MacIntyre and intelligent action (and reading too)

Chris Tilling, over at Chrisendom has recently commented on a brilliant piece of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. He relates this post to the John Piper-Tom Wright debate over justification. It is a great thought and the post can be found here.

Here is the quote in full:

"I am standing waiting for a bus and the young man standing next to me suddenly says: 'The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.' There is no problem as to the meaning of the sentence he uttered: the problem is, how to answer the question, what was he doing in uttering it? Suppose he just uttered such sentences at random intervals; this would be one possible form of madness. We would render his action of utterance intelligible if one of the following turned out to be true. He has mistaken me for someone who yesterday had approached him in the library and asked: 'Do you by any chance know the Latin name of the common wild duck?' Or he has just come from a session with his psychotherapist who has urged him to break down his shyness by talking to strangers. Or he is a Soviet spy waiting at a prearranged rendez-vous and uttering the ill-chosen code sentence which will identify him to his contact. In each case the act of utterance become intelligible by finding its place in a narrative." (p. 210) (italics mine)

What MacIntyre so beautifully articulates is the role of context in shaping the intelligibility of action. While I think there is some fruit to be found in deconstruction and the sort of postmodern linguistic turn, what it fails wholly to grasp is the embedded nature of language and action. We are not completely adrift in a sea of language, no matter how much it may appear the case. Neither are we completely adrift in embodied action. The great gift of MacIntyre (and the whole theological school of Hauerwas et al. that followed him) is the realization that narrative plays a vital role in discourse.

Much of our misunderstanding, therefore, (and thanks to Tilling in naming this to be the case with Wright and Piper) is not over words themselves, but over the narrative context within which those words are given meaning. After all, we can read it as plain as can be "the righteousness of God". But as soon as we ponder what these words might mean within the context of Paul's letter to the Romans, or that of First Century Judaism and Christianity, we are onto a whole different topic. The same emerges in our readings of Genesis and Revelation. What are we to make of such potent imagery? Can we read these as simply as we can pick up a newspaper or must we immerse ourselves in another world of thought and metaphor to make sense of things?

I think this is why Wright is such essential reading, for he navigates these challenges as deftly as anyone. (If you haven't yet, stop now and go read his New Testament and the People of God parts one and two!) The task of faithful exegesis must begin from this point - the thought world of the Biblical writers and original readers - and ask these sorts of questions or else it does become adrift. It must be willing to listen and to wait and to press further into a narrative that is not, in the first instance, simply our own. Only from this point can we begin to grasp 'the way' and follow it.