All of this pushes us to understand the relationship between Christ and culture not simply as a retread of past ideas, expressions and practices but as a wholly unique moment, informed by the past but fundamentally new at the same time.
This is the narrative form. We tell stories to help us, in the same breath, understand the past and push into the future. As Hauerwas writes, “it does not just happen that God’s people tell stories; certainly, the penchant for storytelling has nothing to do with Matthew, Mark, and Luke being primitive, pre-rational people who told simple stories, whereas we are sophisticated people who do not. Story is the fundamental means of talking about and listening to God, the only human means available to us that is complex and engaging enough to make comprehensible what it means to be with God[21].” This, I would argue, is why our stories inevitably follow familiar shapes. Wether it is the similarities in mythologies such as the Atrhasis, Enuma Elish and Genesis account of creation, humanity is notorious for reusing story elements.
In fact, the long history of human storytelling has recently found new paradigms within which to witness its redactionist tendencies, in particular copyright law. “Writing for the New Yorker, Tad Friend, tackled the issue of synchronistic cinematic expression by suggesting that, ‘the giddiest aspect of copyright suits is how often the studios try to prove that their story was so derivative that they couldn’t have stolen it from only one source.’ The studios essential say: Every part of the movie is a cliche stolen from plots/stories/themes/jokes that are in the air[22].”
Story is part of the human experience. Granted, there are those who tell new stories, who invent, create and recombine elements to elicit new insight but the Christian belief is that all stories repeat because they flow from the same source narrative. It is my bias that the scriptural narrative of creation, fall and restoration as imaged in the Good-Creation centric view is representative of the individual human story. We all long for the drama of struggle and change and this is essentially the context in which we grow to know God. His mission of recreation and our mutual participation in that journey.
