Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Stob Lectures 2006)

by Alan Jacobs

Even the various forms of theological activity can be redescribed in narrational terms, as when Newbigin writes of "the congregation as hermeneutic of the Gospel": interpretation of Scripture for Newbigin is not so much what a particular scholar writes as what a particular community of believers enacts.

If the church cannot cultivate the "fundamental and dynamic" discipline of analogical discernment - the discovery of how different lives in different times and places belong nonetheless to the same genre - it has no hope of making disciples of Christ and therefore no hope of survival.

This need for tentativeness is Helm's first concern; it is accompanied by another major one: The Bible does not, it seems, promise that a person's life will form a discernible pattern, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Many lives are completely patternless or marked by tragedy; early promise may be cut off by serious illness or death. It would be completely false to Scripture to suppose that in order for people to be assured that the events of their lives are ordered by providence for a good end, they should be able to discern some overall pattern or "story" in their lives. The pressing need to discern such a pattern can often lead to unnecessary frustration and heartache. I want to begin my response to Helm by noting that he confuses two very different problems here: first, the problem of being unable to discern a pattern or story in one's life; and second, the discernment of a pattern or story that is marked by misery and frustration. Helm seems to assume that pattern is always good, always reassuring: "But what if no pattern at all can be discerned? What if a life, a Christian life even, seems marked by pointlessness and tragedy? What if whole stretches of a life are stamped by monotony, or by loss and adversity?" But it is far from true, first of all, that "pointlessness" and "tragedy" are synonymous - as we shall see, at some length, later in this chapter - and it is equally far from true that the discernment of a pattern in one's life is necessarily a positive t...

It is in part to avoid situations like Cowper's that Helm counsels "tentativeness" and "scepticism" in reading our lives for signs of providential direction. `As human beings," he notes, "we do not have sufficient data to make definitive judgments on the significance of the events in our lives." This is a truly useful reminder; as Helm notes, there are dangers both in finding too tidy a pattern in one's life and in thinking that one should be able to discern such neatness. But I grow concerned when Helm adds to his recommendation of "tentativeness" a counsel of "scepticism." Is this not going too far? I cited earlier Helm's claim that "the time-scale for a person being conformed to the image of Christ is the whole of that person's life. Any judgment about the significance of one event, or series of events, should therefore be appropriately tentative and open to revision in the light of subsequent experience." But how tentative must one be to be "appropriately" so?