THEOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Shea, John
the parables Jesus told reveal his identity. Since we are never far from our stories, our stories become a way of getting at us. Not only the stories we tell but those we hear and read are often...
...The importance of truth is that it adds to interest...
...Stories of God are not tales of a supernatural person but the way birth-and-deathbound people relate to the Mystery they find themselves within...
...A story functions mythically when it establishes the world in which we live and move and have our being...
...As with most new directions in theology each insight in the area of religious self-understanding and story forms raises multiple questions...
...In the Christian Scriptures stories function mythically to establish our powers and insights and parabolically to subvert our false consciousness and call us to "go beyond...
...They penetrate to the core of what we unquestionably hold and question it...
...It seeks to understand how faith and the symbols of faith enter into the transformation of human life...
...For example, the parable of the Good Samaritan shatters the world of Jewish cultural expectation where every Samaritan is evil...
...Each generation must look back to what Christian testimony has understood Jesus to have been...
...Hauerwas and Bondi argue that the Commonweal: 361 Christian story of life as a gift and our need to live in communities of trust create a world where euthanasia and suicide are alien choices...
...1, No...
...But once the interpenetration of the human and the divine (not their separation) is the context of the stories, their real meaning surfaces...
...The holy has been affirmed, not on the basis of scriptural or ecclesiastical authority, but in the development of Keen's own life story...
...The last becomes first with remarkable regularity...
...Myth establishes world...
...My grandfather was paralyzed...
...What the church thinks of Jesus is the absolute center point of its existence...
...There is no lighthouse...
...Not long after that his father died...
...Whenever the Christian community begins to reflect on its image of Jesus and to test the integrity of its own life and institutions in the perspective of that image, then there is reason to believe the church is alive and maybe even well...
...Self-deception is one of the most baffling of human phenomena...
...As in any genuine dialogue both the communal and personal stories are transformed in the mutual process of listening and speaking...
...You will hear their pleading nature or their attacking nature or their asserting nature...
...No matter where the rafts were, and even if the people themselves had no idea where they actually were, the keeper always knew their whereabouts...
...The general area of "theology and autobiography" is rich in insights and possibilities...
...As Wiesel tells the story, his own story is taken up and moved beyond madness and murder...
...McCleridon, Jr., Gregory Baum, Wesley Kort, John Navone, Robert McAfee Brown, Louis Cameli, Johann Baptist Metz, James Cone, Dominic Crossan, Amos Wilder, James Barr, Sallie TeSelle, etc...
...Louis Cameli, Stories of Paradise: The Study of Spiritual Autobiographies and the Formation of Today's Stories of Faith, Paulist Press, 1978...
...The guiding question becomes: what picture of self, others, nature, history, and God does the story suggest...
...Each moment is a "tensed unity" of past, present, and future...
...Gertrude Stein has shrewdly observed: Everybody's life is full of stories: . . . They are very occupying, but they are not really interesting...
...At least one reason why certain stories interest us is that they come close to home and yet are an invitation to journey...
...439-452...
...Theology is the effort to explain and explore this critical difference...
...But traditional Christian faith also affirms that Jesus is alive and present in history, that his person and message have perennial, universal and even cosmic significance, that he is, in fact, divine...
...As such, faith seeks to be present and formative to the decisions that influence personal and social life...
...The rafts were constructed of materials from the land whence they had come...
...2. Sam Keen's remark that "telling stories is functionally equivalent to belief in God" suggests an inescapable religious dimension to storytelling...
...At any given moment we may be telling our own story or someone else's, the traditional stories of our community or of someone else's, a fictional blend or the closest we can come to hard fact, a mythic, apologetic, actional, satiric, or parabolic story (to use Crossan's distinctions...
...XXXIX, 1971), establishes the anthropological foundations for the relationship between religious self-understanding and story...
...It will undoubtedly be developed in many directions...
...In the telling we ourselves are told...
...There is no reality which is independent of our constructive imagination...
...Isak Dinesen may say, "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them" but how exactly does this healing go on...
...The person of faith is convinced that it makes all the difference...
...The flight from insight into self would not occur did I not already somehow know that my actual condition is painfully distant from an ideal toward which I aspire but which I also seek to evade...
...Novak's suggestion is that the U.S...
...42, 1974...
...Story is the continual and fundamental way humans appropriate encountered reality...
...In an atmosphere more amenable to Godlanguage his maxim might easily be reversed—to tell a story of God is functionally equivalent to believing in the human person...
...We work out of pre-conceptions, unexamined biases which both encourage and forbid...
...Not only the stories we tell but those we hear and read are often quickly translated into our own life situations...
...Did it really happen was the popular ahd insistent question...
...And in spite of everything he did laugh...
...Some observers think that in the next thirty years literary criticism will have the same revolutionary impact that form redaction criticism has had in the last thirty years...
...Religious self-understanding through story forms is a live option...
...Although "theology and autobiography" has immense potential for the classroom (cf...
...These relationships are extremely helpful in understanding the story approach to religious self-understanding...
...But the recognition of Scripture as basically a story form suggests a new approach...
...For Keen this story creates a world of promises made and kept...
...From a religious perspective it is a redemptive undertaking...
...This contact is probably the ultimate reason why we "believe in" a story...
...The Logic of Self-Involvement, London: SCM Press, 1963, p. 158...
...In other words, a story engages us because it is both similar and dissimilar...
...This restriction of the drive to know is often the result of guilt...
...James Olney (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1972) thinks that autobiography is the form of literature which "most immediately and deeply engages our interest...
...Storytelling is more than a delightful and engrossing activity...
...This is the concrete way of Christian story telling and a direction for pastoral theology...
...Elie Wiesel's own life travels this path...
...He/she initiates the type of question or perception which will lead to a faith appropriation of their experiences...
...It stems from faith's concern with the question of salvation...
...How does the reality of God explicitly influence our lives and how does God language explicitly enter our stories...
...Cf...
...Story is not merely that inferior form which antedated the clarity and precision of conceptual thinking...
...Telling a story may be an implicit affirmation of God but is it an adequate one...
...Satire attacks world...
...This perspective of approaching stories from the way they reflect and influence our self-understanding is not meant to reduce the many dimensions present in a story to the single dimension of self-reference...
...What shape does the hermeneutical problem take when processed through story categories...
...Every attitude and behavior is grounded in a vision of reality...
...Donald Evans catches this aspect in the Christian creation myth...
...A story . . . must reach me on some level to which I can respond, but it must also 'stretch' me, pull me beyond where I now am...
...and each generation must disDONALD senior, C.P., is Associate Professor of New Testament Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago...
...It may be inaccurate to label the church's changing perception of Jesus as "crisis...
...The relationship between ministry and theology has always been strained...
...In the past theological rescues have often led to theological crownings...
...Our desire to know ourselves as we really are is suppressed...
...3. "God made man because he loves stories" is the conclusion to Elie Wiesel's often quoted story about stories...
...John Haught, Religion and Self-Acceptance, Paulist Press, 1976, pp...
...The Dark Interval, Argus Press, 1976...
...On the contrary it both points the direction and sets the limits of thought...
...What we think is an objective description of what is "out there" is really a story, one possible way of imagining...
...Today the locale of salvation is not relegated to death and after-life possibilities...
...All of life is understood as an ongoing redemptive process...
...In the shattering is the invitation to construct another world...
...Stories which function parabolically are not about the making of worlds but about the clash of worlds...
...Stories are one way we come into contact with the ubiquitous yet elusive presence of the sacred...
...Whether the case for story is overstated or not, it is compelling enough to pursue...
...The Christian stories of God include the ultimate worth and salvific possibilities of the human world...
...How should the various story forms be distinguished and discussed...
...Why was the most tragic of our ancestors named Isaac, a name which evokes and signifies laughter...
...Storytelling raises a person out of the "randomness" of the moment and inserts him into a larger framework...
...Whitehead once remarked: "In the real world, it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true...
...I discover a task for my future...
...In the parishes and neighborhoods life stories are unfolding in dialogue with each other and the larger Christian story...
...Crossan's conclusion is that "the classical mind says, that's only a story, but the modern mind says, there's only story...
...The relationship between narrative and history in the Bible needs to be extensively explored...
...We affirm that Jesus was a human being, a Jewish male of the first century, who lived and died within the confines of Israel...
...His most recent work, Messengers of God, is a reworking of the traditional Old Testament stories in the light of his own experience and a reappropriation of his own experience in the light of the traditional stories...
...In the first moment the mythic story configures experience so that certain elements are highlighted...
...Some of the theologians who have contributed to this discussion are: R. Richard Niebuhr, John Dunne, Harvey Cox, Michael Novak, Sam Keen, James Wm...
...This power of story to effect what it tells is captured in a delightful Hassidic tale passed on by Martin Buber...
...In the present situation theology cannot be done in the university and then passed on to the parish...
...We find that in relating to reality through the story we are healed and renewed...
...should understand the basic story it is working out of before making foreign policy decisions...
...In the biblical context, if I say 'God is my Creator' I acknowledge my status as God's obedient servant and possession, I acknowledge God's gift of existence, and I acknowledge God's self-commitment to me...
...For an excellent survey from an academic viewpoint consult George W. Stroup, III "A Bibliographical Critique" Theology Today, July, 1975, pp...
...All experience is inescapably temporal...
...Storytelling seems to be a human activity which excludes disinterestedness...
...This is part of Paul Ricoeur's meaning: "The sense of a text is not behind the text [its historical origins] but in front of it [the world it opens up...
...What is absent in many modern stories is a content of positive affirmation...
...1, pp...
...To concretize this discussion consult Stanley Hauerwas and David Burrell, "Self-Deception and Autobiography: Theological and Ethical Reflection on Speer's Inside the Third Reich," The Journal of Religious Ethics, Spring, 1974...
...1. The title of an article by Stephen Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol...
...1976, pp...
...A case could be made that many of the tremors the church has experienced in the past decade are in fact the shock waves undulating from a thorough revision of our perception of Jesus...
...Within this foundational narrative framework of acceptance the need for cover stories dissolves and the dynamic urge to know is released...
...A better term might be "vital sign...
...It calls attention to certain patterns present in the encountered reality and entices the person to relate to that reality through those patterns...
...My grandfather stood up while he was telling the story and the story carried him away so much that he had to jump and dance to show how the master had done it...
...The foundational story of the classical mind runs: Once upon a time there were people who lived on rafts upon the sea...
...Isaac, of course, never freed himself from the traumatizing scene that violated his youth...
...8187), its natural environment is the grass roots community...
...Dominic Crossan escalates the story form into a metaphysical principle...
...Yet the name Isaac means laughter...
...44, Sept...
...Parables take aim at these presuppositions and dominant directions...
...Once he was asked to tell a story about his teacher and he told how the holy Baal Shem Tov used to jump and dance when he was praying...
...There is no dry land...
...James Barr, "Story and History in Biblical Theology" The Journal of Religion, January, 1976, p. 5.) Statements like this indicate a revolution in the academic understanding of the sacred writings of Christianity...
...But this too was enough and the misfortune was avoided...
...True existential atheism is not telling a godless story but having no story to tell...
...Each community must relate its experiences to the Christian symbols and so tell their story for their time and place...
...The suggestion is that scripture is most adequately prosecuted by neither history nor science but by the quality of the world it creates, the dangers that lurk within that world, and the possibilities that world holds out...
...Theology, because it dwells on transcendence, atrophies on answers and thrives on questions...
...This basic affirmation about Jesus Christ—that he is uniquely historical and yet universally significant—commits the church to a constant reassessment of what it thinks and says about Jesus as the community trudges across the boundaries of time and culture...
...On this land was a lighthouse in which there was a lighthouse keeper...
...After all, it does seem that we are all under the sentence of Scheherazade...
...Narrative is an inherent quality of experience and so a primal form of human discourse...
...He/she becomes a theological resource, relating the contemporary situation to Christian perspectives and values...
...How is a story verified or falsified...
...In Elie Wiesel's language: "When he opened his eyes, Adam did not ask God: 'Who are you?' He asked: 'Who am I?'" Crisis alerts have become almost routine in the contemporary church...
...the holocaust had marked him and continued to haunt him forever...
...Dominic Crossan has outlined five relationships between story forms and our phenomenological world...
...Liturgical reform, alteration in style of authority, shifting images of church and ministry—all of these events (or, at least, aspirations) are ultimately connected' to the persistent Gospel question: "Who do you say that I am...
...To move within the myth of the loving God suggests a lifestyle of care but it does not assure the ability to care or the knowledge of what the "caring thing" is in any situation...
...But the fact that we are experiencing turmoil in Christology cannot be yawned away...
...Faith's ambition and its natural home is to be where everything is at stake, where life hangs in the balance, where serious loss and gain are the outcome...
...Although all five story forms are found in scripture, myth and parable are particularly important...
...Ministry appears concrete, actionoriented, practical...
...The interest in who we are and what we must be about as we move through life and life moves through us is both a path to truth and the task that comes with breath...
...The modern version reads: "There is no lighthouse keeper...
...In the passing of time this task fell to a second Rabbi who knew both the place in the forest and the prayer but not how to light the fire...
...One way beyond this torturous and self-defeating circle is to situate ourselves in the story of God's unconditional acceptance of humankind...
...Therefore the linguistic form most appropriate to this basic given of human existence is narrative...
...And there is the sea...
...The minister is the facilitator, catalyst, and resource for the ongoing story telling process...
...Part of his agenda was to find an alternate religious language to Godlanguage...
...5. "The long narrative corpus of the Old Testament seems to me, as a body of literature, to merit the title of story rather than that of history...
...The teller is present in his tale in at least two ways...
...The very act of storytelling is an implicit affirmation of ultimate meaning...
...If the Christian peoples are to reflectively own their lives, this process must be articulated and celebrated...
...Both articles emphasize that behavior cannot be fully comprehended apart from its underlying mythic story...
...The reason for this is that "it brings an increased awareness, through an understanding of another life in another time and place, of the nature of our own selves and our share in the human condition...
...What is present even in relating a story of nothingness is a positive act of affirmation...
...In its second moment mythic stories embody and promote values...
...In this situation we create cover stories which carefully screen out all input that does not reenforce them...
...And it was sufficient...
...If story is the linguistic form essential to temporal existence, how do we define it "clearly enough" to use it systematically...
...Action investigates world...
...Their goal is subversion...
...The sacred story of the community becomes the freeing context for individual biographies...
...The immediate criticism is that stories of God are thieves of the human...
...If you listen, really listen, you will hear people repeating themselves...
...Charles Winquist philosophically elaborates this insight by contrasting the act and content of storytelling...
...Keen developed his perspective in explicit dialogue with the death of God movement...
...Yet from the perspective of story forms and religious self-understanding ministry and theology are inseparably linked...
...They take what is finest about us and project it skyward...
...In the recent past the dominant method of investigation was historical...
...To A Dancing God, Harper and Row, 1970...
...4. One way of redemption through story is the interaction of personal experiences with the stories the community holds to be sacred...
...How is story related to concept...
...Even philosophers, like Sartre, who proclaim a meaningless existence where each moment is alien to every other are secretly supported by a narrative pattern which enables them to courageously accept that existence...
...Here is why...
...How does scripture, if it does, function mythically and parabolically today...
...Some insights of the formation of the self through story are captured in key recurring themes, catch phrases which suggest the power and possibility of this approach...
...There was even communication between people and keeper so that in an absolute emergency they could always be guided safely home to land...
...It is interesting...
...God ordered his slaughter then relented...
...In fact, a recent approach to Christology attempts to study how...
...If it is not magic, we must explore how story reconciles the past, envisions the future, and redeems the present...
...The perspectives of Crites and Crossan attempt to rescue story from second-class intellectual citizenry...
...but no matter what the form of the story is, a similar process is at work...
...Relating theology to lived experience THEOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY JOHN SHEA popularity...
...More importantly, the content of the stories we choose to tell and retell betray the convictions, values and conducts we prize and deplore...
...Not long after that conversation Keen received a peachseed monkey in the mail...
...The phrase "theology and autobiography" in the title of this article is not a strict designation...
...His telling of the Isaac story is a case in point...
...To tell a story of God is to proclaim a pervasive purpose in which humankind shares...
...Finally the task fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn who knew neither the place nor the fire nor the prayer...
...Mythically functioning stories are integral to self-understanding and activity...
...Robert McAfee Brown, "My Story and 'The Story'" Theology Today, July, 1975...
...As the first survivor, he had to teach us, the future survivors of Jewish history, that it is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter...
...There are only people living on rafts made from their imaginations...
...In fact, in order for life to be creatively negotiated a person must live out of a narrative infrastructure...
...A story functions mythically by structuring consciousness, encouraging attitudes, and suggesting behaviors...
...This widened focus on autobiography is one of many avenues into the recent, vast, and highly diverse literature on theology and story...
...Two recent attempts which trace concrete activity to its mythic foundations are Michael Novak's "Story" in Politics (The Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1970) and Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Bondi's "Memory, Community and the Reasons for Living: Theological and Ethical Reflections on Suicide and Euthanasia" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, No...
...This process of reinterpretation is linked to the intrinsic nature of Christian faith...
...Then one day in a conversation with his father Keen suddenly found himself saying, "In all that is important you have never failed me...
...What is interesting is the way everyone tells their stories...
...We tell our stories to live...
...Years passed and both father and son forgot the promise...
...This is how stories ought to be told...
...Whenever misfortune threatened the Jews, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov would retreat to the forest, light the fire, say the prayer and the misfortune would be avoided...
...All he could do was tell the story...
...Story is a perspective close enough to the street to be the way the "ordinary Christian" (nonprofessional theologians) reflects...
...Theology appears speculative, couched in technical jargon, in many ways a private preserve...
...It points to what is holy and sacred which is now defined as "that irreducible principle, power, or presence which is the source and guarantor of unity, Commonweal: 359 dignity, meaning, value and wholeness...
...A third Rabbi knew only the place: the prayer and the fire had been forgotten...
...Apologue defends world...
...Nevertheless the misfortune was avoided...
...Also story does not fade when speculation soars...
...All is story...
...But perhaps its outstanding quality is one few associate with theology...
...Keen volunteers his own story as an example of this "subterranean theology...
...As a small boy Keen watched his father carve a monkey from a peach seed...
...A second example of the healing effects of relating personal and communal stories is John Haught's suggestion that the foundational Christian story can move us beyond self-deception...
...He died only at the end of his life...
...It has, in some way, grasped us and mediated to us the power of the sacred...
...The Act of Storytelling and the Selfs Homecoming," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol...
...It is simply the recognition of the intense involvement of the self in the stories it tells and hears and the attempt to explore the nature and scope of that involvement...
...148-52...
...The story of Isaac is a tale of the affirmation of life in the face of the despair and nihilism of holocaust...
...Crossan emphasizes this point by contrasting the classical and modern mind-sets...
...Parable subverts world...
...Rather it points to a series of ideas, side-by-side insights that cluster around the relationship between religious self-understanding and story forms...
...He/she helps the people hear and clearly articulate the religious, theological, and ecclesiological dimensions of their situation...
...From that moment, he was healed...
...Elena Malits, "Theology as Biography" Horizons, Vol...
...The escape from meaninglessness is achievable through the transcendence of act over content...
...The boy asked for the "creation" but his father said that this one was for his mother but later he would carve one for him...
...For an excellent survey of the history of parable research which focuses on the story of the Good Samaritan, consult Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom, Fortress Press, 1976...
...It does not mean a concentration on autobiography as opposed to biography, history, or myth...
...being the recipient of promises, I become the maker of promises...
...133-143...
...Finally, myth provides a broad directionality for action but not a guide to the complexities of concrete situation...
...But if the church's perception of Jesus were to remain too familiar, too routine, then there is every likelihood that the church's thought and action would grow moribund...
...With one exception, you kept the promises you made to me—you never carved me that peach-seed monkey...
...Yet he remained capable of laughter...
...a peach-seed monkey has become a symbol of all the promises which were made to me and the energy and care which nourished and created me as a human being...
...Isaac, like Wiesel himself, is a survivor of a holocaust...
Vol. 105 • June 1978 • No. 12
