Storied Theology

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.

With deep gratitude to my friend David Vinson for putting me on to it, I am now reading through Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.

(Two asides: (1) everyone needs a friend or two who read everything we should have read and lets us know about it; and (2) since getting a conservative Reformed theological education that was seriously deficient in the area of ethics, I have never ceased to be thankful that out in the larger world there are people doing ethics that are not only interesting, but also profoundly Christian. Thank God for the breadth of the church. Amen.)

Wells is writing a book of ecclesial ethics. This has several important ramifications. In terms of the overall shape of the book (and ethic), Wells wants to build an ethic that is rooted in scripture, and therefore narrative in shape, but enacted by the church, and therefore dramatic–but not simply scripted by the scripture and so it consists in dramatic improvisation.

Because this is an ecclesial ethic, Wells distances his approach from those that are weighed down with various “realisms” and other limiting factors: “there are no ‘givens,’ no nonnegotiable facts about existence that one must simply except, other than the great gift of the gospel” (15).

Further, because it is an ecclesial ethic, it is insufficient merely to say the right things. A truly Christian ethic must be embodied in a community.

Put these concerns for drama, the gospel, and the church’s life together, and Wells charts a course that is music to my ears: “I see the Bible as making the conversation that is Christian ethics possible, rather than concentrating on command and making conversation impossible” (16).

After the introduction, Wells walks through the first section, building his case as follows: Ethics as Theology (ch. 1); Theology as Narrative (ch. 2); Narrative as Drama (ch. 3); and Drama as Improvisation (ch. 4).

The chapter on ethics as theology gives a tremendously succinct overview of how perspectives on Christian ethics changed in different eras of church history. It ends with a call to see ethics as enabling faithful imitation of God and Christ as those formed by the Spirit.

The chapter on theology as narrative gives another quick overview–this time of the Bible and Jesus’ place in the narrative. Wells outlines dangers entailed in seeing Christian ethics focused too much on the whole world: it ignores God’s visible means of action (the church) and becomes coercive to outsiders. There’s an opposite, dualist danger, too–that the church so separates itself that it neglects God’s care for the world and cutting itself off from other ways God is at work besides the church. Finally, a “gnostic” danger so privatizes “ethics” that people who are maintaining the sufficient doctrinal purity end up thinking they’re being faithful to God while ignoring the love to which they’ve been called (and acting quite against it).

On a narrative account of ethics, what is the goal? Witnesses. “These witnesses are the church’s truth claim–it has no purchase on truth that is detached from the transformation of lives and communities brought about by its narrative and practices” (41).

So far, so good. The book is going to head toward a Christianized idea of “virtue” ethics, in which the type of people we are, formed by practice, story telling, etc., will lead us into faithful performance in the present. I’m finding a good bit of affinity between Wells’ proposals and some of my own thoughts on Pauline ethics, especially as it is attuned to the narrative dynamics of the Christian story.

Next time: Drama and Improvisation