5. Strategies and Criteria for Narrative Apologetics
5.
Strategies and Criteria for Narrative Apologetics
The analysis offered in this book suggests that narrative apologetics is a theologically legitimate and culturally appropriate way of engaging the concerns, anxieties, and questions of our age, potentially creating receptivity and attentiveness to the themes of the gospel. Christians must engage the dominant stories of our culture, either by telling a better story that shows that these stories are inadequate or incoherent, or through subversive storytelling in which they enter into a rival cultural narrative and retell its story in light of the Christian worldview. We are called to out-narrate the dominant stories that shape our culture, by exposing their weaknesses or showing how they are enfolded by our own or how they are eclipsed by a more luminous and compelling story.
Strategies for Narrative Apologetics
So how might this be done? There has been much interest in the general question of how literary and cultural narratives can be assessed—for example, their correlation with an external world and their internal coherence. Three broad strategies can be proposed for narrative apologetics, each of which has its own distinct character and virtues. A Christian narrative apologetics will aim to show that Christianity tells a better story than its rivals; that it presents a deeper account of reality, enfolding whatever truths are communicated by other stories; and that it enables rival narratives of reality to be challenged and critiqued. In what follows, we shall consider each of these approaches and reflect on its potential application.
Telling a Better Story
Christian apologetics aims to show the deeper appeal and capaciousness of the Christian story. In his 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory,” C. S. Lewis asks how the cultural dominance of a materialist metanarrative might be broken. Like any ideology, this metanarrative seeks to make not merely the idea that earth is our home but also the idea that there is no transcendent dimension to life seem normal. All ideologies aim to achieve invisibility so that their ideas and values are simply assumed to be true. So how can their spell be broken?
Lewis’s answer remains significant: to break a spell, you have to weave a better spell. “Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness that has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.” To break the spell of one narrative, a better narrative needs to be told, one capable of capturing the imagination and opening the mind to alternative possibilities.
This first approach thus sets out to exhibit the rational, moral, and imaginative vision of the Christian faith. Although a narrative appeals primarily to the imagination, it also allows and encourages connections with human reason and experience. There are ways in which a sensitive presentation of the fundamentals of Christian theology can serve an important apologetic role. Although some argue that the best apologetics is a good systematic theology, this overstatement requires careful nuancing. There is, after all, a significant difference between teaching theology to the committed and commending the spiritual and intellectual vision articulated by theology to outsiders and seekers. Apologetics unquestionably rests upon and draws upon the core themes of systematic theology, yet its genre and its voice are quite different.
We can draw on the work of social theorist Charles Taylor in developing this point. Taylor persuasively argues that there is a need to move away from the traditional believers-nonbelievers paradigm to a new seekers-dwellers paradigm, with important implications for the way in which the church engages its own members and the wider culture. Taylor’s analysis of modern secularism suggests that “our options for belief are more numerous, optional and contestable” than ever before, as we find ourselves “caught between myriad options for pursuing meaning, significance and fullness.”
This way of thinking, originally developed by American sociologist Robert Wuthnow, highlights the different needs and expectations of those who already inhabit the Christian tradition (and wish to understand and enact it better) and those who are drawn to it from outside but have yet to grasp how it might connect with their hopes and fears. Dogmatics might well speak to at least some “dwellers”; a quite different mode of discourse, however, is required to engage the needs and questions of “seekers.”
Developing this point, leading Czech writer Tomáš Halík emphasizes the importance of the “fringe”—the liminal zone at the interface between the church and the world, which prevents that church from becoming a sect rather than a church in the proper sense of the word. The “fringe” is a “zone of questions and doubts,” where a “seeking church” can encounter and engage seekers who are both curious and shy and prefer to remain on the margins of an institution they distrust. The maintenance of this fringe is thus essential to the continuing ministry of the church, not least in providing a space within which those whose original faith has been shaken can arrive at a deeper faith that is at home with paradox and mystery.
In his Ways of Judgment, leading British moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan points out that apologetics is “not a distinct genre of religious thinking” but rather is “a distinct genre of exposition.” The same fundamental ideas lie behind both theology and apologetics; the difference between them lies in the manner in which they are presented, reflecting the different intended audiences. While there are no apologetic reasons and arguments that do not belong within “the ordered exposition of Christian belief,” the apologetic needs of the situation may lead me to “organize my account of my beliefs in relation to somebody else’s doubts or counter-arguments.” “Different trains of theological thought may acquire greater or lesser apologetic weight circumstantially, as the crises or doubts of the culture may dictate at any moment. One train of Christian thought that carries apologetic weight in our times is the capacity of faith to display the intelligibility of political institutions and traditions.”
O’Donovan’s point is well taken. Apologetic strategies must be attentive to the opportunities of the moment. Current interest in moral and political issues creates the possibility of positive and creative dialogue between Christianity and the wider culture. Yet other such apologetic dialogues are certainly possible and desirable. For O’Donovan, apologetics is not to be identified with systematic theology but is a manner of expounding and communicating the core themes of Christian faith that is sensitive to the “crises or doubts” of our cultural contexts. It is the natural outcome of a rich theological foundation, but its modes of communication and commendation are not the same as those of Christian dogmatics. Apologetics and systematic theology are certainly related and interconnected; they are not, however, the same.
Let us return to C. S. Lewis as we reflect on how a “better story” might be told. In the course of his period as an atheist during the 1920s, Lewis found himself reflecting on the capacity of various worldviews to do justice to the complexity of reality. Modernist writers such as atheists George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells seemed to Lewis to be “a little thin”; there was “no depth in them”; they were “too simple.” Their cultural metanarratives seemed incapable of adequately representing the “roughness and density of life.” Yet Lewis found that Christian poet George Herbert was remarkably successful in “conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it,” apparently on account of “mediating” reality through what Lewis then termed “the Christian mythology.”
This surprising discovery made Lewis increasingly receptive to considering Christianity as a “big picture” of reality. While it did not lead directly to his conversion, it appears to have made him open to this alternative way of seeing things. For Lewis, this “better” story seemed to be more capable of “conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it” than its atheist alternatives. In his later reflections on the apologetic importance of this point, Lewis noted how a story needs to “chime in” with the human experience of reality if it is to carry weight with an audience and open up new possibilities.
Seeing the Christian Story as a Metanarrative
One of the most significant goals of Christian apologetics is to show that what is good, true, and beautiful can be convincingly accommodated within the Christian narrative. This approach proposes that the Christian story is to be seen not as a local narrative but as a deeper account of things, capable of accommodating valid insights from other narratives, while at the same time positioning them within its own framework. J. R. R. Tolkien did not refer to Christianity as a metanarrative but conveyed essentially the same idea through his more helpful phrase “a story of a larger kind.” For Tolkien, this larger story embraced what was good, true, and beautiful in the great stories of human culture and literature, such as Nordic myths.
This second strategy has a long history of use. In his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), Alasdair MacIntyre sets out what he considers to be the three main approaches to moral reflection, such as understanding moral inquiry as being grounded in timeless universal rational principles, which have enabled the rational progress of humanity. MacIntyre regards each of these as flawed and finds these deficiencies to be exposed and corrected by classical Thomism. My concern here, however, is not to evaluate MacIntyre’s conclusion but to consider how he reaches it in the first place.
So what criteria does MacIntyre use to make this judgment? How does he defend his view that classical Thomism offers a more compelling and trustworthy tradition of moral inquiry than its three main rivals? His answer is significant: the best narrative prevails over its rivals because it proves “able to include its rivals within it, not only to retell their stories as episodes within its story, but to tell the story of the telling of their stories as such episodes.” This renarration of someone else’s metanarrative within the broader framework provided by one’s own is ultimately an assertion of the greater explanatory capaciousness of one’s preferred narrative.
This basic approach is particularly associated with the natural sciences, in which successful grand theories are seen to both incorporate and contextualize earlier successful theories. The “unificationist” approach to scientific explanation holds that the best theory is able to accommodate all the valid insights of earlier theories, while at the same time expanding their horizons and identifying the basis of its plausibility. This is nicely illustrated by the transition from classical Newtonian mechanics to relativistic quantum mechanics, which took place during the first few decades of the twentieth century.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, classical mechanics was seen as a self-sufficient and intellectually autonomous area of theory, capable of accounting for what could be observed in nature. Yet following the work of Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr in the early twentieth century, it was realized that classical mechanics was a special, limiting case of a grander theory. Relativistic quantum mechanics was proposed as a more fundamental theory, capable of far greater explanatory capacity, in that it was able to account for both the successes and the failures of classical mechanics by identifying its limited sphere of validity. The “correspondence principle,” first identified by Niels Bohr in 1923, sets out, clearly and elegantly, how quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics under certain limits.
Neither relativistic quantum mechanics nor quantum field theory invalidated classical mechanics; they simply demonstrated that it was a special or limiting case of a more comprehensive and complex theory. The classical model was thus accounted for on the basis of the greater explanatory capacity of the relativistic model, and the limits of their correspondence were established. And perhaps more importantly, the relativistic approach explained why the classic theory worked in certain situations and not in others. Its validity was affirmed within certain limits.
Elsewhere, I have suggested that the Christian faith can be thought of as offering a metarationality—a greater vision of rationality that is able to accommodate and account for what we might call “everyday human rationality,” while at the same time helping us grasp its limits. The distinct trinitarian logic of the Christian faith is the greater framework—a way of understanding ourselves and our world that transcends the limits of human reason yet at the same time helps us position what we might call our “native” or everyday rationality within an informing context. Human rationality operates within limits—and outside those limits, it distorts and impoverishes our understanding of God and our universe.
In the specific case of narrative apologetics, the apologist can aim to show at least that the Christian narrative is a meaningful and credible option in today’s world, and if possible that this narrative is capable of positioning and accounting for other narratives. We have already considered J. R. R. Tolkien’s important discussion of this theme; a similar approach was developed by C. S. Lewis, who held that Christianity was not one myth alongside many others but rather represented the fulfillment of all myths—the “true myth” toward which all other myths merely pointed, or “God’s myth” from which “human myths” ultimately derived and toward which they ultimately point. Christianity thus tells a true story about humanity that makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself—and provides robust answers to the questions they raise yet tantalizingly fail to answer satisfactorily.
Offering Criticism of Rival Narratives
Narrative apologetics can also be used critically, as a tool for challenging the credibility of the dominant narratives of our culture. This is a preliminary move before proposing the Christian narrative as a better account of reality; the objective here is initially not to commend Christianity but to challenge the integrity and intellectual reliability of an influential alternative narrative and in doing so to remove a roadblock to the serious consideration of the gospel. If this dominant narrative proves unreliable, what alternatives might be considered?
One of the most obvious applications of this approach relates to the “conflict narrative” of the relation of science and religion, which has been adopted by writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as emblematic of the New Atheism. The “conflict narrative” is a highly eclectic reading of Western cultural history that holds that there is a perennial and essential conflict between science and religion. Dawkins intensifies this image, speaking of the warfare of science and faith and asserting that this entails the notion that any scientist with religious beliefs is a traitor to science. Scientists are thus intellectually prohibited from holding religious beliefs, in that this amounts to appeasement or treason.
Apart from being a hysterical overstatement of the situation, this represents an unacceptably selective and biased reading of history. J. A. Froude, a former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, was withering in his criticism of such cherry-picking approaches to history: “It often seems to me as if history is like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.”
The serious deficiencies of such polemical readings of history are easily demonstrated from Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (2007), a flagship manifesto of the New Atheism. Noting (correctly) that Christian writer Timothy Dwight (1752–1811) opposed smallpox vaccination, Hitchens draws the wider conclusion that Dwight’s position demonstrates how religious obscurantism stood in the way of scientific advance then, as it continues to do to this day. Religion poisons all attempts at human progress. The specific example confirms the general principle.
But Hitchens’s simplistic narrative is both subverted and redirected through a closer reading of the history of smallpox inoculation. For example, Jonathan Edwards (1703–58)—now widely regarded as America’s greatest religious thinker—was a strong supporter of scientific advance and was committed to the new medical procedure of smallpox inoculation using the “variolation” technique introduced into America from Europe by Cotton Mather (1663–1728), probably the most famous Puritan pastor in New England. Wanting to reassure his students at Princeton that it was safe, Edwards was vaccinated himself—only to die as a result. Using the same highly selective narrative approach favored by Hitchens, it could be argued that this single case proves that Christianity was supportive of scientific advance.
Or, to complexify Hitchens’s inadequate and superficial account still further, consider the case of the atheist writer George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), who opposed smallpox vaccination in the 1930s, ridiculing it as a “delusion.” He dismissed leading scientists whose research supported it—such as Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister—as charlatans who knew nothing about the scientific method. Applying Hitchens’s cherry-picking approach, it could be argued that this single case provides that atheism was hostile toward scientific advance.
But nobody with any knowledge of the history of smallpox vaccination and concerned to tell its full story would draw such ludicrous conclusions. History is complex. It is open to multiple interpretations, none of which is self-evidently “right.” Revisionist approaches to many of the historical incidents traditionally interpreted in light of the “conflict” or “warfare” narrative have debunked these interpretations. Their continued use within the New Atheist movement is a worrying indication that it relies upon “fake news” for its intellectual and cultural appeal. As philosopher John Gray points out, the New Atheism is precariously dependent upon what is little more than “a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion.”
The origins of the “conflict narrative” lie specifically in the social world of the final quarter of the nineteenth century, when it emerged as a polemical strategy to ensure the independence of the natural sciences from ecclesiastical control. Other narratives—such as that of the potential enrichment of science and faith—can be proposed that are far more sensitive to the historical evidence than those of the “conflict” model. The New Atheism’s decision to allow itself to become dependent on the “conflict” narrative must now be seen as unwise, leaving it exposed to potentially lethal criticism as historical research continues to erode its intellectual foundations.
Thus far, we have outlined three broad strategies for narrative apologetics. Yet these strategies themselves open up further questions—above all, how we might go about deciding which is the “best” narrative. We shall consider this in the next section.
Criteria of Relevance for Narrative Apologetics
Humans are storytellers and story-dwellers. Some stories are received, some are discovered, and some are simply invented. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are fundamentally about discovering a story that makes sense of all other stories—and then embracing it, because of its power to give meaning and value to life. But which is the true story? Which are merely its shadows and echoes? And which are fabrications, tales spun to entrap and deceive?
At an early stage in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children begin to hear stories about the true origins and destiny of Narnia. Puzzled, they find they have to make decisions about which persons and which stories are to be trusted. Is Narnia really the realm of the White Witch? Or is she a usurper, whose power will be broken when two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve sit on the four thrones at Cair Paravel? Is Narnia really the realm of the mysterious Aslan, whose return is expected at any time? As the children realize, they need to work out how stories are to be tested.
Gradually, one narrative emerges as supremely plausible: the story of the noble lion, Aslan. Each individual story of Narnia turns out to be part of this greater narrative. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe hints at (and partially discloses) the “big picture,” expanded in the remainder of the Narnia volumes. This “grand narrative” of interlocking stories makes sense of the riddles of what the children see and experience around them. It allows the children to understand their experiences with a new clarity and depth, like a camera lens bringing a landscape into sharp focus. In Mere Christianity, Lewis helps us to understand Christian ideas; his Chronicles of Narnia, however, allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story, judge it by its ability to make sense of things, and “chime in” with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty, and goodness.
In his book Moral, Believing Animals (2003), Smith identifies the contemporary metanarratives that he believes shape the thinking of Western people—the Christian metanarrative, the Militant Islamic Resurgence narrative, the American Experiment narrative, the Capitalist Prosperity narrative, the Progressive Socialism narrative, the Scientific Enlightenment narrative, the Expressive Romantic narrative, the Destined Unity with Brahman narrative, the Liberal Progress narrative, the Ubiquitous Egoism narrative, and the Chance and Purposelessness narrative.
So which of these many stories about our world and ourselves should we choose? How do we know whether it is truthful and reliable? Which “grand story” allows the best rendering of our complex universe? Which metanarrative offers the most illumination of our shadowy world? And what criteria might be used to make these judgments in the first place? A narrative apologetics cannot avoid such questions—nor should it. Christian apologetics focuses on the question of the trustworthiness of the Christian story and its capacity to illuminate and then to transform our lives.
As a former natural scientist, I have long been interested in the criteria used in choosing scientific theories. The dominant approach to the development of scientific theories is currently known as “inference to the best explanation.” A number of theories can always be developed to explain a set of observations. The challenge faced by natural scientists is to determine which of these candidates represents the best explanation.
A number of criteria are often put forward as hallmarks of successful theories, such as simplicity, elegance or beauty, and coherence. Yet these criteria are at best indications of theoretical success. The criteria emerge from scientific practice and are not grounded on a priori metaphysical ideas that are somehow built into the order of things. The best explanation is not always the simplest, and beautiful theories are not always correct. Yet these criteria serve a useful function, in that they allow us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of theories—even if this does not always lead to a secure conclusion about which theory is indeed the best.
So how might we go about judging the stories that lie at the heart of our lives and cultures? How do we evaluate their trustworthiness? We noted earlier the findings of sociologist Christian Smith, who observed that a dozen “grand stories” are regularly used by people in Western culture to make sense of the world and their lives. Smith stresses the importance of these narratives in generating and sustaining a person’s meaning. Humans are “animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories.” Furthermore, we tend to use different stories to engage and illuminate different aspects of our lives. A modern American might use a Christian narrative to illuminate and inform some aspects of her life yet draw on the Capitalist Prosperity narrative for others. This entanglement of informing and interpreting narratives is something that can never be entirely resolved or rationalized.
Smith’s studies of how people use narratives help us grasp an important point: it is not necessary to show that Christianity offers an exclusive account of reality. The apologist needs to show that the Christian story connects with the deepest questions, concerns, and needs of humanity. People may—and do—draw on other narratives to make sense of some areas of their lives. The Christian narrative illuminates deep questions of meaning and value, offering transformation and renewal in the face of God. Yet it might not answer questions concerning political and social issues, so people might draw on other narratives to help them engage these matters. As we noted earlier (see “The Story of the Exodus: The Hope of Deliverance” in chap. 4), the complexity of human life is such that we need to draw on multiple narratives and multiple maps to deal with its many facets.
These reflections, though helpful, do not resolve the issue of how we decide which narrative is the “best.” Smith is clear that this poses some serious and possibly insurmountable problems. “The problem with a narratological understanding of human persons—and probably an important reason modern people resist thinking of themselves as ultimately storytelling and believing and incarnating animals—is that it is difficult rationally to adjudicate between divergent stories. How do you tell which one is more deserving of assent and commitment than others?”
Yet while this is indeed a difficult question to answer, it is important apologetically. At the very least, Christianity must be able to show that its informing and grounding narrative is plausible and capable of engaging meaningfully with at least some major questions of life. So what criteria might be used? In what follows, I shall suggest three basic criteria that seem to be important to people as they engage and assess competing narratives, and reflect on the apologetic significance of these criteria.
Offering a Realistic Account of Our World
Some say we are entering a post-truth era, in which we simply make up our beliefs to suit our personal taste. We create a world that fits with our preconceived ideas or our deepest longings and take offense when our imagined certainties are challenged. Why worry about someone else’s so-called reality, when we can create our own and thus make our beliefs serve our longings? For some in this post-truth world, a metanarrative is nothing more than a convenient fiction, created to serve our wishes. Earlier, we noted how Thomas Nagel’s atheism is a post hoc rationalization of his fundamental longing for a godless world (see “Meeting Objections: God as a Projection” in chap. 3).
This does not, of course, in any way preclude a fictional narrative from making important moral points or illuminating significant intellectual issues. Stanley Hauerwas points out that while Watership Down (1972) was clearly a fictional work about rabbits, it nevertheless made some powerful and valid points about the importance of transmitting stories and how the loss of a defining narrative leads to the fragmentation and dissolution of a community. Yet the truth of these insights is neither established nor guaranteed by the story line of Watership Down. If these Leporidian insights are indeed true, then their truthfulness must be established on other grounds, so that the novel illustrates them, without actually validating them. Watership Down thus highlights the need to determine whether a given narrative is able to both produce and confirm ideas or values.
The Christian narrative is both generative and validating. In other words, distinctively Christian ideas and values arise from a dramatic narrative of creation, redemption, and consummation and find their grounds of authorization and justification from within that narrative itself. This important insight resonates with both recent narrative approaches to theology, noted earlier (see “Why Stories Matter” in chap. 1), and traditional evangelical approaches that emphasize the Bible itself as a source of ideas and values. As is often stressed, the Bible is firmly rooted in history, on the one hand, while offering an interpretation of that history that transcends any specific time or place, on the other.
At times, the Christian theological tradition has amplified those ideas by establishing interconnections not necessarily found within—though not for that reason inconsistent with—the core biblical narrative; at times, it may even, whether by accident or design, have assimilated them into ideas deriving from other sources, potentially distorting the biblical dynamic. For example, N. T. Wright has argued that some Protestants have moralized the core problem of humanity (seeing sin essentially as violations of an ethical or cultural code), paganized the solution to this problem (by suggesting that an angry Father takes out his anger on his Son), and Platonized the goal of the Christian life (by thinking of going to heaven when we die, rather than focusing on the core notion of resurrection). All these points are open for discussion within the community of faith, yet the very possibility of that discussion itself illustrates that the Christian narrative has the capacity for self-correction when needed.
Creating Space for the Reader
The best narratives arguably create space for their readers to step inside them, seeing themselves described or analyzed in the text. A good example of this lies in Charles Colson’s conversion to Christianity in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. During a visit with Colson in August 1973, Tom Phillips—then chairman of the Raytheon Corporation—read aloud to him the chapter titled “The Great Sin” from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Colson recognized himself in the text, which both diagnosed his problem and pointed toward its cure. The trustworthiness of the diagnosis opened him to embrace its capacity to cure.
It is no accident that many readers of the Gospel narratives find themselves drawn to the accounts of encounters of Jesus Christ with individuals—such as Nicodemus (John 3:1–21), Zacchaeus (Luke 19:2–10), or the anonymous woman at the well (John 4:7–26). The passages are not about the enunciation of generic ideas directed toward anyone who happens to be around but rather are about specific engagements that reflect the individuality of the person whom Christ encounters.
The critical point is that the Christian narrative needs to speak to us individually, not merely to someone else. We need to feel—or to be helped to realize—that we are being addressed and engaged. We need to be able to see ourselves in that story. This points to the importance of the core Christian narrative itself and also helps clarify the role of its apologetic interpreters. Their task is to construct a bridge from the narrative to its audience—whether that audience is a single individual or a group of people. This, it must be stressed, is about exhibiting the intrinsic significance of the Christian narrative, not about imposing an external constructed significance upon that narrative.
It is abundantly clear that the Christian narrative, when properly interpreted, has an intrinsic capacity to engage all kinds of human situations. Yet it is the task of the interpreter of that narrative to translate and transpose it, with the specific situation of the audience in mind. We have already noted the importance of this point in speaking of the “love of God” (see “The Story of Jesus Christ: Rendering the Love of God” in chap. 4); it is instructive to consider how this could also be applied to other core Christian ideas.
Making Sense of Our Existence
Finally, we can judge the relevance of a story in terms of its ability to make sense of the world in which we live and our own personal existence. Narratives serve an important role in that they can connect otherwise disconnected events and show how they belong together in a larger vision of things. We have already considered the importance of narratives in helping people cope with emotional and spiritual trauma in times of distress, partly because they help us cope with events by finding meaning within them. The philosopher Iris Murdoch also noted the “calming” and “whole-making” effect of ways of looking at the world that allow it to be seen as ultimately rational and meaningful. Yet although she expresses this idea of generating a comprehensive vision of the world in her more philosophical writings, the importance of the theme is best seen in her novels, in which she uses narrative to help her readers grasp the importance of this point imaginatively, and not merely rationally.
The most familiar literary genre that engages this theme of making sense of our world is, of course, crime fiction. In his essay “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Franco Moretti reflects on why the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—creator of the London detective Sherlock Holmes—remain so widely read, when other Victorian crime authors are overlooked or neglected. His answer is significant, and of obvious apologetic importance. Conan Doyle makes systematic use of clues: entities or observations that demand an explanation that can only be provided by a coherent narrative that binds them together. Some other authors of this period mention clues but seem to have little idea about what to do with them; others make virtually no use of them at all.
Clues are pointers to a larger picture—to a coherent story that can be told, explaining how those clues came into being and what their place and significance is within that story. This point is highlighted by the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, who emphasizes the need for a coherent narrative to provide connections between clues. Sayers sees human beings as searching for “patterns” in life, and she explores this theme in her Peter Wimsey detective novels as well as her religious writings. How can we find the best explanation of what we observe? What is the best story that we can tell, that holds as many of these clues together as persuasively as possible? Sayers’s point is echoed by Michael Goldberg, who emphasizes the need for a “narrative which can bind the facts of our experience together into a coherent pattern” and thus allow our ideas and lives to “gain their full intelligibility.”
Sayers argues that the success of detective fiction is based on our deep yearning to make sense of things, above all to connect together what may initially seem to be an unrelated series of events. Sayers makes her point by appealing to the Greek legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. Theseus is challenged to enter the dark and complex Cretan labyrinth, kill the Minotaur, and find his way out again. His lover, Ariadne, gives him a ball of thread, so that he can leave a trail behind him that he can follow afterward and thus escape from the labyrinth. For Sayers, detective novels are about finding a narrative thread that connects events and holds them together. We “follow, step by step, Ariadne’s thread, and finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth.” Sayers later spoke of the intellectual “satisfaction of plaiting and weaving together innumerable threads to make a pattern, a tapestry, a created beauty.”
Sayers held that the Christian narrative is dramatic, making a deep appeal to the imagination. Yet it also discloses patterns by which we can “make sense of the universe,” disclosing its otherwise hidden patterns and finding meaning within its mysteries. Some have suggested that her novel The Nine Tailors addresses the “mystery of the universe,” while Gaudy Night engages the “mystery of the human heart.”
As Sayers discovered, Christianity offers a dramatic narrative that helped her make sense of her world. Always self-critical, she at times wondered if she had fallen in love with the intellectual pattern that Christianity disclosed, rather than with the central character of that narrative. Yet Sayers knew the importance of discerning that pattern and knowing that there was some deeper unity and coherence within the world. Sayers here echoes the New Testament itself, which speaks of all things “holding together” or being “knit together” in Christ (Col. 1:17).
Thus far, we have focused on the question of intelligibility and coherence, exploring the ways in which the Christian narrative helps us make sense of our world and ourselves and helps us discern the fundamental interconnectedness of reality. Though these are important, many would argue that the most important human concern is finding meaning in life. This rich and important theme, already hinted at in this chapter, is of such importance that it demands a fuller treatment in its own right, which we will turn to in the next chapter.