Stretching narrative over theology
My conversations at LoFi Tribe and Philocrites have, of late, ranged over the question of whether liberal religion has a sustainable narrative, or mythos. Last night, while finishing up Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I wondered–is this what it would look like to construct a quasi ad hoc story?
Think of it–if you’ve read TSZ, or snippets. Nietzsche is inarguably brilliant, but his struggle is to make a life-affirming “Yes!” out of a criticism of previous philosophy and his surrounding milieu. Does he succeed? If so, he does by borrowing a narrative style straight from the religion he abhors, Christianity. He has no rigorous framework to act as a scaffold for his story–nor would he want to have one. Throughout the work, he falls flat attempting to evoke what the Ubermensch would be like, save through a negative comparison.
Understanding revelation as a continually shifting conglomeration of texts offers no teleology, no end-point to the story. The end must come from without, or be a dilution of what comes from within. That’s well and good, but we all know how difficult it is to stomach a movie or a novel with one of those “postmodern” endings–you know, where there’s no resolution? We may feel very intellectual for having watched/read it. Pretty quickly we’ll reach for a good James Bond flick where the villians are destroyed, the evil plans thwarted, and there is, well, consumation.
I’m not offering a solution–myself, I think that the lack of an eschaton in Unitarian Universalism is a good thing. Metaphysically, I’m more or less convinced that the present is real, not the future or past. So the idea of a story”line” is nonsensical. Bringing that eschaton entirely into the present, though, collapses the tension of the “already-here/not-yet” that it seems religious sensibility thrives upon.
What I’m wondering, personally and academically, is whether a movement without this story can be construed as religious? And further, if I do not place myself within a story, am I religious–or merely interested in religion, like an English major is interested in Shakespeare?