3. Words and stories: discovering the deeper significance of faith
Christianity helps us make sense of things. It allows us to look at the world through new eyes and see it in a different way. Of course, we cannot expect everything to come into focus, or hope that all the shadowlands will be illuminated. But somehow it is possible to cope better with uncertainties and difficulties because we are gaining a sense of direction and purpose for our lives. The creeds give us a framework for going further and deeper into our faith. Yet many find their words and phrases inadequate, if not occasionally baffling.
When words aren’t good enough
Our present chapter focuses on this problem. We have to use words to refer to life’s deepest intuitions, most important moments and greatest excitements – whether falling in love or discovering God – but often find that those words just aren’t good enough to convey the meaning or the intensity of our thoughts. Words let us down when we try to write a letter expressing our sadness at the death of a friend to his surviving relatives, or tell someone how much they mean to us, or how they have helped us during a dark time. Of course, poetry can sometimes be helpful in expressing what seems inexpressible to us, but for the most part, we struggle to find words good enough to do the job. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) famously pointed out that it was impossible to convey the aroma of freshly ground coffee in words.
And the problem is not limited to coffee or the kind of personal experiences mentioned above. Imagine that you are standing on a mountain ridge in the Alps. Below you, spread out like a tapestry, is a beautiful landscape, stretching into the far distance. Woods, streams, fields, villages are all lit by the gentle radiance of a late afternoon sun. How would you describe this vista to someone back home?
The fact is, you can’t. It is impossible to express something so wonderful in words – ‘I saw a lovely view’ doesn’t even come close! Even as you struggle, you realize that you simply don’t have the vocabulary to communicate the glory of the experience. There is always going to be a significant gap between a word and the reality to which it points. You could tell your friend about a wood you saw in the distance from the mountaintop; but the little word ‘wood’ will not evoke the memory of a green mass of trees, dappled leaves shimmering in the sunlight, or your emotional reaction to this scene of beauty.
Of course, you could draw a map to show the positions of the various elements – where the woods are in relation to the mountains, the streams in relation to the villages, and so on. But as we saw in the last chapter, a map is merely a two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional landscape, and the things that moved you to wonder and delight – the beautiful view, the cool wind, the fragrance of flowers and resin, the distant tinkling of cowbells as the herds wander around seeking the best pastures – are hardly going to be conveyed to your friend through some scribbling on a piece of paper.
No wonder so many abandon words and reach for a camera. Yet even photographs fall short. To experience the wonder of an Alpine landscape, or a tropical island surrounded by an azure sea, you need to go there yourself. Words and images can never represent reality in all its fullness.
However, we have to use words; we simply don’t have a choice. And the fact is that although words have limitations, they also have power. Words can change everything.
Think of a man in debt for more than everything he owns, facing bankruptcy and ruin, who gets an urgent message from his accountant: ‘The debt has been cancelled’. Think of an ageing couple whose only son has been kidnapped in the Middle East and threatened with death. They are called by a national newspaper with the dramatic news: ‘Your son is being released’. Or imagine a young woman who feels she is drowning in emptiness and loneliness. The man she secretly adores visits unexpectedly and tells her: ‘I love you’.
Here, words are tokens of transforming news – of developments that change everything. In a similar way, while the verbal formulae we call ‘Christian beliefs’ can seem a little wooden and lacklustre, they express matters that run deep and speak to the heart as well as the mind. Declarations such as ‘I believe in God’ may seem like cool, dispassionate and disinterested statements, but the truth is much more complex and interesting than that.
Wittgenstein (of the coffee example above) does more than point out the limits of words in everyday life. He also reminds us that if we want to know what words really mean, we ought to listen to how they are used. ‘Words have meaning only in the stream of life.’
Let’s listen to four very different people expressing their understanding of the opening words of the creed – ‘I believe in God’. I asked them to try and put into words what their faith in God meant to them. First, we hear from a woman in the legal profession, who has been a Christian for about 20 years.
I used to think that life was meaningless, and that my longing for truth and beauty was just a pointless delusion. Then I discovered my heart’s desire, and everything was changed. I found the peace that I so earnestly desired. And the name of my heart’s desire was God.
The second to speak was a retired schoolteacher who has been a Christian all his life, and found faith a great consolation in his later years. His comments were brief and to the point.
Without God my life would be bleak and empty.
The third person who tried to express her faith was a student, who had always seen herself as a Christian but had begun to think about things more deeply while at university.
I found that the Bible tells us the truth and that there is a God who loves us. God’s words are my strength and my rock.
The fourth witness was a local businessman, with a very down-to-earth approach to life.
My walk of faith is about having a true and deep relationship with God and realizing how much he loves me, despite my failures.
In one way, these four accounts of faith are very different. Christianity is a public faith but it has private dimensions, connecting up with the individual identity and concerns of each person. For some, faith gives stability to life; for others, faith is about being loved and valued; for yet others, faith is about being able to make sense of things. There are many diverse but complementary interpretations of faith making up its rich landscape.
It isn’t easy, though, to sum up what faith means to you in mere words. Words may not seem capable of expressing really deep things. However, we can still use them wisely, as signposts rather than as complete statements of what truly matters. In the end, one of the most powerful things that Christianity affirms is that the heart’s desire, the meaning of life, the foundation of justice and the culmination of human hope and longing, all converge on the God who is proclaimed and disclosed by Jesus of Nazareth. And we can use words to point in this direction – to tell our own stories of faith.
In fact, recent cultural history has shown a new appreciation of the importance of stories in helping us make sense of things and allowing us to work out what is good. As we continue reflecting on how to deepen our appreciation of Christian beliefs, let’s explore this point further.
The story of faith
One of the most powerful passages in the Gospels records Jesus of Nazareth’s answer to the question: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ (Luke 10.29). Jesus answers by telling a story – the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.29–37). This moving and powerful tale grips our imagination and answers the question in a more memorable, powerful and challenging way than any mere dictionary definition of ‘neighbour’ could.
Let’s ask another question: what is God like? Some will answer by reaching for a dictionary: God is the ‘supreme being’. The Christian Bible, however, dispenses with dictionary definitions. Instead, it tells a story.
The story opens well, relating how God created a wonderful and beautiful world that was pronounced to be good. Soon, however, things go wrong. G. K. Chesterton identified the problem with characteristic brilliance:
God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
So how were things to be put right? Here, the great story of faith focuses initially on an individual, then on a nation, before it expands to embrace the whole world. God calls Abraham to be the father of the people of Israel, from whom the Messiah will emerge to bring about the redemption of the world. As the ‘bidding prayer’ for the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge puts it, we should ‘read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child’. It is a grand epic of creation, fall, redemption and final consummation, which captures the imagination, warms the heart and enlightens our minds.
How, we might ask, does telling this story relate to statements of Christian belief? Perhaps C. S. Lewis can help us grasp the point at issue. In the 1950s, Lewis published not only Mere Christianity but also the much-loved children’s series, ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’. Many Lewis scholars argue that these works reflect the same basic themes, but where Mere Christianity uses reasoned argument, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and other volumes in the Narnia series employ narrative to explore the Christian faith. Mere Christianity engages the mind, but the Narnia stories appeal to the imagination.
Now it is not quite as simple as this. Mere Christianity appeals to the imagination at several important points. But the comparison is useful. In one work, Lewis argues, and asks us to accept his ideas; in the other work, he shows, and invites us to enter the world his story reveals.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children begin to hear stories about Narnia. But which is right? Is Narnia really the realm of the White Witch? Or is she a usurper, whose dark power needs to be broken? Is Narnia really the realm of the mysterious and noble Aslan, whose return is expected at any time? The children are forced to make decisions about which stories they can trust, and which are false. Gradually, one story emerges as supremely plausible, making sense of the evidence, and chiming in with the children’s deepest intuitions: the story of Aslan. Each individual story of Narnia turns out to be part of this greater story.
Lewis crafted a fictional masterpiece, focusing on finding a principal story that makes sense of all other stories – and then embracing it, because of its power to give meaning and value to life.
Yet Lewis did not invent this Narnian story. He borrowed and adapted one that he already knew well, and had found to be true and trustworthy: the Christian story of creation, fall, redemption and final consummation. The ‘grand narrative’ of the Christian faith tells of how God entered into history to redeem the world. This Christian story first converges on Jesus Christ, and then radiates outwards from him. Jesus Christ is the way that God comes to us, and the way that we come to God. The story of Jesus Christ tells us who God is, and who we are.
Why does the Bible tell a story to help us grasp what we are meant to believe, and how we are meant to behave? Christian theology has given two main answers. In the first place, a narrative makes faith more accessible. God is concerned to engage with people at a level suitable for their abilities. The theme of ‘divine accommodation’ emphasizes the graciousness of God in choosing to use a variety of means of self-disclosure – stories, images and ideas.
The second reason is especially important for apologetics – the area of Christian thought that tries to communicate the joy and wonder of the gospel to the world. Stories have a unique power to change the way we think. They invite us to see the world in a certain way. A story that is well told can suspend disbelief, making it easier for us to consider whether what we are hearing might actually be true and trustworthy. Many readers of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic, The Lord of the Rings, find themselves presented with a world of such intense richness and depth that they are drawn into reflection on the deeper meaning of life.
The Story and our story
‘There’s a story behind that!’ How often have you heard that said? I was in the study of one of my tutors in theology at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, early in 1978. After the tutorial, we stood around his bookcases as he pulled out some volumes that he thought I would enjoy reading. My eye was drawn to a book by C. S. Lewis – I cannot recall which one – in whom I was beginning to develop an interest at this time. When I asked my tutor what he made of Lewis, he laughed, picked out the book and waved it in the air. ‘There’s a story behind this!’ he declared, and proceeded to relate it. My tutor’s name was Peter Bide, and it turned out that he was the clergyman who married C. S. Lewis to Joy Davidman in an Oxford hospital in March 1957.
Let’s do a thought experiment. What is there in your home that has a hidden story? That has a special meaning and significance, not immediately obvious to anyone else? What would you select?
Here’s my choice. Since 1972, an old German microscope has stood on my desk. Wherever I’ve gone, the microscope has gone too. It was given to me back in the early 1960s by a great-uncle, who was head of pathology at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. It proved to be the gateway to a new world. As I happily explored the small plants and cells I found in pond water through its lens, I developed a love of nature that remains with me to this day.
So why do I keep this microscope? Well, first, it reminds me of a family member, who died soon after giving it to me. Second, it reminds me of my own past, enabling me to recall my youth and my hopes and aspirations for the future. And third, it acts as a symbol for what has come to be one of the major themes of my own vision of life – namely, that looking attentively at the world of nature deepens our understanding of God.
I’m sure you can think of other examples that make the same point – letters, photographs, gifts or everyday objects that, though ordinary, play a special role in connecting you with your own story.
But there is another point here. Our own stories connect up with a bigger story – with the ‘grand narrative’ of the Christian faith. The Christian story is not simply something that we tell; it is something of which we are part. We could think of faith as the act of becoming a participant in the ‘grand narrative’ and discovering the role we believe we ought to be playing in taking that greater story forward.
The creeds may be regarded as a shorthand interpretation of this grand story of faith that tells of the creation of the world, of things going wrong and then being made right again. The grand story speaks of exodus from Egypt, wandering in the wilderness and entry into a promised land. It tells of the birth of a saviour and of his death and resurrection. And finally, this grand story speaks of us, as we make it our story. To be a Christian is to allow our personal stories to be shaped and sustained by the greater Christian story.
The creeds do not tell this story as a story; nevertheless, they distil its significance and hit its high points. One of the finest reflections on this idea comes from the pen of Dorothy L. Sayers. In her essay, ‘The Dogma is the Drama’, Sayers shows how the story of Christianity conveys its theological heartbeat. (The term ‘dogma’ may be understood as meaning doctrine or a set of beliefs.) Most people, she suggests, ‘simply cannot believe that anything so interesting, so exciting, and so dramatic can be the orthodox creed of the Church’. How could such a vivid story be transmuted into the rather dull and wooden phrases of the creed?
It is the dogma that is the drama – not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death – but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death.
That dramatic story, Sayers argues, holds the key to understanding what faith is all about. ‘The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man – and the dogma is the drama.’
Nonetheless, the suspicion that the creed does not really tell the story of faith as well as it might leads us to reflect further on the problems Christians experience when trying to use words to express the deepest realities of their lives.
Theory and reality
All of us want to see and understand things clearly. Yet the human mind is not well adapted to complexities. In particular, scientific reality is not always easy to visualize. When I was in my early teens, I had a pretty good idea what an atom looked like – it was similar to a miniature solar system. Right in the middle was the nucleus, consisting of neutrons and protons. The electrons orbited this nucleus, just like the planets revolve around the sun. It was all so simple.
Except it wasn’t. When I began to study science in more detail at university, I realized that this was just a convenient way of picturing atoms, invented by the great physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937). Atoms didn’t look like this at all. Rutherford had merely provided a useful mental image to help people visualize something invisible and intangible, and so make sense of mathematical formulae that would otherwise be hopelessly abstract.
We need pictures to help us think. That’s why we have maps of landscapes and diagrams of complex pieces of machinery. They’re there to allow us to make sense of what we encounter and experience. But what they represent already exists. Reality precedes its description. Nobody seriously imagines that atoms came into being only when Rutherford suggested that we think of them as tiny solar systems, or that the Alps appeared for the first time when somebody mapped them.
The same is true of Christian beliefs. They describe the deeper vision of reality that the Christian faith makes it possible to see. Our aim is to encounter that reality, and we are given a map of the landscape of faith so that we may find, inhabit and explore this new world. Some may be content with the map itself. But they would be missing out on what the map points to.
As a professional theologian, I want to insist that theories matter, and that it’s important to get them right. We need to take time and trouble to make sure that our description and understanding of such matters as the character of God, or the identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth, are as reliable and comprehensive as possible. But the reality of God is already there, in advance of our thinking. Reality precedes our beliefs about it. Our beliefs are accountable to the reality that they represent, just as the map (or those who drew it) could be said to be accountable to a landscape.
The map is not the same as the landscape, even though it may represent it reliably. Once we are in the countryside, the reduced account of reality offered by the map makes a lot more sense to us, and we can fine-tune the map in the light of what we actually encounter on the ground. But most importantly of all, we are able to flesh out the map’s symbols and images because we have encountered the reality to which they point.
As every scientist knows, theories reduce reality to something manageable. They offer us a way of grasping concepts that are actually much more complex. But the price we pay is high, because reality is being scaled down to something so much less than it truly is. And there is a serious risk that in trying to scale God down to something we can handle, we lose sight of God’s transcendence and glory. One of the reasons so many Christians find themselves puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity is because they are making do with a reduced vision of God. But the real God is untameable – one who expands our minds and excites our hearts in praise and adoration.
That’s why worship is such an important part of the Christian life. It reminds us that God is more than an idea – a lot more. The living and loving God sets our hearts, reasons and imaginations on fire. The author and pastor A. W. Tozer (1897–1963) was right on target when he said: ‘We might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasoning of the theological mind.’
I gradually became aware of the importance of this point when talking to some people who had embraced Christianity through attending worship. One conversation, which was particularly memorable, was with two professional people who had visited one of London’s largest churches in the late 1990s. Thoroughly secular, they were curious about what drew so many people to something as hopelessly outdated as Christianity. So they decided to go to a Sunday service.
They told me that they were awed by the experience: ‘These people had discovered something that we knew nothing about.’ And whatever it was, my professional pair wanted to find out more. What could be so attractive and glorious that it prompted this response from the congregation? As they began to explore the Christian faith, both came to embrace the God they had seen others worship with such delight. They too sensed God’s greatness. They too were moved by who God is and what God has done for us. Worship unlocked the gates of their hearts and of their minds, and their lives were never the same again.
The mystery of faith
Christian writers often speak of the importance of ‘preserving the mystery of faith’. To fail to do this, they suggest, is to end up reducing Christianity to little more than sanctified common sense. We need to reflect a little more on that word ‘mystery’. What does Paul mean, when he declares that ‘the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages’ has now been made known (Colossians 1.26)?
When I first began to study theology back in the mid 1970s, the meaning of the word seemed obvious. A ‘mystery’ was some kind of riddle or puzzle. I was an avid fan of detective fiction in those days, and regularly pored over second-hand book stalls in Oxford’s market, searching for Earl Stanley Gardner novels to supplement my collection. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse series began to appear around this time, adding considerably to my delight, not least because it was set in Oxford. A mystery, as I then saw things, was a superficially baffling series of events that could be explained by some sharp detective work.
It was a good start to appreciating what Christianity was all about. As we saw back in
G. K. Chesterton made this point with characteristic incision and clarity, contrasting two very different ways of thinking – that of the poet and that of the logician. Poets try to expand their minds to take in the wonder of reality; logicians try to limit the universe to what their minds can cope with.
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion … The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
Christian writers down the ages have made this point, and we need to listen to them. When the poet and theologian John Donne (1572–1631) spoke of the ‘exceeding weight of glory’, he was trying to express the sheer mental difficulty he experienced in putting the immensity of God into words. Divine glory leads us to worship and adoration, yet lies beyond our total comprehension.
Dorothy L. Sayers made more or less the same point in a much more homely way. Trying to get God into a verbal formula was like trying to force a large and irritated cat into a small basket. As soon as you tuck in his head, his tail comes out. Once his back paws are inside, the front paws appear again. And when you finally manage to squeeze the cat into the basket, his ‘dismal wailings’ make it clear that ‘some essential dignity in the creature has been violated and a wrong done to its nature’.
There is always the danger that we might say, ‘I can’t understand this – so it’s wrong’, thinking that this demonstrates the irrationality of the idea when it really highlights the limits of our reason. The human imagination is so important because it compensates for the limits of reason; it warns us against assuming that reality is simply what we can see – or understand. To speak of God as a ‘mystery’ is to acknowledge that we have been grasped by something and someone greater than ourselves, compelling us to stretch, rather than limit, the horizons of our awareness.
So how can we make sure that we have appreciated the fullness of the Christian faith? That we have done justice to the richness and wonder of God? That we have comprehended the full significance of Jesus Christ? There is a way of thinking about this that is especially helpful, and we shall consider it in the next section.
Rainbows and brushstrokes
It was a brilliant Tuscan morning back in 1988. I had travelled to Florence to work on some unpublished fifteenth-century manuscripts that were held by one of the great Renaissance libraries in the city. The library was set around a small courtyard, like a monastic cloister, and had stone walkways, roofed with the brilliant red tiles for which Florence is famous, arranged around its four sides. At the centre of the courtyard was a small garden. Plants grew in profusion within the garden, as they did over the masonry of the building itself.
With all the enthusiasm of a scholar working abroad, I had turned up far too early. The library was closed. As I waited for it to open, I walked around the courtyard and noticed that the garden took on completely different aspects depending on where I stood. From one angle, it seemed to be dominated by roses; from another, by citrus trees. To fully appreciate it, I had to see it from every side. Each of the great arched glassless windows in the courtyard opened up to give a different view of the same garden. Each view was like a snapshot, building up to give a composite picture of a greater whole.
The librarian arrived. I gathered my papers together and prepared to start work for the day. My sense of anticipation was, however, rapidly flattened. She explained to me that as it was a Monday, the library opened even later than usual. Dejected, I wandered off to a nearby square and ordered a cup of coffee at one of its many pavement cafés. I tried to console myself by reflecting that the manuscripts had been in the library for 500 years and would probably survive another hour or two.
The square was next to the Duomo, Florence’s great Renaissance cathedral. From my seat I had a marvellous view of a small section of it, and after finishing my coffee and consulting my watch, I decided to spend the remainder of my time exploring its magnificent interior. I pottered around pretending I was Lucy Honeychurch in E. M. Forster’s classic novel A Room with a View. Finally, I returned to the now open library and immersed myself in my studies.
But the events of that morning remained in my mind. I reflected that the bigger and more complicated something is, the more difficult it is to take in at a single glance. The garden illustrated this point neatly, the cathedral more graphically. It is no good glancing over at a wonderful building from the window of a passing coach or a seat at a pavement café. You have to get out and explore it from all kinds of angles and viewpoints, otherwise its riches and wonders will remain largely hidden and undiscovered. It may have been ‘seen’ – but it has not been understood or appreciated. Snapshots of the different aspects of a great building help us piece together the panoramic vision that each, by itself, fails to disclose. To put it simply: the whole turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts. Yet each part matters.
My difficulty in getting a full view of even a little garden helped me to appreciate the problems we face trying to take in the glorious riches of the Christian faith. There is just too much to squeeze into a neat little formula, a single sentence or a simple analogy. The great matters of faith – such as the nature of God or the identity of Jesus Christ – are complex.
For example, the Bible uses a wide range of similes and analogies to help us grasp the significance of God. To mention only a few: God is our Father; God is our shepherd; God is a rock. And so on. The same is true of Jesus of Nazareth. He is the Messiah, the Son of David, the saviour, and the friend of sinners. Again, when we come to think about the meaning of the cross, we find the Bible and the long Christian tradition of reflection on the biblical texts saturated with images and ideas, illuminating its significance. The cross reveals the love of God. It enables the forgiveness of sins. It brings healing. In every case, a rich and multi-faceted reality is represented by a series of snapshots. Our task is to piece together the panorama that each of these snapshots individually discloses in part. Seeing the ‘big picture’ expands our vision of faith; reflecting on its individual elements allows us to deepen our understanding. Two analogies will make this point clearer.
Imagine a rainbow. The raindrops cause the white light of the sun to break down into its individual components – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The colours are all there, combined in white light. But the process of refraction, which takes place within the raindrops, allows each of those components to be seen and appreciated individually.
Or consider a striking painting – such as Van Gogh’s famous sunflowers. We stand back and take in the whole picture, appreciating it as a work of art. Then we move closer, admiring Van Gogh’s individual brushstrokes and his brilliant use of colour and texture.
To appreciate our faith to the full, we need to grasp the big picture and explore the fine detail. We need to see the panorama and examine the individual snapshots. The French intellectual historian Etienne Gilson (1884–1978) once suggested that medieval theology was like a ‘cathedral of the mind’. This fits well with our recent contemplation of Florence’s Duomo. Imagine inhabiting this vast, magnificent cathedral, and the excitement of exploring its many aspects – its design, its beauty, its splendour.
To return to the creeds, we may say that far from merely summing up the things of God, they are an invitation to explore the wonders to which they point. Like diagrams of cathedrals and maps of landscapes, they are useful as summaries and starting points, but come to life when we let them guide us on a voyage of discovery, in which we see things with new eyes and take things in with a new sense of satisfaction.
Let’s now explore how the creeds actually came into being.