Quaker Theology #14

Review of The Trouble with God -- Page 2

Winstanley was also, it turns out, the archetypal (and perhaps first) non-theist Friend: "For Winstanley, both God and the devil were internalized," (p.128) and he preferred to call God "the power of reason" (p.129). Boulton has embarked on a long-term project to bring Winstanley’s several books back from historical obscurity into print, as key resources for the larger rehabilitation of theology as necessary fiction.

Boulton’s presentation moves deftly from autobiography to religious history, lucidly through the twists of theology since the Enlightenment, and amusingly to the quirky debates among religious humanists, writing with flair throughout. His account was clear enough, indeed, that I could see just where I parted company with him. It’s when he gets into the matter of God, fiction, and story:

If [God] is a fiction, we are his author as well as reader. Human communities fashioned him, imagined him into being by story telling . . . .We said, "let us now make God in our own image and likeness," and we breathed into his nostrils the breath of story telling, and God became a living fiction. . . . But it is a story, and God is no more, but no less, than what we have made him." (P. 164)

Now this model doubtless works to explain many stories; but not all. Nor does it explain the testimonies of many authors, old and new, that their stories in large measure wrote themselves. They are written down or told by their human "authors," but not created by them.

One of the oldest such testimonies comes from perhaps 2500 years ago, and was recorded by a man who did not want to begin telling stories, or once begun, to continue. But, lamented the prophet Jeremiah: "If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." (Jeremiah 20:9)

And one of the newest such testimonies comes from this writer, even if I tremble to mention myself in the same paragraph with Jeremiah. I have written many stories. Some were indeed constructed fictions, pieces of craft which fit Boulton’s description quite well. But not all: others were given to me, not created by me, and I merely wrote them down and polished them a bit. Of course, I don’t claim these stories are grand prophecies such as Jeremiah delivered; only that I did not create them.

But if I did not make those stories, who did? And if (again, the trembling) Jeremiah refused to tell stories until he literally could not do otherwise, where was that fire in his bones coming from?

So, not to put too fine a point on it, there are stories we write, and stories which write us. Boulton comes within shouting distance of this notion when he says that

. . . just as we are what we eat, so too are we what we read . . . .Every one of the stories we read, hear, see, changes us a little . . . .but the stories that most clearly make us what we are are the great foundation stories of our culture: the origin myths, redemption stories and epic tales of love and death. . . . .Every Arab has been shaped by the Koran, every Jew by the Torah. . . . These are our very foundations, their themes, their inflections and their nuances forming the bedrock of the culture–both "high" and popular–in which we live and move and have our being." (P. 200)

For him, all this is still a human construct. But Jeremiah’s experience points to another option: if some stories write themselves, and write us, maybe there’s a Story Teller, shaping the world thereby, who is not a human invention, but is really "out there" in some ineffably mysterious fashion.

That may not be much of a theology, but it is what the drift of my own experience leads me to affirm, even in the midst of acknowledging the truth of much of Boulton’s account of the changing god-images and stories.

I don’t state this alternative to argue or to insist Boulton is mistaken; our own stories simply come to different conclusions. For some–even alas, some among Friends–such differences are the mandate for heresy hunts. But those stories in my reading (and experience) all have unhappy endings, and are unnecessary to boot. Instead, I see the difference as the basis for some very fruitful conversations.

Or to put it another way, my Story Teller must be content to have many different storylines in play; else why make so many of them? Including the ones so memorably described in The Trouble with God.

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