ABSTRACT
Stories, words, and images change with experience. Those that do not change gradually lose their grasp on meaning, as fewer and fewer experiences find expression in them. The threads of connection between words, images, stories, experience, and meaning are therefore tangled and dense. The story of the three-tiered universe, fleshed into image by poets like Dante and artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo, is an example of the fluidity and vulnerability stories have in relation to experience. Ever since 1608, when Hans Lipperhey first applied for a patent from the Dutch government for an invention called a telescope, descriptions of reality that depend on the architecture of a realm of God above the clouds and a realm of Satan below the crust of the earth have eroded, despite the cinematic appeal of such a vivid and simple cosmic and ethical scheme. Under the weight of quantum physics and historical criticism, the center of the story of the three-tiered cosmos, occupied by a fallen angel embedded in an ice floe of his own making, does not hold. But what stories of power are able to take its place and hold the ever more vast heavens and earths? Does not science tell stories (offer hypotheses) in order to test and undo them? Is it not better, therefore, to dispense with stories altogether, to seek facts without the distractions of narratives that are conditioned by context, by the very temporality of location? If it is possible to possess truth without a context-rooted story, then
perhaps these questions would succeed in guiding contemporary theology through the seas of modern and postmodern skepticisms. The evidence suggests, however, that truth is constituted in story, even in the hypothetical
stories that scientists tell in order to make coherent their findings and to guide their investigations.3 This means that whatever human beings strive to call truth is inaccessible to human life except fleshed in folds of language, culture, and interpretation. The co-constitution of truth with time, place, and culture does not discredit the truth as such (though such co-constitution does make any single truth very difficult to assert across all time and space, except hypothetically). Instead, it makes the vitality of stories-myth, if you will-less easy to dismiss when pursuing truth. This is nowhere more obvious than in theology, where the inseparability of stories in all of their fluidity and occasional inscrutability form the frame around the very things that theologians seek to say are true of divinity and reality. This is not to say, however, that theology always recognizes the insepar-
ability of story from its attempts to make truth-claims. Beginning with Aquinas, but accelerated in the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel, theologians of the past three centuries like Friedrich Schleiermacher, David Hume, Ernst Troeltsch, Ludwig Feuerbach, Paul Tillich, Pope John, Karl Rahner, and others strove to argue for theological claims in an intellectual environment increasingly shaped by scientific premises of objectivity. Rudolph Bultmann, a mid-twentieth century New Testament scholar, is a prime example of one whose goal was to strengthen modern Christian faith by relieving it of its thick involvement with fiction. He sought to separate the density, malleability and contextuality of stories from enduring (and presumably universal) theological truths. In his influential essay Jesus Christ and Mythology Bultmann suggests, for example, that the ancient images of ‘‘Satan and the evil spirits’’ are mythical, meaning that they give shape to intangible truths like a sheet thrown over an invisible man: ‘‘myths give to the transcendent reality an immanent, this-worldly objectivity.’’4
