129 - What's the Story?

What's the Story?
By Hugh T. Kerr

EVERYONE who has ever been a student remembers a few former teachers.

The more schools attended, the more teachers remembered. "Old Professor Snodgrass, wasn't he a character!" "Remember the day when Ruth Jacobowitz announced that she was ... ?" "How about the time Henry Cooper came to class with a ... ?" "Will you ever forget the look on Dr. Frey's face when he ... ?" Almost anyone can supply words and incidents for the blank spaces.

What students remember most about teachers falls on the side of antics, mannerisms, classroom episodes, and anecdotal trivia. We tend to remember the person rather than the course. We recall vividly certain personality traits but have long ago forgotten what these had to do with what we were supposed to learn. Sometimes we remember only the stories and nothing else.

I

In my own early public school days, the Assistant Principal of Liberty School was a "Miss Faloon." I can't remember anything at all about her or the school except that we sang a verse during recess:

Miss Faloon went up in a balloon
And never came down till the fourth of June.

In college, old "Geology Scott" was so near-sighted that after the class monitor had checked off the empty seat numbers in "Geology 201," several last-row students always slipped out the back door unnoticed. As the professor droned on, no one was the wiser; certainly not those who copped out.

"Prexy" Patton, who had the distinction of serving as President of both Princeton University and the Theological Seminary, was reported to have asked a seminarian in theology class to explain Calvin's doctrine of double predestination. The student stuttered bravely but soon admitted defeat. "I have read the assignment, Professor, and I did know the answer, but now I've forgotten." To

130 - What's the Story?

which Patton replied, addressing the whole class: "What a pity! The only person who ever knew the answer cannot now recall it."

Such stories multiply almost endlessly when former classmates meet at reunions, sports events, and on visits back to the old campus. Ephemeral nostalgia, perhaps, but isn't it curious how such isolated tales of former teachers and school days stick in the mind?

We seem to remember the unusual rather than the normal, the oddity rather than the routine, the amusing rather than the solemn, the mythology rather than the chronicle. As to teachers, we remember their influence, not their lectures; their personal quips and cranks, not their scholarship; their embarrassing moments, not their controlled reflections. And it is only these teachers we remember at all. The others are long since forgotten and beyond recall. Very learned teachers, no doubt; correct and proper in every way, diligent and demanding about their "disciplines," restrained and invulnerable personally, scholars and pedagogues, surely. But they belong mostly to that long procession of instructors who made school so tedious.

Tedious? Well, maybe one reason we remember best only the amusing, funny, and incidental episodes of our school days is that education was for many of us a very sober business with little to laugh about or enjoy. Like the innocent catechumen in the Scottish kirk who always thought the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism was: "To glorify God and endure him forever." The tyranny of the daily class schedule, the relentless demands of assignments and homework, the constant judgmental supervision-this oppressive experience may well linger in the memory but appear only subconsciously in dreams and nightmares. Several university alumni magazines a year ago were deluged with letters in response to a college graduate who wrote how, many years later, he still dreamed of missing a class, of not being prepared, of taking an exam on material he hadn't studied. All the writers reported similar terrifying fantasies that still plagued them regularly. With so much to be frightened about, it's no wonder we remember with relish the few fun-times in a long educational servitude.

II

If history is "the remembered past," then all such incidental stories, yarns, and episodes are important in lending substance and authenticity to the record. Those of us in the Judeo-Christian tradition, of course, already know all about this. Our religion celebrates the acts and events, often scattered and disconnected, of the remembered past as recorded in the Old Testament and as continued and re-interpreted in the New Testament. "O.T. history," as every Bible student knows, is a jumble of legendary stories, preposterous names, astonishing events, and miraculous happenings. The New Testament is allegedly the story, and its sequel, of the life of Jesus. But it, too, is a skein of many threads, twisted in irregular patterns,

131 - What's the Story?

even if at the same time we also insist that it is "Gospel," that is, "God's spiel." As one of my biblical colleagues put it, speaking of its narrative richness: "It takes a genius to make the Old Testament dull." And the Christ-story keeps reappearing in fresh format every year even though we don't get much closer to the historical Jesus.

So it is that today we witness a new appreciation of the place of story and narrative in theology. Especially in an anti-intellectual time when philosophical structures and discursive reasoning find few takers, it may be inevitable that the illustrations in history's textbook arc more to be cherished than the text itself. The scholars among us may be partly to blame. We are very good, we think, at critical analysis, but there aren't many biblical scholars who are also known as raconteurs. Theologians can draw up impressive comparative evaluations of various positions, but not many provide line-drawings or cartoons for their texts, if indeed they could think of anything to illustrate. Perhaps seminaries should require courses in story-telling and yarn-spinning as well as in theology and homiletics. Ministers who aspire to the role of enabler might be reminded that most of their older parishoners love to regale any willing listener with seemingly trivial and endless reminiscences. The older generation, incidentally, has much in common with the very young-both like to tell tales and live in a fantasy world of make-believe.

III

Why do those who advocate "story and narrative in theology" find the notion so fresh and exciting? Perhaps because our middle-age and middle-century generation somehow forgot what others before knew by instinct. Perhaps our present time is emerging as a story-oriented age. Librarians and book publishers tell us that "biography" is making a comeback. Part of the fascination of Watergate was the ever-unfolding of new episodes in a true-life mystery stranger than fiction. As we come to celebrate the Bicentennial, the chances are we will be more interested in newly remembered bits and pieces from the past than in principles of freedom, liberty, and justice. We will find it easier to sketch the illustrations in our history books than to articulate the ideals we aspire to but cannot attain.

But more influential. than anything, perhaps, has been the story-obsessed and narrative-ridden appetite of the media, especially TV. Every night we are treated to thumb-nail biographies of "personalities" on the talk-shows. All day long, if we could endure it, there are soap operas made up of interminable chapters. In prime evening time, the "sitcoms," the "made-for-TV" films, the serials of mystery, mayhem, and violence-all thrive apparently on the public's fascination with stories, yarns, anecdotes, who-dun-its, and cliff-hangers.

Well, someone may respond, "Isn't this life? Isn't life itself, every person's life, a story-narrative? Isn't this, then, the best possible reason for recovering for theology what has been lost but re-channeled

132 - What's the Story?

in other ways?" Some might go even farther and, taken up with the new trend, insist that the story is sufficient unto itself, that the string of episodes remembered is history, that the meaning of any biblical narrative "is the narrative itself" (Hans Frei). If this were so, then all that we need today are more and better ways to spell-bind our hearers, whoever they are, with scenarios, vignettes, and sagas.

Intriguing perhaps, but too simple. Let us return to my early recollections of teachers and their oddities and quirks. What we recall, even the trivial incidents, are surely important for our own personal history, but no one would suggest that such remembered stories about teachers tell us much about education. The myths and legends of a people make up the pattern of their history, their self-identity, their culture and religion. But unless this store of lore is somehow interpreted and expounded anew for each new generation, the stories will be forgotten or remain only inconsequential items such as we all include in our own version of the teacher's tale. If all we have are the Bible stories, we might have enough, but as a matter of fact the narratives are already embedded in interpretation.

Theology can be enriched, possibly even revived, through the creative imagination of new narrators. But theology is not itself story and cannot exist without some investment in prosaic description, discursive analysis, and reconstructive exposition.

The theologian, inevitably, is the person who strings stories in sequence, who asks about the meaning of the joke, who probes for personal motivations, who reflects about and not only recounts the narrative of faith. In the midst of fun and games, the theologian can look like a spoil-sport. Among the story-tellers, jokesters, and stand-up comedians with their one-liners and throw-aways, the theologian cannot compete. But those of us with ministerial responsibility for articulating and communicating the faith must learn to refine and perfect our own special tools of the trade. If story and narrative can help, so much the better, for today preachers, ministers, and teachers need all the help they can get.

To the question: "What's the story?"-the answer can be in story-form. But to the question: "What's the story all about?"-the answer must try to interpret, explain, and apply. Both are needed if we are to tell "the old, old story of Jesus and his love."