Beyond the obvious generic differences, how do literature and theology help us make sense of the world in distinct ways? Literature, after all, shares much in common with theology, as Frederick Buechner observes in the first chapter of The Alphabet of Grace (1970):
At its heart most theology, like most fiction, is essentially autobiography. Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, working out their systems in their own ways and in their own language, are all telling us the stories of their lives, and if you press them far enough, even at their most cerebral and forbidding, you find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes before something that happened once.[i]
Buechner’s central claim is that all our attempts to make sense of the divine are rooted in our own experiences. It couldn’t be otherwise. Why does this theologian grapple so mightily with the significance of death? Perhaps she lost a loved one. What drives that theologian to spend years trying to reconcile the goodness of God with the suffering in the world? Because he has experienced great suffering himself. Or maybe, in both cases, there was no great tragedy, only a nagging question brought about by a stray thought or a scene from a film. ‘What happened once may be no more than a child falling sick, a thunderstorm, a dream,’ Buechner continues, ‘and yet it made for the face and inside the face a difference which no theology can ever entirely convey or entirely conceal.’[ii] The source of all theological reflection, he insists, is human experience. And yet, theology can never completely explain the meaning of our experience because there are some things which simply cannot be explained.
What accounts for the shortcomings of theology? Buechner argues that theology is the wrong arena for wrestling with the ineffable because it strives for explanation and thus requires experience to be translated into a language of abstraction and certainty. This language is different from that of experience:
But for the theologian, it would seem what happened once, the experience of flesh and blood that may lie at the root of the idea, never appears substantial enough to verify the idea, or at least by his nature the theologian chooses to set forth the idea in another language and to argue for its validity on another basis, and thus between the idea and the experience a great deal intervenes.[iii]
The theologian moves away from the experience of death or suffering and tries to formulate a theology of those experiences. The theologian, in a commendable attempt to make the ways of God known to humans, drifts away from the death of his dear friend, or her mother, or your mother’s dear friend, and sets out to understand death as one abstract element in the larger rubric of God’s world.
What is lost in this effort to fit death into the rational matrix of God’s world is the particularity of human experience that is integral to human understanding. And this particularity is where literature comes in, according to Buechner:
But there is another class of men—at their best they are poets, at their worst artful dodgers—for whom the idea and the experience, the idea and the image, remain inseparable, and it is somewhere in this class that I belong. I cannot talk about God or sin or grace, for example, without at the same time talking about those parts of my own experience where these ideas became compelling and real.[iv]
The poet does not seek to translate experience into the language of certainty, nor to rationalize it into a coherent and reliable system. Rather, the poet attempts to recreate the experience itself in language that enables readers to inhabit the very same experience, or a similar one perhaps. The poet sets out to use language that will allow readers to imagine a world in which they themselves can see, hear, and feel what’s happened, and to grapple with what it means to care for a sick child, or to get stuck in a thunderstorm, or to wake up from a dream. Literature doesn’t try to tell you what to think about the things that happen to you; it tries to make things happen to you.
And perhaps this is why so much art that is produced under the banner of Christian comes off as didactic, shallow, or even hokey. The writer may feel some compulsion to shoehorn an image, symbol, or bit of dialogue into the work, not because the logic of the world or the personality of the character requires it but because the novel is supposed to be somehow Christian. The result is often a commentary on experience rather than a genuine plunge into pain or joy or suffering or love. The poet G. C. Waldrep, himself a Christian, avers: ‘My sense is that most religiously inflected art is designed precisely to prevent a deeper exploration of “lived faith,” rather than to provoke it. It is affirming and comforting, or else it’s palliative.’[v] Instead of grappling with the theological implications of human experience, the risk for literature is that it can become a poor imitation of theology.
Literature must not try to be theology, though it can certainly be theological. To shimmer, literature must step out of the shadow of theology and risk the deep plunge into experience without any guarantee it will ever return to the surface. Literature must be willing to hazard miracles, which defy explanation because, as Buechner insists, they occur ‘when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’[vi] If theology is a kind of system run on equations where one plus one always equals two, literature is itself something of a miracle, where ‘one plus one equals a thousand.’[vii] We need the theologian to systematize what can be systematized and the poet to help us grapple with everything else.
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Footnotes:
[i] Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace (New York: Phoenix Press, Walker and Company, 1970), p.1.
[ii] Ibid, p.1.
[iii] Ibid, p.1-2.
[iv] Ibid, p.3.
[v] Shane McCrae, “Field of Encounter: a conversation with G. C. Waldrep’, Image, Iss.107 [Read article here]
[vi] Buechner, Alphabet, p.73-4.
[vii] Ibid, p.74.
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