with the punchline, that Barth, this towering figure of theological sophistication, was once asked if he could summarize this whole life’s work in a single sentence.
“Yes, I can,” he reportedly said, “In the words of a song I learned at my mother’s knee: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’”
I instantly redeemed myself in the eyes of both the children and their parents. For the time being at least, my job was secure.
In any event, the point is that through stories we humans place our life experiences into context, into a coherent narrative. We live life forward, often traversing strange and foreign landscapes. Without a frame of reference we are lost.
Though we’re often told that reason guides us, it alone cannot match the power of stories. That’s because stories engage not just reason but emotion and spirit. They touch that part of ourselves often hidden from sight and in ways we are consciously unaware.
Then again, there are stories and then there are stories. Take the two creation accounts in the Book of Genesis. Contrary to a literalistic reading of these stories, they are in fact stories, not historical accounts. Yet in them the reader or hearer is invited into a world that tells us some very basic things about God and creation, things that frame our understanding of life itself.
Be it noted that the Genesis accounts were hardly the only creation stories circulating around the ancient Near East. There were any number of them. And they explained reality to those who held to them.
One famous account is Gnostic. It asserts that the world was created by an evil demiurge. Thus, creation was essentially (ontologically) evil. The focus of life, as such, was to escape the vagaries of existence by gaining secret spiritual knowledge (gnosis) as the means of escaping an otherwise unredeemable material world.
Consider the difference in the Genesis accounts. There a loving God is Creator, who establishes that everything that exists is divinely made and thus good! Human beings are made, in fact, in God’s very own mage!
Evil, while endemic to the Gnostic worldview, is considered an anomaly in the Genesis accounts, the result of creation’s rejection of God and God’s goodness. It’s a turning away relationally from the source of light. (Thus Barth’s evil as an “impossible possibility” and sin as a “lie.”
To live within the Gnostic worldview is to disparage the things of creation, while the Judeo-Christian idea is to cherish them and to rediscover their intrinsic beauty and redemptive power, just as God so ordained.
In the end, both the Gnostic and the Jew encounter the same life circumstances yet experience them completely differently, both in terms of what they mean and how one responds to them.
Fast-forwarding to today, I have noticed a variety of responses to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus that betray the many divergent, modern-day stories we default to in times of crisis, be they conscious or no.
How does one frame the strange unfamiliarities generated by the virus’ sudden outbreak? What stories do we tell ourselves to contextualize these experiences into a larger set of meanings? What do these stories say about life and about death? And what do they suggest our response ought to be?
More often than not, if one takes the news media and popular culture as our guide, the response is more like Munch’s The Scream (pictured above) than anything even remotely approximating thoughtfulness or considered judgment.
Blogger Alma T.C. Boykin recently wrote: “We, as a culture, have been fed ‘End is Nigh’ stories for decades now. Nuclear war, nuclear winter, zombies, secret vampire governments, vampires created by government experiments gone wrong, environmental disaster leading to global collapse, zombies again, hyper-fast climate change leading to galloping ice-sheets, more zombies, earthquakes that rip California off of the continent, and still more zombies…Oh, and various plagues, some natural, some bio-engineered.”
These stories are powerful, she assures, and they “explain in part why the world has gone strange.” She also suggests that the coronavirus “[feeds] right into the story-world of the past decades…” We are, in effect, “primed for ‘worst case ever!!’ stories of plagues and collapse and social disaster.”
“It’s all in the framing,” she explains, “all in the background stories that set the pattern. Our cultural stories about zombie apocalypses and the End of Civilization have so soaked into the collective social mind that people are reacting as if that was the problem, not an especially nasty lower respiratory bug…”
The simple fact is, such epidemics are not new in human history. Instead of hysteria, paralyzing fear, and doomsday projections, we should place this virus in context, not callously, but thoughtfully and with due consideration. Yet to even suggest such a thing in today’s Manichean climate is to appear both reckless and uncaring, at best.
Again, Boyking: “We need more positive ‘we can get through this’…tales, more stories that encourage and show how people get through by helping each other and being prepared (within reason).”
Ultimately, she concludes, “We have the luxury of picking our stories.” And then adds, “Choose well.”
Whenever ancient Israel found itself in difficult and uncharted waters, it returned to its roots. Its defining story of the Exodus, of God leading a disparaged people out of Egyptian slavery and into the Promised Land, would thus be lifted up again and again.
In so doing, Israel was reminded of prior hardships, times when all seemed lost. Yet God had acted faithfully. God had redeemed them. And if God had redeemed them then, God would redeem them again. Hope would define their extent circumstance of suffering and loss.
With the increasing absence of the Judeo-Christian story, of how life is constituted and how it one day shall end, we’ve manufactured alternate religious narratives with competing apocalyptic endings and lurking evils.
But rather than a hope-filled story that admits to human suffering while affording solace and calm, even in the face of death, and that concludes ultimately with wholesale redemption, our modern stories stress the fleeting frisson of a regnant, overweening nihilism and despair.
The other day I received an email from a friend of ours who grew up in England. She wrote: “During the Blitz in Great Britain there was stoicism. In adversity…strength. Air raid shelters were only used when necessary…Add plenty of humor…This too shall pass.”
The source of this erstwhile strength was undoubtedly born of the confidences and assurances intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian story. It was the story most had grown up with and was therefore the one they invariably chose, if not by default.
What story, then, shall we choose?