Abstract
The ‘narrative turn’ in theology over the course of the past few decades has highlighted the storied character of Christian theology and alerted us to the fact that stories make theological claims and are central to our communal and individual selves. In his absorbing and insightful volume, Theological Anthropology and the Great Literary Genres, Michael Jensen helpfully takes this point further and argues that the genres to which stories belong are themselves bearers of theological meaning, and therefore, they make anthropological claims about the place of the human creature in the cosmos. He uses the term ‘theo-anthropology’ to indicate how literary genres ‘attempt to answer the major questions of human existence with reference to what transcends us’ (p. 9). In this way, the book offers an original and meaningful contribution to the literature on theology and narrative. In fact, Jensen positions the work as ‘a piece of narrative theology’ (p. 37) that exposes and exposits the theo-anthropology of the epic, comic and tragic genres (the three genres on which the book focuses) in conversation with the theo-anthropology of Christian theology. While there are important overlaps between the three genres and Christian theology, ultimately, Jensen argues, it is the distinct sense of an ending found in the gospel that differentiates it from other narrative forms, making possible a joy and a hope not available elsewhere.
Having set out the overall shape of the book in the opening chapter, in chapter two Jensen offers a ‘Milbankian account’ (p. 19) of literary genres as not merely classificatory systems, but as structures of meaning-making—even, following John Frow, ‘ontological domains’ or forms of life—that hold significant theological import for the specific works of literature that are situated and shaped by the genres under which they operate. Genres carry normative weight and pose answers to questions of central existential concern to human beings (such as questions about origins, purpose, destiny and identity). ‘The tragic, the epic, and the comic will have substantially different answers to . . . these questions’, Jensen writes, ‘simply by dint of their shape as narratives’ (p. 20). He argues that genres have a mythos which serves to make sense of the world as an ordered whole, and like culturally embedded political theories, they appeal to metaphysical concepts by which societies organise and understand themselves. Genres, then, do not operate according to a neutral rationality, but rather are like a ‘genetic code’ that move narratives along in particular ways, transmitting theological assumptions as they do so. Jensen nicely compares this to the ‘grammar’ provided by a computer’s operating system.
This account of the function of genres leads Jensen to a discussion of a broader theology of taxonomy, whereby he argues that the historical development of genres is neither arbitrary, nor merely descriptive. Rather, in ordering literature according to genre, Jensen claims that the human mind is engaged in a process both of giving order to the literature and of recognising the order already there in the literature. That there is such an interplay in the ordering of literature reflects the more general nature of human ordering. Such ordering is a creative and cultural activity with ‘an echo of the divine creative activity’ (p. 29). There is room in the creation whose order is an expression of God’s righteousness for the ordering activity of those creatures made in the Creator’s image. The historical development of genres, like other human activities, is characterised by this mix of the constructed and the organic that marks human taxonomic undertaking. As such, genres bear ontological significance and have arisen not simply contingently, but as the result of being a part of ‘the ways things really are’ (p. 37).
In chapter 3, Jensen provides an account of narrative theology, including treatment of figures such as Barth, Lindbeck, Frei, Hauerwas, Loughlin and Balthasar, before offering his own outline of a ‘narrative ontology’ (p. 51). Jensen situates himself among the narrative theologians as a ‘purist’ in the sense that he holds the Christian narrative to be irreducible. Nonetheless, he argues that the category of narrative is a mediating one, making possible conversation between the Christian narrative and other narratives. Jensen’s focus on genre, he argues, serves the function of carrying forward such a conversation in a way that has not been fully explored by narrative theology to this point. Given that God reveals Godself in the history of creation, Israel and the Church—and that is a story in which God is both actor and teller—and given that human identity is also grasped in narrative, Jenson suggests that a narrative ontology proves promising for thinking about and discussing both divine and human persons. This approach simultaneously highlights the prominent role of words in constituting things. This ontological point is also eschatological. As Jensen puts it, the story of the gospel is not simply a retelling of the old story of fallen humanity. Rather, ‘the story is retold with a new ending—which makes the story altogether something else, and which means that in it we find that we are something else’ (p. 56).
With the work of justifying his focus on narrative, and on genre in particular, behind him, in chapters 4–6 Jensen turns to consider the theo-anthropology found in the epic, comic and tragic genres respectively, situating them in light of Christian theo-anthropology. In these chapters he provides penetrating interpretations of several major works of literature, while bringing to the surface the theological implications at play and the way the Christian story, with its own sense of an ending, has something distinctive to offer in relation to each genre. The result is an enriching cross-engagement between the literary works considered and Christian doctrine, offering numerous substantial insights. For example, he begins the treatment of epic with reflection on the difference between the epic genre and the modern genre of the novel. In conversation with the arguments of György Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin concerning the lack of psychological inwardness in the epic hero, whose quest is about communal, not individual identity, Jensen considers the import of such inwardness, as exemplified in the novel, for the Christian understanding of the self as compared to the epic understanding of the self. He views this development in an interior direction as a genuine element of the Christian gospel. While he agrees with Krister Stendahl that Paul may not have had an ‘introspective conscience’, nonetheless, Augustine’s and Luther’s ‘inwardness’ is a faithful development of the apostle’s teaching concerning the sinful disposition, a teaching that necessitates self-reflection. Jenson’s treatment of this matter raises several interesting questions about the exegetical import of the history of a text after its composition, and the function of genre in historically transmitting and unfolding texts surely helps us better interpret them in the present.
Relatedly, in treating the epic genre, Jensen demonstrates how it retells a closed history located in the deep past (the Aeneid is his primary example), whereas in the Biblical narrative history is open-ended and still in motion, looking forward to the end that has already begun in the Incarnation (this point about history returns in Jensen’s treatment of tragedy). He illustrates the way this positions Christian appropriation of the epic by offering readings of Augustine, Dante and Milton. Given this different understanding of history on display in these Christian authors, so convincingly set forth by Jensen, I would have liked to have heard him say just a bit more about how the open-endedness characteristic of both Christian conceptions of history and the form of the novel might reposition some of the earlier reflection on ontology and order. Further, what more might be said about the relationship between Christian doctrine and the novel as a genre (there is a reflection on David Foster Wallace at the end of the book, but it serves as a negative ‘postmodern’ example)? However, again, the reflections on the epic genre are highly illuminating. In terms of what the genre shows us in conversation with the Biblical narrative, Jensen argues that both narrate a particular history focused on a people, but the Christian narrative makes possible a new identity not grounded in shared custom or ‘genetic relation’ but in a common faith. Jenson writes, ‘The new identity relativizes but does not extinguish the old’ (p. 93). And what of that burning concern for glory and renown so prominent in the epic hero? Well, in the Christian narrative, the future identity of the individual is secured, not in the poetic memory of her people, but rather in the memory of God and the promise of bodily resurrection.
Through readings of Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jensen presents the comic genre as assuming the conditions of a fallen world, and the narrative form offers a moral vision of the world wherein particular vices and virtues are judged and an unexpected deeper moral order is revealed to underlie the fallen and incongruous human condition. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay, ‘Humor and Faith’, Jensen argues that although comedy points in the direction of a resolution of the chaos of the human condition, it is only the vicarious sacrifice on the cross, with its combination of justice and mercy, that provides the necessary atonement unavailable in comedy. In this way, Christian theo-anthropology is neither simply anti- nor pro-comic. Following Oliver O’Donovan, Jensen argues that the resurrection reveals the true moral order of creation, and so to simply oppose comedy would reveal an insufficient doctrine of creation. On the other hand, that comedy cannot offer atonement means that a straightforwardly pro-comic stance would reveal an insufficient doctrine of the fall.
Finally, Jensen turns to tragedy, which ‘is simply the recognition in literary form that, in human life, suffering and death are inevitable’ (p. 139). Using Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles as prime examples of the genre, Jensen makes the case that the genre’s underlying theo-anthropology is one holding that human beings are at the same time victims and perpetrators, that sacrifice is required to maintain social order, and that human suffering has redemptive potential. However, as with comedy, the justice promised in tragedy is insufficient in that human societal justice ‘restores order, but does not atone’ (p. 155). While Christian theo-anthropology agrees with tragedy that human beings are simultaneously victims and culpable, and that sin belongs to the whole community, not just the individual, the suffering of Christ transforms suffering in the direction of eschatological hope. Importantly, Jenson argues, the Biblical narrative makes place for protest against the normalisation of violence and suffering. This is a protest that David Bentley Hart, for example, sees as too often lacking in tragedy. In the promise of the resurrection, made possible by the suffering of Christ, which ‘absorbs the human tragedy’ (p. 183), Jensen says believers find themselves transcending tragedy, not by leaving grief behind, but by grieving as those who have hope (1 Thess. 4:13). As with the epic and comic genres, so then with tragedy, the Christian narrative takes up aspects of it, but uniquely shapes the human experience in the light of the distinct and different ending to the story found in Christian eschatology.
Jensen’s fine book offers an astute argument about the function of narrative forms, the shape that narrative theology may take going forward, and the distinct difference Christian doctrine makes for our understanding of the human condition. As such, it will be of interest to a variety of readers, including those concerned with the relation of theology and literature, theologians reflecting on what the narrative turn means in the present, and theological ethicists interested in the storied shape of theological anthropology. Most importantly, it encourages a generous engagement with ‘non-Christian’ sources of the self, while refusing to elide the distinctness of Christian doctrine.