Volume 14, Issue 2: Incarnatus
Knowing is Story
Graduate philosophy seminars are often library quiet, with whispered disagreements over domesticated ideas. I remember
one where a mild conflict between two skinny British students turned oddly loud. The prof encouraged the discussion, and
pretty soon one of them was standing and shouting from the chalkboard, drawing. The other then joined him, yelling at the top of
his voice, scribbling contrary diagrams with thick lines. They were in each other's faces, all red, all over a thin Saul Kripke
implication. Finally the prof's laughter filled the room. "This is too great!" he said. "If only we could get a picture of this in
the philosophy prospectusa real philosophy fist fight!"
That event stands out over everything else in the class because it was a dramatic little narrative, a story. I only wish more
of that class had been in narrative form. Outside of most classrooms and sermons, we almost always talk in story. Just
listen around. We tell stories to explain, bond, defend, entertain, and sin.
Whether they are simple and mundane narratives about what happened to us at the gas station or multi-layered epic
novels, stories are characterized by particular details and events embedded in time. Where more logical, mathematical modes most
often seek to rise above such time and detail, stories relish in them. Jerome Bruner contends that "a good story and a
well-formed argument are different natural kinds. They differ radically in their procedures for
verification."1 The story mode "strives to
put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place," whereas the
logical/scientific mode "seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction, and in the end disclaims
in principle any explanatory value at all where the particular is
concerned."2 A Christian-take on knowing doesn't disdain
everything general or abstract, but we would seek to find such kinds and patterns grounded in the created order itself. This
appreciation for time and particulars, instead of the desire to escape them, lies at the heart of narrative thinking (and poetic knowledge
in general). That's why our modern drive to count as knowledge only those things that can be put into timeless lists of truths,
like so many Presbyterian sermons, is so odd. It's so unlike human life. God has set us amid constant rhythms of
timeweather, celestial, bodily, social, and more. We live in constant time, designed time. This sort of talk frightens us in our day because
so many radical nominalists in postmodern garb invoke time to try to undo objective reality. But in a biblical perspective, time
is not some impersonal, autonomous box dictating its own course. Time is the pace of change, and the Holy Spirit is He
who shapes change throughout the created order. He is not time, but change is sculpted by His hand. And you can't get any
more objective, true, and beautiful than the Triune God. We needn't fear time.
Stories live and move and have their being in time. Just like our experience, a narrative connects events, particulars,
and points in a causal sequence, one thing produces another in a story; events grow organically. A logical list has no sense of time
and growth; it seeks to move by timeless connectionsso unnatural to our basic mode of life. That's part of the answer as to
why we can remember narratives so much better than discrete logical points in a lecture.
Though we didn't need artificial-intelligence theorists to point out what is so clearly assumed in Scripture, it is interesting
to hear the likes of Roger Schank explain that "humans are not really set up to understand
logic."3 After decades of
picturing human and computer intelligence as logical problem solving, Schank now urges us to see knowing and intelligence as
characterized by stories. He uses the notion of scripts to explain part of how knowing uses stories: "A script is a set of expectations
about what will happen next in a well-understood situation. . . . They serve to tell us how to act without our being aware that we
are using them . . . You don't have to figure out every time you enter a restaurant how to convince someone to feed you. All
you really have to know is the restaurant script and your part in that
script."4 New experiences of the same type get bundled
together, and the script adjusts over time as we mature and learn new angles. Though we each have thousands of personal scripts from
the mundane to the odd, they needn't be exactly the same; just similar enough for an overlap of understanding. In the end,
Schank suggests that "knowledge is experiences and stories, and intelligence is the apt use of experience and the creation and telling
of stories."5 Scripture itself assumes that stories are central to our daily epistemology. As Eugene Peterson notes, "Story is the
primary way in which the revelation of God is given to us. The Holy Spirit's literary genre of choice is story. Story isn't a simple or
naive form of speech from which we graduate to the more sophisticated `higher' languages of philosophy and mathematics. . . .
The biblical story comprises other literary formssermons and genealogies, prayers and letters, poems and proverbsbut story carries them all."6
Earlier installments in this poetic-knowledge primer pointed to the centrality of image and imagination within
knowledge. In one sense, a story is an image stretched and projected through time.
This, too, is reflected in the Incarnation. Christ, the Image came in time, and His image isn't static; it extends
through history and church by the Holy Spirit.