Storytelling, doctrine, and spiritual formation

Stories, then, are something like experiments. They are trials and tests. They are attempts to collect and analyze some "data set," some series of events, in ways that explore or extend or challenge some part of the paradigm or construct by which we make sense of how the world works or what life means. Experience is puzzling, and stories are attempts to solve those puzzles, to attain the insight and the meaning inherent within or promised by the constructs upon which we rely. As scientists know, one cannot collect meaningful data without a hypothesis; but hypotheses are derived from one's creative insight into the governing paradigm. One cannot tell a story that makes sense without pulling relevant episodes from the fast waters of time and circumstance, from the rapids of history and memory (or invention, which is a variety of memory8). But one cannot make that selection, one cannot dive into those depths and emerge with the necessary stone, without a model-governed prior notion of what constitutes "making sense." Within faith communities, or in the storytelling that constitutes the life of faith, we are guided by and we are endlessly engaging and deepening and extending and disputing and, yes, even revising a paradigmatic vision of God as the coherence behind any sense we hope to make.

As Kuhn recounts in specific and historical detail, paradigms themselves are individual experiments now taken as exemplary, as a model or a pattern for other thinkers to follow. If we take Kuhn's study as itself paradigmatic of the historical operations of creative and critical thinking in the West, we can imagine that behind the doctrine as such, the theological paradigm as such, there is a story. There is a human experience, an event or a series of events, and there is a community in which and for whom both the experience and the story became exemplary of God and of their connection to God. Some of these stories are in Scripture; some are in other kinds of texts, both sacred and secular; some, no doubt, have simply been lost or have left only elusive records demanding such delicate reconstruction as we lavish upon the shards of other arts.

I realize that this is quite a peculiar way in which to regard the arcane reaches of Christian doctrine. It can be understood as an array of testable claims about the historical record, claims that as a modernlanguage literary critic I am not trained to investigate (nor, as an independent writer, situated to explore). More to the point, for my purposes here, this way of framing the issues involves the claim that valid or meaningful doctrine has (must have) a rich and specifiable connection to human experience or else fall liable to David Hume's devastating argument that theology is but decadent word-games and fraudulent imitations of inquiry.9 Doctrine, in short, is an abstraction, a simplificat9ion or codification, something less and not more than the original tales.

Story and Doctrine

Religious experience easily demonstrates how our own stories and storytelling create and sustain the link between the fragmented, partly conscious flow of highly particular experience and the large, abstract, conceptual structures or paradigms provided by systematic theology and doctrine. On the one hand, religious faith can be identified strictly or simply with the paradigm as such: "faith" can be defined as understanding and assenting to one or another formulation of a complex array of doctrines-sacrament, sin, redemption, forgiveness, grace, covenant, call, the Trinity, etc., etc. Each of these doctrines interlocks with all the others; all of them are dense, abstract, complicated, arcane, and, in various ways, fodder for ongoing sectarian contempt of one another. But "religion" names a domain much more extensive than doctrine as such defines. Faith is much more than knowing and assenting to complex metaphysical doctrines.