Epilogue
A Story to Die For
No one would die for one of Don Cupitt’s stories. Indeed no one in their right mind would die for the Christian story – unless it was true. To say that it is true is not to demonise other world religions, nor to bind us to some epistemology that is untenable. The fundamentalist theory of inerrancy, for example, binds us not to the story, but to a theory about the divine inspiration of the story which is probably false.
To talk of the truth is to come clean and admit to its givenness – the belief in revelation over and against the whispers of reason. This is not to deny the legitimate search for the philosophical foundations of Christian faith, but it is to assert that we may not find them. There may be no going back behind the back of Jesus to certain truth claims about him
In practice, however, Christians come to believe in the truth of the gospel on quite different grounds. Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, thinks that Popperian science would reveal as a matter of fact that the resurrection did occur as an event in time and space. Others take to the story that a whole because of their trust in the witness of the apostles and the saints down the ages. For some it is a question of experience: Leslie Newbigin believes that he was saved by grace, and that God rubbed his nose in reality; Metropolitan Anthony is convinced that he was confronted by the risen Christ in his own room.
To say that the gospel is ‘the one short tale we feel to be true’ is another way of talking about something to which we will commit ourselves; something which for us is of ultimate concern; something – or to be more exact, someone – for whom we would be prepared to die. The gospel story is really about a God who poured out his life for the world, and who calls us to follow him by taking up our cross. This is more than a pious invitation to selflessness or ego loss; it is an appeal to our idealism, our best nature, our love for all humankind.
Martyrdom as the ultimate sacrifice, most of us hope, is not something that will be asked of us. But the tragedy of the story in our culture is that it no longer rings with the conviction of absolute truth, because it is not presented as a matter of life and death, hope or despair, heaven or hell. It has been trivalised beyond recognition, to become a success story, a decent story, one of the many stories of world faiths, a tall story – but never a true (or false) story. By contrast, postmodernist society will no doubt allow us to say that the story is true for us. It will respect out epistemic distance from the other stories that tell a different tale, as long as we keep our distance and do not encroach upon their linguistic territories.
As modernity fades behind us, we Christians can say that we have passed through it and survived, but in Leslie Newbigin’s words, we have been ‘very hard pruned’. We came close to losing our story, the ‘one short tale we feel to be true’, and if we had done so, we would have nothing left to offer to the future. In the event, chastened by our experiences, we have woken up in a world that no longer believes in the God of our fathers, and we find that we have become missionaries to our own culture. In order to prosper in our own unfamiliar role, we will have to return to our first love of God, forswear our timidity, and become in the third millennium like the missionaries of the first.
Lord, help us to discover the fervor of the early Christians
And the power of the first evangelization,
That morning of Pentecost, as it started
In the cenacle of
Where your disciples, with Mary, gathered in prayer,
Awaited, Father, the fulfillment of your promise.
Gives us the grace to be renewed
‘In the Spirit and in fire.’
Teach us to speak to the world in tongues of fire,
Let us bring to an end this time of uncertainty
Where Christians are timid and mute
Discussing anxiously problems of today,
As in the past on the road from
Without realising that the Master is risen and alive.
Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens,
extract from ‘Prayer for the year 2000’.
Excerpt from:
Walker, Andrew. Telling the Story. Gospel,
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