Gospel as Story 3

C. S. Lewis saw a good story as providing “concrete experience of the universal.”  He held that thinking and experiencing, by themselves, were not complete. Paul F. Ford explains what Lewis thought about story this way:

“Essentially, Lewis saw story as the bridge between two ways of knowing reality: thinking about it and experiencing it. Thinking is incurably abstract; experiencing is always concrete. The human dilemma is that ‘as thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; [as experiencers] we do not clearly understand [what we are experiencing]. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off; the more deeply we enter into the reality, the less we can think.” (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction; pg xxi)

As products of modern and post-modern society, this dilemma becomes more and more urgent. In my case, I think way too much. My need is to become more active to assimilate the reality of what I think. Others around me, though, are simply too active. They just don’t have time to be contemplative. Because of the choices available, we can pursue those activities that make us feel most comfortable without ever needing to do the work necessary to bear fruit using the opposite method. If you’re active, you can be always active without ever needing to be contemplative. If you’re contemplative, you can certainly find the books and websites that feed your contemplative nature without ever needing to be active.

It is not that this is any different that at any other age, just more pronounced.

For Lewis, the “thinking and the experiencing come together in one place: a good story.” It is a combination of the ideas of looking at something and looking along something. Looking at corresponds with thinking and is abstract. Looking along corresponds with experience and is sensory, concrete. A good story, because of the design imposed by its author, brings forward those things that are of ultimate importance. C. S. Lewis said it this way:

“As a work of the imagination, [a story] helps people to both contemplate and enjoy either an aspect of reality they already know or something that they don’t know and the author of the story thinks they should.”

This is why the gospel’s original form is as story. When wrenched from this original form—to some propositional formula, for example—the gospel loses its’ power.

When I’ve talked about this idea in the past, the idea that comes across is that it is the story that’s important, not the subject of the story. And, sometimes, it is perceived that because I’m using the word story (remember the word fantasy from yesterday’s post?), or because Lewis says that story is a “work of the imagination” that the content of that story may or may not be true. If we tell the gospel as story, can we rest assured our audience will consider our story as fact? Do we undermine our case by using story?

I don’t think so. The gospel has always been story, from its inception. Even the gospel in the Old Testament is told as a story. Its form as story in no way undermines it as fact. Additionally, if Lewis is right, this is the way the gospel was designed, so that its hearers could respond to some “concrete experience of the universal” even if they weren’t around to see Jesus heal or hear Him speak.

But, there’s one other thing about story that is even more interesting. Eugene Peterson, in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, takes these ideas a step further when he says,

“Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn’t know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

As such, stories are initial building blocks of community.

Gospel as Story 2

It seems, then, that the old adage, “show, don’t tell”, applies to the telling of stories as well as to the writing of them. But the temptation to “tell” is always present:

• What if my audience misses my point?
• What if my audience draws different conclusions?
• What if my audience ignores this story?

I’m using “tell” or “telling” in this post to indicate the presence of language, both verbal and nonverbal, explicit or implicit, which dictates or “tells” people how they should feel about the particular story they’re hearing. This is to be differentiated from “telling” the story, which is simply an arrangement of the events in that story, and I’ll refer to as “showing.” I suppose this might be confusing–and I might need to change the words signifying the ideas later–but I will stick with this definition for now. Later I’ll incorporate the idea of story “showing” versus story ‘telling”.

I think there are a number of motivations for “telling”. Make no mistake: some motivations for “telling” are certainly good and proper and right. We love Jesus and want other people to love Jesus too because we believe Jesus loves them. This leads us to tell other people about Him, which is fine, by itself. This “telling”, however, sometimes includes, especially in formal preaching, arcane historical data or a deconstruction and reconstruction of the underlying text (which, by the way, is not the story). Also, we might add our own emotional interpretation; we tell people how we feel and we imply others should feel as we do. We may illustrate the story with other stories having nothing whatever to do with the original story and thereby imply that there is some perceived correct reaction to the story.

Paul F. Ford describes, in his introductory essay for the Companion to Narnia, why C. S. Lewis thought we should avoid what I’m describing as “telling”:

“Lewis offers much hope to those who would read his stories as to how and why he wrote them. He complains that the heart of any story is often undetected by the most earnest critic thereof. A story is a ’series of imagined events’, ‘a net of successive moments.’ Yet the critic concentrates on style, order, and character delineation, the ‘everything else’ which ought to exist in fantasy for the sake of the story.” (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction, pg xxviii)

I’ll leave aside the idea of “fantasy” for a moment. Don’t get hung up here because the word means “something made up” or “fiction”. I’ll return to this idea in the next post. For now, I want to concentrate on the idea that the critic of the story misses the heart of the story and why this happens. Lewis complained that in most criticism that the “series of imagined events” or the “net of successive moments” is broken. We are asking people to look not to the heart of the message, where meaning resides, but off to the side, where we think meaning resides or where we desire the meaning to reside. This is not unusual: many times this off-to-the-side type of study does, indeed add to the meaning of the story. But adding to the meaning and the meaning itself are two different things.

I’m not talking here about commentary, explanation or translation. These are types of story “showing” in and of themselves, and although they seem to be off-to-the-side studies, they leave the substance of the story intact. In this type of story showing, the voice and thoughts and feelings of the writer/speaker are left out of the telling.

Within criticism, on the other hand, the voice, thoughts and feelings of either the writer or the speaker are the main point of the exercise. And, in the mind of the reader or the hearer, the message becomes, more or less, a sales pitch, not a story. If a sales pitch, then the story becomes something that can be bought and consumed rather than something that can be contemplated and lived. In other words, the goal of telling is for it to work, to achieve some end determined in advance which may or may not have anything to do with its’ underlying true meaning. This can be effective, but when the buying and consuming is finished, so ends the effectiveness of the story.

The goal of story showing should be not to find something that works but to transform people who hear the story. This transformation  happens from within rather than from without. The effect can be and sometimes is permanent.

I guess, the operative question that should be asked by the hearer of any story is this: “Is this story one that can be lived?” If no, then the story should be forgotten. If yes ask, “What would happen if I do live this story?”

Gospel as Story 1

Yesterday, we talked in our class about telling the gospel as story. I’d like to spend the next couple of days expanding upon that idea.

I’ve learned most about story from reading writers who write great stories. There are some writers, however, who have even written about the process, thus shedding light about how to approach a story, both as a reader and as a writer.

One of those writers was C. S. Lewis.

Now, it seems that a figure who towed so high in 20th Century Christian history would have little to say to those people in a postmodern setting. Some postmodern Christians believe that Lewis is quoted way too often. This is unfortunate because, although Lewis was the quintessential modern, he also possessed postmodern and even medieval sensibilities. His was a curious mixture, to be sure, but I think much can be learned from his eclectic application of thinking styles from across the ages.

I also think it interesting that the personal story of C. S. Lewis sounds like stories told by so many people who’ve been disaffected by the so-called modern ecclesiology prevalent in so many churches. Paul F. Ford, in his Introduction to the Companion to Narnia, writes this:

“As a child, Lewis had been told how to feel about God and religious realities. And this obligation to feel froze his feeling. Night after night in his school dormitory, he tried to muster all the proper feeling attendant upon saying the Lord’s Prayer with devotion. His scrupulosity wearied him and he gladly gave all this up when he left the practice of his religion in his early teens. There were ‘watchful dragons’ at the Sunday School door, and these fostered a schism in his personality that lasted into his forties.“  (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction Essay; pg xix)

Lewis “had been told how to feel.”  If we are to tell the gospel as story, this is to be avoided at all costs. People will feel what they will about Jesus. If they cannot generate a feeling, they will become frustrated, angry, hurt, confused and leave the church or, worse, they will stick around and become pretenders, acting as though they feel something they really don’t. I guess this is something also to be learned: Expecting people to feel the same way you do about things is not only an unrealistic expectation, it’s an unusual expectation as well.

To Be Surprised

We see glimpses now;
in that day
we will
see it
straight on.

In the days
after death dies
we will see all
as it was
created to be.

And we will be…
Surprised!