Shows About Nothing

A student repeated back to me a point I was trying to make in class the other day. He said, "So a well told story is one that's told the way God tells the gospel." To which I could only reply, "Yes! I couldn't have said it any better.

God's story begins with creation (setting), then moves to fall (conflict), redemption (climax), and consummation (resolution). This is the Christian metanarrative or grand story that gives our personal stories ultimate meaning, hope, and a goal for which to strive.

Jean Francois Lyotard famously put it, "Postmodernism is skepticism toward all metanarratives." Post modern stories tend to remove redemption and resolution in favor of distress and despair. There is no hope of improvement for the characters, justice in the face of evil, or redemption through repentance. For instance, the characters in Seinfeld end up in prison discussing the same things they discussed in Jerry's apartment. Hannibal Lector and the Talented Mister Ripley live on. Justice is not done and that's the point: Life is ultimately pointless. As Seinfeld admits a show can be about nothing. Nothing is working together for a greater good. There is no providence, just a demonic anti-providence. See Thomas Hibbs Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture

Yes there are tragedies in the Bible like the Levite and his concubine but they are set in the meta-narrative of the gospel comedy where sad things come untrue.

Before the Fall

G. K. Chesterton on the Fall of Man as a Worldview:

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds … that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, … on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans an skeptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries … out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; that we are all kings in exile.

If we were entrapped in a bad world we would not cry for what is not. We would not protest the way things are. We would surrender to what is.

If the world was messed up from the beginning, as all the pagan myths say and Darwinism implies, we would know nothing different and not differ with the way things are. When we do cry for justice and try to right the wrongs we are remembering our origins in a good creation and longing for our return there. We appeal to a lost standard that can only be recovered in Christ.