Book Notes: Samuel Wells, Improvisation (Part 3)

In the final chapter of Part 1 of Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Sam Wells moves from “narrative as drama” to “drama as improvisation.”

The idea that Christian theology and ethics is dramatic leads to the notion that these are to be performed. And there is a great deal in such a view that Wells find commendable. The notion of performance reminds us that, as communities, we are to enact the life commended by scripture while “remaining faithful to the character of God that emerges from the biblical witness” (62).

But performance is not a sufficient category for articulating the Christian vocation, Wells maintains. The idea of performance can create the false impression that the script given in the Bible is sufficient to cover every eventuality and circumstance. Relatedly, it can create the false impression that scripture covers the entirety of the drama when we are living in a new act, and anticipating another, that scripture does not script.

The answer? To recognize that our performance is not simply performing a story but improvising within a drama. We are part of a play “that has to be improvised on the spot” (65). Wells maintains that improvisation is inevitable–we are always improvising whether we realize it or not. He also argues that it is biblical (look at the scenes the disciples play out in Acts) and ecclesial.

Of the several objections Wells meets, I want to focus on one: that improvisation can mean (or means in practice) anything goes.

No, this is not how improvisation works. Improvisation happens within a drama that has already begun to unfold. Improvisation is about acting as saints within the play that finds its climactic action in Christ. There are ways of faithfully playing the script, and ways of unfaithfully playing it. “Blocking,” that is, introducing story-disrupting discontinuity, is not good improvisation.

This will all be dovetailed with a vision of ethics that often goes by the name of “virtue”: to be involved in Christian ethical reflection is to become the kind of people who can faithfully live Christianly in the situations in which we find ourselves. Or, if you prefer the words of Paul, Christian ethics is about being “transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you can prove what the will of God is–that which is good, and acceptable, and perfect.”

I don’t know if I’ll blog through the remainder of the book, so I want to conclude with this: I think that what Wells is doing is right on, though I’m not sure you have to latch on to the same heuristic of “Improvisation” to make the point. Doing so holds onto another of other important elements (such as the narratival shape of Christian theology, the need to enact it in community, etc.), but I see, for example, Richard Hays advocating much the same end using narrative as his heuristic. So I’m not sure that the theoretical framework is as important as keeping all the elements on the table.

If narrative works for you (as it does for me), great. If drama is better, cool. If improvisation really draws you into the idea that the NT intends for us a “conversion of the imagination” so that we can live faithfully in the here and now, so much the better.