Story

The importance of stories is undisputed. Alasdair MacIntyre writes, ‘Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.’[i] Aristotle said, ‘When the storytelling goes bad in society, the result is decadence.’ Yet one of the essences of postmodernism is that there is no overarching story that rules over all times, cultures, histories, and people. Everything is contingent on culture and perspective. Lyotard defines postmodernism simply as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’.[ii]

In the novel, Fight Club, writer Chuck Palahniuk, through the character Tyler Durden, gives voice to a generation without a Metanarrative:

We are the middle children of history—no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very ****** off.

In a world without a great war or great depression is left to create its own futile story. What the world needs is a story which is not only worth living for, but worth dying for. In 1 Corinthians, there is such a story. A story which has been foretold and revealed by a divine storyteller (2:10), which Paul reminds the young and troubled church in Corinth, to lead them out of decadence. Such a story, if McIntyre is correct, is eminently practical for, ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’[iii]

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[i] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame, 1981), 216.

[ii] Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savior (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), 7.

[iii] MacIntyre, Virtue, 217.