Americans who want to keep God, religion and moral behavior alive in the public square recharge their batteries by reading the monthly magazine, FIRST THINGS. (Its  web site is www.firstthings.com/.) Its authors are academicians, jurists, pastors, journalists, biographers and political analysts. Its Editor-in-Chief is Richard John Neuhaus. For most of his life he was Lutheran and long a pastor in a poor Manhattan parish. He is now a Roman Catholic priest. His writers are mainly Lutheran, Jewish and Catholic. But anyone who makes a worthy argument for God in American public life is a candidate to appear in FIRST THINGS.

In the December 1998 issue of FIRST THINGS, Neuhaus offers “C.S. Lewis in the Public Square” (pp. 30 - 35). Neuhaus wonders what the author of MERE CHRISTIANITY would do today in a world driving God and faith out of public affairs. By public affairs and the public square Neuhaus means not just politics, but culture.

To Neuhaus, C.S. Lewis had two sorely needed traits. He was a powerful and lucid reasoner about facts. He was a magnificent teller of tales. Lewis spent his life making the case for Christianity to a world not quite as suicidal as ours. Lewis’s age still relished a strong argument. People still thought about their wider world within a narrative framework derived from the Old and New Testament promises of God to man.

C.S. Lewis was always asking two questions: “Is it not true? Do you not find it to be so?” But fewer people are open today to reason, because many no longer  believe or even know biblical narratives and vision. Too many people now carry about a framework of meaninglessness and nihilism created by Nietzsche. That is, more people are  “post-modern.” How on earth would C.S. Lewis connect with people who love to make up and hear tales, but cannot imagine that any  might be true?

Neuhaus reaches for help back to an October 1993 article (pp.19-24) in FIRST THINGS called, “How the World Lost its Story.” Its author  is  Robert W. Jenson, Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College. The article is on the internet at  www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9310/jenson.html.

Professor Jenson portrays the vanishing world of Western “modernism” as one characterized by reason. When the West was predominantly modernist, the West trusted in reason to get things done and to dispel  darkness. It will be many a summer yet before Modernism becomes extinct. Hence, simply giving the name “post-modernism” to our time of transition does not tell us what  post-modernism’s abiding successor will be.

Aristotle, Jenson points out, had thought out a conceptual framework which Judaeo-Christian story-telling perfectly exemplifies. 

“In a dramatically good story he (Aristotle) said, each decisive event is unpredictable until it happens, but immediately upon taking place is seen to be exactly what ‘had’ to happen.”

Long before modernism, Jews and Christians accepted that telling stories was a good way to understand ourselves and what we are about. Secular modernity continued to assume that we live in a narratable world. That is, concerning our world we can tell stories which are also true. But that modernist idea had been inherited, Jenson argues, from Christianity. Post-modernism saw more clearly than modernism that  we cannot “live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.” “If there is no universal storyteller, then the universe can have no story line.” If the world does not have sense already built into it by someone greater than the world, then neither you nor I can force it to make sense. “We should note that humankind does not universally share the supposition: not shamanist cultures nor Confucian or Taoist China nor the high Indian religions suppose any such thing.”

In the West such a crisis of meaning is not without precedent. As Jenson puts it, 

“the late antique world also insisted on being a meaningless chaos, and ... the church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence.”

God has given Jews and Christians their coherent narratives. They add up to the Great Story. Churches should, through the way they present themselves, through their liturgies and through their constant retelling of the Bible story, give church goers places of truth and of God’s promises. Church interiors and liturgies must proclaim why the world was made, how it will end and what good things await God’s followers. 

In the December 1998 issue of FIRST THINGS,  Richard John Neuhaus uses insights from Robert W. Jenson’s “How the World Lost its Story” to imagine what C.S. Lewis would do today. For Lewis would now face  a world where not so many people believe in reason or have confidence that even their personal lives have credible story lines. Ours is a world where too many people, having no belief in the Great Story, take a look at themselves and then commit suicide. Yet human nature compels people, wires them, to tell stories. People spin yarns  by the millions: for SEINFELD, THE X-FILES, for Howard Stern or for the tabloids. It is just that people rarely expect any stories  to be true or even to be capable of being true. Such is the post-modernist mind-set.

Neuhaus, on the other hand, thinks that C.S.Lewis was confident “that human beings are hard-wired for reason in search of truth.” Today, therefore, Lewis would look around at changed circumstances and start spinning fresh yarns. His would be tales “that winsomely, even seductively, reintroduce the Great Story.”

By Lewis we would be led today, argues Neuhaus, along fresh paths to the truths of the Great Story. Working with God’s grace, Lewis would persuade many that true, coherent personal narratives are possible for everyone. We, too, therefore, ought to encourage people to tell their stories. We should listen and we should ask them the two questions of C.S. Lewis : is it not true? Do you not find it to be so?

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for Asheville TRIBUNE