Tell Me a Story

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. – Hannah Arendt

I’ve come to love the often long, arduous narrative portions of the Bible, particularly those in the Old Testament. I love indulging in the imagination necessary to create that “movie in my head.” I blame this squarely on Tolkien. For some reason The Lord of the Rings trilogy fostered a respect and enjoyment of a lived in, deeply historical, acutely human, epic narrative. The first time I finished The Return of the King I found myself wanting to experience that disquieting epic urgency present in his story; that feeling of kairos, and inter-connectedness; the experience of the veil of divine meaning momentarily lifted so one might get a passing glimpse or scent or breezy touch of the divine mystery; the hint of holistic reality, the trace of divine condescension. For some reason, I found this experience often repeated when reading the epic tales recorded in the Old Testament.

This wasn’t always the case for me. I grew up with a strong preference for the enlightening pedagogy found in the Apostle’s letters. Meaning was much easier to find there. The writers came right out and told you what they meant. They explained those epic tales. They told you what was going on behind the scenes in heavenly places while folks slogged about trying to make sense of their lives down here. They gave you the moral of the story. They clarified the ambiguities of history... to a point, but as it turns out, not always to a particularly sharp point. This stood out to me as a Bible study I am involved in was trying to make sense of Romans 9 through 11.

Paul here is trying to reconcile God’s actions in the history of the life of Israel with God’s actions in the young history of the life of the Church. It may seem at first blush that God has abandoned Israel to engage the Church. Paul makes the historical case that this isn’t so. This is Paul doing his best to clear the muddy waters of history. Of course this clearing is necessary because history doesn’t interpret itself. Even when God acts to intervene in history, or perhaps especially when God acts to intervene in history, God’s motivations and intentions are often not entirely clear. Take as an example any narrative representation in scripture. When God extended daylight in the book of Joshua, what did God intend to communicate to humanity? When God allowed Job to suffer, what was really going on there? When God allows Jonah’s shade to be eaten by worms, what are we to take from that? Granted, we’re often given partial answers to these questions, but we are typically left with more questions than answers. Some might be uncomfortable with this predicament, which is why we may tend to embrace only the explanations in the New Testament, however I would suggest this ambiguity is one of the strengths of Biblical historical narratives. In the words of philosopher Hanna Arendt these narrative reveal meaning, I might add “experientially,” without defining it.

One of the most amazing outcomes of a good story, at least to me, is the wordless glimpse it provides into transcendence, into places where denotations and definitions are powerless to go. A good story allows one to experience something beyond the walls of the visible, and allows the unseen to be perceived, imagined and experienced. These experiences though are, again at least for me, often difficult to impossible to articulate. Words as human creations are often not capable of containing the descriptions or meaning of these kinds of experiences. The meaning simply overflows the words. This is part of the challenge I think Paul faces in Romans 9 through 11. He’s trying to condense a story God had been telling over thousands of years into a few paragraphs. He brings to light the key points he wants to highlight to boil the story down for his readers, but there is far more that God was and is doing in those relationships than can be contained in those few chapters, which I believe Paul himself would acknowledge.

This then I believe is part of the value of reading the narratives of the Old Testament on their own; that the reader gets to experience these glimpses first hand. They get to experience the wildness of a God who is good but not safe, to cite Lewis. They get to experience the meaning the Holy Spirit is intending to reveal to humanity, even while that meaning isn’t entirely defined, and in this case, I believe that lack of definition is a good thing.