As far back as we have written records, humans have used stories to figure out their world and to help them understand what it means to be human. We are story-telling creatures—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter.
In previous posts we spoke about how individuals, families, and nations use stories to create identities and to provide meaning—that ways of relating, thinking, motivation, and behavior are based on stories. We also talked about how the gospel message is a story that is distinct from the biblical text, and how this distinction enables Christianity to remain good news today.
A question that remains is, “why this story?”
Why choose this story to live by? Why privilege this story? This is a non-trivial question. For one thing, if we were raised in a different time or place—Morocco, Sri Lanka, India, China, or Greece—we would have likely accepted a different religious story—be it Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or the Roman and Greek pantheons. And we would have likely used similar reasoning to explain why we prefer and privilege our particular religious story.
In addition, many look at Christianity and find it repellent. Why choose this story in light of recent examples of evil and disregard for truth? As two examples: the terrible child abuse and its subsequent cover-up, and the widespread suspicion of and hostility toward modern science. And when many look at the Bible, they see, in the words of Steven Pinker, “one long celebration of violence.” Is this story morally and intellectually bankrupt? Can this story give us something valuable that we can’t get elsewhere?
It is unsurprising that some argue for accepting the findings and story of science as a sufficient narrative for humanity. For them, science is unlike various religions—a mass of contradictory stories, where people appear to choose what fancies them and make stuff up.
If, however, we compare religion too closely to science, then religion does seem to be a free for all, not bound to anything. Inevitably, religion will be ruled out because it doesn’t agree with the scientific method. But what if religion is closer to music than science? In music, the approach is unlike the scientific method, but there are still rules, traditions, and frameworks within which people compose and perform music. And cultures have different music—unlike science, where an experiment in Philadelphia should give the same results in Timbuktu. Furthermore, music can communicate information, meaning, truth, and have a transformative influence. So why not religion?
If religions are more akin to music, this opens up a number of similarities. First, like music, religion is different from science and the scientific method. Second, like music, there are different expressions of religion. Third, like music, some religious expressions are better than others. Forth, like music, religion can communicate truth, provide meaning, and have transformative value. Fifth, like music, religious awareness, imagination, and discovery have been with us at least since the appearance of Cro-Magnon.
Both religion and music can inspire and enlighten. And both can have superior forms of expression. Classical pianists may argue, for example, that Liszt’s B Minor Sonata is one of the greatest works in piano literature. Is it superior to much other music? Yes. Does this music communicate well? Is it transformative? Does listening to it make us more fully human? Does it contain more truth and beauty than many other musical expressions? I think so.
Some music is glorious. Some is lousy. Some is repulsive and destructive. Same with religion.
Why do I continue to live by this gospel story? There are many reasons. In part because of my culture. In part because it still makes some sense to me, provides meaning, structure, and community. In part because as I understand the story, it has considerable resources for transformation—that although Christianity has often promoted a tribal insider-outsider mentality (see the post on “a just life”), the story subverts and defies tribalism. In fact, the view that one group or tribe has the understanding and a monopoly on truth is to move away from the gospel. And if this story critiques religious expressions, then Christianity is included.
One point that needs emphasis: the gospel story contains a radical inbuilt critique. At the center of the story is Jesus of Nazareth whose main conflict is with religious leaders. The Judea-Christian religion has a long history of leaders and religious experts at cross-purposes with the gospel story. Christianity has its good and bad. For every sinister Cardinal Grand Inquisitor (Dostoyevsky) we find a kind, generous, and redeeming Bishop Myriel (Hugo). Having just finished reading Laura Hillenbrand’s best seller, Unbroken—the remarkable, inspiring, and true story of Louis Zamperini who in World War II survived all kinds of hardship, cruelty, and torture—I am struck again by the transforming power of the gospel story as exemplified in Louis’ life.
In addition, I choose this story because I prefer to live with trust, hope, justice, love, and life. Of course, non-Christians also live with basic trust in life, hope, justice, and love. The evidence is clear—many live transforming lives. But the gospel story provides something more. It gives these things a lasting reality. When I read the words of the 19th abolitionist and preacher Theodore Parker—“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice”—I prefer to live with the commitment that this arc of justice continues without collapsing into nothingness. Likewise with love. I accept that love is more than oxytocin flooding my brain. I prefer a story where justice, humility, and forgiveness are encouraged. I choose a narrative that encourages giving up of power and having goals lofty enough that require a “dying to self.” I prefer hope to hopelessness or to a hope that finally fails. I want to live with the framework that life has the final word rather than death.
Paul writes in Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” All people live in this reality. It is a reality similar to gravity or evolution, in that grace is there whether we accept it or not. Every human being lives and grapples with this reality. The quest in response to this grace and love is a shared human quest.
Camus writes in his opening lines in the Myth of Sisyphus, “To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.” What story gives a positive and satisfying answer to this question?
Why do you live by the gospel story? If not, what story makes sense to you?
Thanks.
[...] next post is up on the power of story for providing coherence for the human drama. He addressed “Why Story” in his previous post. Today he looks at the Christian story specifically.As far back as we have written records, humans [...]
Thanks. Loved the comparison with music (though how much of music could just as easily be classified as “a matter of taste.”?) Also, I wonder, is our “mission” as followers of Jesus and tellers of His story, to actually tell His story–even if it’s an entirely new story to people/cultures? Or is our mission to help people find a story, their own story that, as you say, brings about transformation and is a story of hope, love, justice ect.? (because many other “stories” certainly seem to do this, to some degree) I’m not sure the difference between your views expressed here and a commonly understood “pluralist” view?
I resonate with the basis of pluralistic thinking—the desire to be in better relationship with people different from us, and that in God all people “live and move and have our being.” But is it all a matter of taste and everything having equal value? Much of music is a matter of taste, but there is more. There are reasons, beyond my personal preference, why Bach’s 48 and Beethoven’s 32 are considered the Old and New Testament of piano literature. Or to change the analogy, is it just a matter of taste that the works of Flaubert, Dickens, and Tolstoy are great literature? But as your questions show—we have our work cut out for us We need to show where the gospel story has value beyond just taste, where it can have transformative influence and speak into the story of another. At the same time, relational transformation works both ways. We are all too familiar with forms of Christianity that are tribal and condescending. Are we open to the “other” speaking to us?
“We need to show where the gospel story has value beyond just taste, where it can have transformative influence and speak into the story of another.”
I agree with you wholeheartedly here, but I’ve found it difficult to have the same passion and excitement for the Gospel in narrative theology as I did when I thought the Bible to be inerrant, particularly in the wake of the wounds left from evangelical Christianity.
Thanks for this post. I sincerely appreciate your efforts to 1) be honest about the relativity of one faith as opposed to another, and 2) attempt to find a way that religion can escape the scrutiny of the scientific method and still “communicate truth” and be worth your time as a life choice, your particular religion over the hundreds of other choices you could make.
Two quick critiques.
1) The metaphorical linking to music was a nice attempt, but I think it falls far short of what you think it establishes, mostly because of a number of leaps you make without justifying them. For example, you want to divorce music from science, but in doing so you make a categorical error. Music doesn’t do what it does apart from science any more than your emotions do anything apart form complex interplays of neurons and chemicals in your brain. Music is the result of measurable vibrations that when coordinated in certain patterns and overlays happen to produce emotional responses in humans. A large part of those responses are culturally conditioned, as you yourself noted in saying that different peoples enjoy different kinds of music. There is nothing that music does that could not be explained by evolutionary development.
Your perception of music is that it has some kind of “life” apart from its purely natural origins and effects. That’s a very human perception, but it has no objective basis that you can demonstrate. So religion produces similar responses. So what?
I don’t mean to be crass, just forthright, when I say that your attempt sounds like an attempt to justify your beliefs to yourself. It has no convincing power to an unbeliever like me.
2) Your final paragraphs are filled with “I prefer” and “I choose.” And right there you give the game away, as far as I’m concerned. You end up with a story that you like to hear that makes you feel better about your life, your suffering, and the world. That’s nice, but it utterly fails to answer the challenge you yourself issued at the beginning: “Why privilege this story over every other?”
I have no intention of divorcing music from science. Of course, there are many things science can study about music—from the work of Pythagoras to neuroscientists. But this doesn’t mean that all of music can be assimilated into science. You have made the category error by saying that everything in music can be explained by evolutionary development. We need primarily to understand music on its own terms.
Yes, Pythagoras discovered remarkable relationships between maths and music, but as Josef Lhevinne said, “One of the great beauties of music is that it is not mathematics, where ‘two and two’ is ‘four’ and ‘five’ is wrong.” Or in the work by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in “This is your brain on music” where he says that unlike the scientist, the musician is after an aspect of “universal truth.” These are essential aspects to music that in your words have no objective basis that can be demonstrated.
It would be interesting (and perhaps even amusing) to listen to a symposium on Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas given by leading scholars in evolutionary development. But much would be lost. We need the David Dubal’s and Daniel Barenboim’s of this world to tell us much more about this music and the “life” it contains.
Have I stated things about music without justification? Yes. I assumed what many composers and music scholars say—that music can convey a huge amount of historical, metaphorical, allegorical, philosophical, and even metaphysical information. And in addition, music can have great transformative value and power.
As for my choices, I hope I don’t choose based only on what makes me feel better! We base our choices on countless reasons, many unknown to us. Your choice of science is good, but limited. I think it constructs a world where anything that you cannot assimilate through the scientific grid is ignored or dismissed. In addition to the scientist, I want to hear, on their own terms, the voice of the poet, writer, artist, musician, philosopher, and the religious.
Thanks for your reply, Neil.
I think we could get into an endless back and forth on “what is music” and “why does it appeal to human beings” so I won’t go point-counterpoint any more on that (though I think I could!).
I think I need to clear something up though. I don’t assume that science can explain “everything.” I think that there will always be things beyond our ability to measure, test, or even directly observe. But we don’t know where those limits are yet. My problem with religion is that it stops the train when there may yet be more stations down the track.
So I wasn’t saying science (or evolution in particular) does already explain everything about the human response to music. However, it does explain a great deal. We do know that there are scientific reasons why certain combinations of cycles in overtones sound harmonious and others sound more jarring. There is a great deal more that we know about the physiology and neurology of responses to sounds than was known in Pythagoras’s day. That doesn’t mean we know everything, nor did I claim that we do. But…it also doesn’t mean that we are therefore warranted to say “things we don’t yet understand…therefore God!” As you are well aware, there are a great many things about which people used to jumpt to “therefore God!” that we now have quite natural explanations for.
So what I’m appealing for is not some kind of belligerent atheism that rules God or gods out a priori. Rather I’m just advocating that in areas where we can’t (yet) know, apply the Iris Dement song “Let the Mystery Be.”
So as a human being, I too very much appreciate “the voice of the poet, writer, artist, musician, philosopher” and yes, even “the religious”
– but just because they can say things that have a lot of appeal, and speak of “great mysteries,” I don’t therefore make a leap to “therefore….God!” much less to “therefore…my particular religion’s concept of that God out of all the myriad concepts out there, not even counting all the disagreements within my own religion.”
Thanks Mark. I agree that Christianity with its “God of the gaps” often stops the train. This is another example of why many get utterly frustrated with religion. We both want the scientific quest to continue unabated, including its research into music. Likewise, as you know, the idea of mystery has a long tradition in the apophatic theology of various religions. Perhaps this “mystery” is another resource that needs recovery to topple religious dogmatism and enlarge our view of reality.
Narrative theology is an important construct these post-modern days. However, it needs to dovetail with systematic theology, I would assert.
Also too, theology has been thought of as a science. Thomas called it the Queen of the Sciences. The Reformers railed against this, for one any Regina Scientarium can be dethroned, as is fashionable today.
I do like the music analogy. But it reminds us that theolgy can never completely be set in contrapose to the harder sciences. The Human Sciences, including theology, music, sociology have “scientific” methods. Liszt and Bach are pleasing, in part because of hearing the hertz, which we could measure on an oscilloscope.
St. Thomas was right, as have been many philosophers of science since. Scientia comes in many forms. We should not be carried away by the “miracles” characteristic of this current phase of Science. Otherwise we will be broadsided by the next of Kuhn’s scientific revolutions.
As I said before. “I love to tell the story, because I know ’tis true.”
Systematic theology has taken a hit in recent years—from people inside and outside religious studies. There are many reasons for this—in part because theology sometimes runs roughshod over the biblical text; in part because it has sometimes undermined or resisted transformation; in part it has kept some people locked in a 17th century world view (or some other century). Some question whether it is a valid academic discipline. Today it is neither queen nor science. I hope it can recover in a more humbled state.
Thank you for a candid word on an important question: Why this story? I recently wrote a column on this for several Newspapers titled, “Why I choose a Christian worldview”
I explained that my aim is to answer
the question: “What way of seeing things corresponds most with reality and does not contradict what I clearly know to be true?” Or, asked differently, “What seems most plausible in light of what we see and know about ourselves, the observable world and its history?
I believe the Christian worldview offers the most logically consistent and plausibly realistic understanding of life and the world. It simply does the best job explaining the world we encounter each day. And it offers the best explanatory frame for the most extensive range of evidence in the world and in the human spirit.
I hope you don’t mind if I link the rest of my explanation as I’d rather not go on too long here. http://thinkpoint.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/why-i-chose-the-christian-worldview/
Neil, as to the current state of Systematic Theology, I would venture two comments. First grand theories of everything, across disciplines are under similar assault. Maybe this is due to the pace of knowledge.
Second, and back to Narrative Theology – I would posit that everyone, take a deconstructionist, has a Systematic Theology, even if they protest too much.
Remember too that the tools of narrative analysis are infused with scientific methods.
Or, take our friend Peter Enns. He uses his keen philological, archeological and other methods and hypothesizes, tests and retests his conclusions. At least as I read him. His erudition is more obvious than his metaphorical test tube (or oscilloscope), but he cannot do without the deliverances of science to do his work.
(I think I have told him that I think draws a dichotomy between what he does and the biologist, for example. I just think they are two doors down the hall.)
Pannenberg, recognized this: the idea that the university was the respository of knowledge, scientia. Of course all disciplines proceed as the leading disciples lead.
I am contending that the literati use scientific methods to probe stories, look how computer algorithms are used to analyze texts? (There is a pretty clear consensus of who wrote some of the Federalist papers, but there is an SEM, a standard error of measure often cited.)
Your musicians playing may actually tune up using little oscilliscopes: certainly psychologists and neuroscientists who study the qualia of music use scientific methods: they may clamp your head in an fMRI next time you listen to Liszt, if they can get your consent .
And the approval of an IRB for the experiment, just like for genomics, Prozac, etc.
Or for a narrative. They are poked and prodded from all angles: Looked at under the microscope, and yet then we have to take off our white coats or academic regalia and live them, hear the music, listen and perhaps obey ourselves and pass it on – “To tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.”
Remember, “Because we know ’tis True.”