*2.3. Renewing the Narrative of the Age to Come*

As we have seen in their description of kingdom-oriented worship, both John Zizioulas and NT Wright emphasise the indispensable role of worship in the experience here and now of the life of the age to come, and they both clearly teach that liturgy shapes people for the kingdom. For Zizioulas, the key to participating in the kingdom is an awareness of eschatological identity, an understanding that true causality is the future not the past, and that the true nature of all people and things is what they will be in the age to come (Zizioulas 2010, p. 15). This knowledge is itself transformative, allowing human beings to fulfil their image-bearing vocation to be kingdom-builders: the "more of your eschatological identity you carry with you, the more you will love and come to the aid of whomever needs your help, whatever it costs you" (Zizioulas 2008, p. 32). Apart from insisting on our iconological participation in the eschaton through the Divine Liturgy, however, Zizioulas never articulates in any practical way how awareness of this eschatological identity is to be acquired, how eschatological ontology works through worship to make us into people who belong in and derive their being from the age to come. A pragmatic solution is sorely needed, though: we have already seen just how scathingly he decries clergy who, lacking the proper eschatological awareness, have turned the liturgy into "a distortion of the image of the last times" (Zizioulas 2011, p. 46).

Throughout this paper, we have seen that, while sharing Zizioulas' concern for the dearth of awareness among Christians of an experience here and now of the new way of life of the age to come, Wright perceives the real solution will come with the recovery the full kingdom *narrative*. He emphasises that it is in the telling of the *story* that the work of God in Jesus to establish his kingdom becomes the "mandate and pattern" for the church: "The more you tell the story of Jesus and pray for his Spirit, the more you discover what the church should be doing in the present time" (Wright 2012, p. 119). What Wright says of the gospels could equally be said of the kingdom worship of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy: the story has a "dense and complex centre," and we need to regularly "be struck anew by the thick, rich, multilayered nature" of this narrative, "so full of vivid human scenes, but so evocative in their resonance of meaning about the world, God, life and death, and pretty much everything else" (ibid., p. 157). In the telling of God's story in worship, there is the potential for the transforming encounter and renewal of our minds that we need:

God has to sweep away all our ideas, including all our ideas about God, in order to draw us, unwilling as we are, face to face with the reality, which is both greater and gentler than we can imagine. And if that is true in our praying and thinking—if it is true that we have to be stripped of our own noisy jumble of thoughts in order to hear afresh the word of the triune God—it is just as true in our living. (Wright 1997, p. 38)

In liturgy, then, God's story shapes our own, the narrative of the age to come moulding us to be citizens and bringers of the kingdom.

The difficulty, of course, is that as Zizioulas and Wright have both identified, it is possible to participate in liturgy or read the gospels and completely miss the clear and overarching narrative of the kingdom that pervades the Christian story. As Wright points out, we have cut the narrative "down to size" and have allowed it "only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already," rather than setting it "free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation." What occupy our minds already are competing narratives that create what Wright calls "bad habits of thought" (Wright 2012, p. 158). These result in perception filters that blind us to even the most obvious elements of God's story, in cognitive biases or subjective perceptions of reality that distort our apprehension of the truths revealed in the narrative and experienced in worship. Wright lays the blame primarily on worldviews arising from a triad of cultural movements over successive centuries—the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and existentialism—that have severely distorted our lenses and prevented us from engaging fully with God's story. As we have already seen, the Enlightenment, "with its ugly ditch between ideas and facts, the eternal truths of reason and the contingent events of history," split religion from real life, divorcing heaven from earth, and subtly pushed the privatisation of faith (Wright 2002). The church swallowed this rhetoric and became content to sell its faith as a means of individuals qualifying for some kind of supratemporal and immaterial heaven after death. Romanticism further distorted the picture by privileging feelings over thoughts and deeds, focusing on the heart, not in the biblical sense as the seat of will and real, personal knowledge, but as the seat of fickle emotions: "it invited you to look within, to see what feelings you had, and to make them the centre of your world, rather than seeing the love of the heart for the true God as the gift of God through gospel, Word, and Spirit." Thirdly, Wright sees the existentialist movements of the 20th century as a blatant return to a form of gnosticism: each of us "has inside ourselves a true self which, though long buried, is now to be discovered and enabled to flourish." This leaves no room for anyone to be confronted, challenged and transformed by the gospel, for it says we need, not redemption, but "to be helped to discover 'who you really are'" (ibid.) These cultural lenses have profoundly affected our ability to read and understand God's story, whether written in the scriptures or proclaimed in liturgy. To these distorted lenses, we can also add the imagination-warping dangers of "secular liturgies" such as consumerism. Within our modern life, countless narrative spaces call us to enter in and participate; these stories and spaces form our desires and imaginations, and they alienate us from the kingdom narrative of our true human existence.

In the face of these challenges and competing narratives, it is not adequate simply to declare that liturgy proclaims the new life of the kingdom and forms our "eschatological identity." What we need is a model for the way the liturgy of the kingdom works in practice as a counter-formative influence. We need to understand how participants in kingdom-oriented worship may be converted from the distorted narratives of the present age and begin to apprehend the full divine narrative—how through the words and actions of the liturgy they may begin to imagine and live the way God desires. In NT Wright's comprehensive understanding of the way narrative itself works, the foundation of his own New Testament scholarship, we may discern and adapt just such a model.

In his New Testament studies, Wright sets out a hermeneutical model called "critical realism." Unlike Enlightenment positivism's detached and objective observer, critical

realism submits that the observer has a distinctive *point of view*, that the observer interprets through a matrix of expectations, memories, stories, and psychological states, and that the observer's interpretive lenses arise from the communities and contexts belonged to. Rather than working from observations and sensory data to "confident statements about external reality" as in positivism, here realism survives "within the larger framework of the story or worldview which forms the basis of the observer's way of being in relation to the world" (Wright 1993, p. 37). Knowledge takes place "when people *find things that fit* with the particular story or (or more likely) stories to which they are accustomed to give allegiance." As Wright explains, stories "are one of the most basic modes of human life" (ibid., p. 38). Narratives are not accounts derived from human words and action: rather, what we say and do are "enacted narratives." In other words, "the overall narrative is the more basic category, while the particular moment and person can only be understood within that context." All of our life is based on the overt and hidden narratives that we tell ourselves and one another. Together, they form what critical-realist theoretician Michael Polanyi calls "tacit knowledge," the precognitive filter that enables to sort out what new sensory data and ideas are to be believed. As story-telling humans, we inhabit a story-laden world; our observations, embedded within narratives, are challenged by critical reflection on ourselves as story-tellers, but with new or revised stories we can find "alternative ways of speaking truly about the world" (ibid., p. 44).

This critical-realist framework suggests how kingdom-oriented liturgy may work in practice to shape participants with what should be its "devastating and challenging" narrative. As story-laden creatures, we all come to worship bearing our own complex of explicit and implicit narratives. We are often not aware of them at all, for we have not stopped to perform any *narrative criticism* on our own lives—we have yet to ponder the plot, the structure, the characters of the stories in which we inhabit. In the readings from the scriptures, the ritual actions and prayers, the liturgy of the kingdom presents us with a myriad of sensory data, ideas and symbols, story-laden events derived from the new life of the age to come. The stories and worldview embedded in the liturgy are meant to subvert all competing stories, for they are in essence revolutionary, proclaiming the dethroning and reversal of all tyrannical powers, the victory of God in Jesus that transforms sorrow into joy, darkness into light, and death into life. As Wright explains, this narrative-shaping role of worship is intentional:

Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews. Where head-on attack would certainly fail, the parable hides the wisdom of the serpent behind the innocence of the dove, gaining entrance and favour which can then be used to change assumptions which the hearer would otherwise keep hidden away for safety. [ ... ] Tell someone to do something, and you change their life—for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. (Wright 1993, p. 40)

Yet, we are almost completely oblivious and immune to this subversive message if there is no point of intersection between our complex of personal stories and the public narrative of the liturgy. Our existing tacit knowledge or matrix of stories prevents us from even seeing the obvious symbol system of the kingdom that pervades the liturgy. For any new story to be subversive, it must come "close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them," and when it does, "nothing will ever be quite the same again" (ibid.).

Much of what liturgy needs to address lies beneath the surface in the deeply embedded implicit stories and tacit knowledge that people hold. These deeper stories may be precisely the source of the filters that prevent us from seeing in liturgy the obvious narrative and symbol set of the kingdom of God, yet they may not easily be addressed with explicit teaching. Drawing directly on the critical realism and related ideas of Michael Polanyi, Susan Wood calls the kind of knowledge that liturgy gives us access to *participatory knowledge*: "we acquire this knowledge by entering into the symbolic time and space of liturgical action. Within the liturgy we enter a formative environment that shapes our

vision, our relationships, and our knowing" (Wood 2001, pp. 95–96). She explains that this form of knowledge is less rational, and more kinaesthetic, incarnate and embodied. Great emphasis must therefore be placed on participation in liturgy—not strictly speaking, on a rational level, but on the rituals, movement and embodied action by which we dwell within the liturgy. This is what James Smith also emphasises in his works on worship: repeated bodily practices, whether they be the liturgy or our secular rituals, create narrative spaces which shape our imagination, desires and character far more than we are consciously aware (Smith 2013). For Smith, so important is ritual action that even the imagination becomes a bodily form of intelligence (or *praktognosia*) that surpasses conscious reflection, and the mind seems only to be involved in organising thoughts after the real work is done. A balanced view of worship should see the liturgy as a place of dialogue between body and mind, of embodied imagination and values repatterned by ritual practice, and of conscious theological reflection on the participative, tacit knowledge perceived within the in-dwelt *whole*.

The narrative of the kingdom of God as inaugurated in the paschal mystery is precisely that *whole* within which we dwell in liturgy. To function properly as a narrative that shapes the participants in liturgy, it is therefore essential that the story of God's kingdom be fully proclaimed within worship. In liturgical proclamation and ritual enactment, the texts of the scriptures move from being literary narratives to being the typological interpretation of the events of salvation present in the life of the eucharistic community; they recount the transformation taking place within it, and the community assumes the story as their own. In this way, the narrative content of liturgy begins to work as an interpretive lens for our life, and it becomes what Polanyi describes as an interiorised faculty of tacit knowledge, much like the knowledge of a language or a tool, bestowing meaning on the world. Wright himself specifically says that the proclamation of the scriptures in liturgy is not primarily about teaching or "to impart information," but to "acclaim and celebrate God's mighty acts" (Wright 2017). He underscores the dynamic sacramental and prophetic role of the scriptures in worship, and laments that the whole narrative is seldom told, that many congregations are not even aware of the story of the kingdom. The story is "so explosive," he believes, that "the church in many generations has found it too much to take and so has watered it down, cut it up into little pieces, turned it into small-scale lessons rather than allowing its full impact to be felt" (Wright 2012, p. 276). Renewal of the liturgy as an event in which we can be shaped by the proclamation of the word and in which it becomes a tacit interpretive lens for our lives depends necessarily on the renewal of the lectionary, an initiative frequently raised as an issue needing urgent attention within Orthodox liturgical celebration. Wright makes a number of proposals that may be of use to Orthodox Christians, including reading longer sections to provide narrative context to lections, providing space within liturgy for continual reading (including of whole books, more often than just during Orthodox holy week), and interspersing reading with prayer, for instance praying "Our Father" after each chapter or section of a gospel (ibid. pp. 274–75). He also suggests that homilists take care to allow shorter readings within liturgy to become "windows on the larger narrative." In this way, he says, the scriptures may "provide fuel for the sacrificial flame which burns in our hearts, to bring us into the true Temple; to point ahead to God's new world and, by anticipating that new world in the present, actually to contribute by the Spirit to its effective realization" (Wright 2017).

#### **3. Conclusions**

The liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop once said that the point of Christian worship is "to say the truth about God." Both John Zizioulas and NT Wright have allocated a considerable amount of their writing to arguing that this truth about God, for many reasons, has not been fully told. Over many centuries, the core scriptural narrative of the kingdom of God has been obscured or altogether lost, and the central Christian hope for the new world in which heaven and earth are for ever united has been transformed into a neo-gnostic expectation of private spiritual escape.

The approach taken in this paper may be best conceived as a form of Venn diagram, exploring the issues of common concern between Zizioulas and Wright, intentionally seeking to read them both charitably and selectively in light of each other's work and to construct a dialogue between them, rather than subjecting them to a more thoroughgoing or harsher critical evaluation. As is the case for most prophetic voices, such critiques abound, and further comparative studies of our authors may well shed useful light on what their critics have written about them.

It is also worth remembering that, beyond this overlapping interest in the eclipse of the kingdom narrative, Zizioulas and Wright operate in very different theological spheres. As one of Orthodox Christianity's leading and most influential theologians, Zizioulas is known in the west primarily for his landmark work, *Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church*, as close to a work of philosophical or systematic theology as one can find in contemporary Orthodox theology, and one far less immediately grounded in either liturgical renewal or scriptural narrative, which is why it has not been focused on in this paper. A future paper could show, nevertheless, how this most well known of Zizioulas' works does still emerge from and reflect this core concern for the recovery of an underlying narrative of the age to come.

For his part, and though as a New Testament scholar he has naturally focused his attention on addressing the forgotten story of the kingdom within biblical studies, Wright is as explicitly committed as Zizioulas to a renewal of worship to express fully the story of the kingdom. They are, after all, both bishops as well as scholars. Both want a full recovery of the eschatological vision of the early church, and the restitution of a kingdom-oriented worship that conveys the world-upending message of the kingdom and shapes believers to participate now in the life of the age to come. Where Zizioulas tends towards a more systematic treatment of their shared concern and calls Orthodox Christians to recover the eschatological identity already embedded within the Divine Liturgy, Wright complements him with a profound treatment of the story of the kingdom as proclaimed through the life-giving words of the sacred scriptures. Wright's critical-realist epistemology completes the picture by pointing us towards the practical measures we can take to ensure that this story transforms us within the liturgy of the kingdom.

We inhabit a world of formative influences, in which a lifetime of individualistic consumerism, let alone a drift back into Platonic or gnostic variants of Christian faith, leaves its mark on our imagination and bends us away from God and his kingdom. The Christian answer to this challenge is simply to hear and live a *story*: "It is a love story—God's love story, operating through Jesus and then, by the Spirit, through Jesus's followers. This is the building of the church against which the powers of hell, and for that matter deconstruction, cannot prevail" (Wright 2012, p. 241). On the centrality and formative power of the narrative of God's kingdom, Wright and Zizioulas are firmly agreed, though in their prophetic articulation of this, each has faced some measure of controversy and opposition in their respective traditions, a fuller treatment of which lies outside the scope of this present paper. We may nevertheless hope that, by bringing these two scholars into constructive dialogue, their collective invitation to a full, participatory knowledge of this story of the kingdom of God may be heard by all Christians.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Smith, James K. A. 2013. *Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works*. Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing.


Wright, N. T. 2016. *The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion*. San Francisco: HarperOne.

Wright, N. T. 2017. Sign and Means of New Creation: Public Worship and the Creative Reading of Scripture. In *Symposium on Worship*. Grand Rapids: Calvin College, Available online: http://ntwrightpage.com/2017/01/30/sign-and-means-of-new-creationpublic-worship-and-the-creative-reading-of-scripture (accessed on 15 January 2021).

Zizioulas, John. 2008. *Lectures in Christian Dogmatics*. Edited by Douglas Knight. New York: T & T Clark.

Zizioulas, John. 2010. *The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today*. Edited by Gregory Edwards. Alhambra: Sebastian Press.

Zizioulas, John. 2011. *The Eucharistic Communion and the World*. New York: T & T Clark.

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