Telling stories

Flashforward is back on Monday evenings, and just as confusing as ever. What was interesting last night was how the episode worked. In terms of new events, happening in the "now" of the story my guess is there was probably about 20-30 mins of action. Take out the inevitable adverts and the full 5 minutes recap of previous epoisodes and the rest of the episode was flashbacks to events in the past which have a bearing on current plotlines; or even, flashbacks to people's memories of their visions of the future, which is a fairly mind-boggling concept.

What the whole concept does, and is underlined by the structure of last night's episode is to heighten suspense by altering the normal straightforward chronological sequence of stories. Of course, this isn't terribly new; lots of stories do that in many different ways, and have done for years. And in doing so, they highlight that the present moment, the now, does not exist in isolation from either the past that has led to it, or the future that will follow, however unknown that is to us.

In one sense, Christians should get this more than anyone. The events we remember this week in particular, of Jesus' death and resurrection, are events in the dim and distant past. Yet our claim is that they shape us now in a more significant way than anything in our personal history, at least in theory. And they point to a future that shapes us too in the now, even though we don't know all the details. As one of the characters in a previous episode of Flashforward put it, "I've seen the future and it's changed my life". I guess we should add our "Amen".

Ideas have legs?

Strangely enough this week I've seen two "peak viewing" type thriller programmes (Flashforward and Paradox) that have featured discussions about the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. I don't understand much about physics, but I guess the people who came up with this theory didn't do it mainly to provide plot material for sci-fi writers.

Having said that, it seems such a weird theory to me that only a story can make sense of it, even if the nuances get lost in the process. So what? Well, it seems to me that a lot of academic theology is about as far removed from the lives of most Christians as quantum mechanics is from most TV viewers. Most people simply don't get that excited about the Cappadocian Trinity, the new perspective on Paul, or the finer points of the doctrine of justification. That doesn't mean to say that it doesn't have value, of course. But it does mean that we need, among other things, to tell stories to make the relevance of theology clear; and that the risk for those who do the academic stuff is not knowing quite what it will look like when translated into ordinary life.

Perhaps even more pointedly, we need to realise that even a lot of our basic beliefs as Christians seem as far removed from your average unbeliever as the finer points of quantum mechanics too.