Leaving Narrative Behind

Reading around the web, I have detected some discomfort among Christians on this topic of abandoning the idea of narrative. I think the worry is misplaced. Belief in a more random-looking, chaotic, and unpredictable world does not undermine God's sovereignty - indeed, it may be more compatible in some ways - but it certainly undermines our mental picture of what that sovereignty is supposed to look like.

From a long cultural line, extending at least back to Plato and gathering force during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, we have come to picture life in a more patterned way that it necessarily is. We see God turning the pages of a book already written, or weaving a pattern which is obscure to us but set beforehand. We see His intervention as a tweaking of some great clockwork or deflection of a river in a bed.

Yet a chaotic view, in which God ropes in, or attracts in various bits to send them on their way makes as much sense. We assign an enormous importance to our own history, as if one of the main points of getting to heaven will be to look back over it all and see what it really was. What if the journey is quite inessential and only the destination matters, however we got there? How if there is no longer any need, or even any point, in reading the pages of the book or listening to the symphony when our lives and all this world are complete? Perhaps they are just typing practice or the tuning of instruments, signifying nothing.

We like the idea of living within a story, even if we have little idea where it is going. It seems to give a point and a structure to all that happens here, especially the unpleasant parts. We want our sufferings to not only mean something but to have meaning in just the way we direct. We tell God what we believe will give it all meaning.

There is a chain of story in the Bible, but the past-present-future aspect of it seems to relate entirely to Jesus and/or the Messianic chapters of Israel. There are prophecies to the Jews of what will happen to them in a year or a century, but these come and go with not much reference to each other. The point of them seems to be the type of tribe and people that the Jews will be made into - what they should learn - rather than some destination requiring that they direct their efforts toward.

The events connect in retrospect, with ample evidence that Yahweh ties events of the past and present together, but I think we overvalue the continuity. The Passover is celebrated to remember an ancient event as if it were somehow happening in the present as well, but it is remembering that first Passover, not the long succession of Passovers, that is the point. As humans living in history we like the continuity that tells us that this Christmas is connected to the Christmas of our grandmothers, and their grandmothers before that; that this Passover was celebrated by people who bore our name two centuries ago or ten. But these are incidental; embellishments allowed like favorite foods to help knit us to the events but not the events themselves.

I am somewhat astray from where I began this. There are many passages in Christian writings which liken the procession of the world to something already patterned, which we must conform ourselves to before the end. It was one great contact point with the northern European concept of fate or destiny which allowed them to apprehend the Gospel. But we may have only one destiny, which is heaven - a destination. There may be a dozen possible destinies (or a thousand) on the way there.