Narrative, epistemological crisis and reconstruction - my story with special reference to the work of Kwame Bediako

Abstract

Stories create meaning. When the stories we live by no longer make sense in the light of our experience then we undergo an epistemological crisis. This can lead to a mental breakdown if we do not find, or construct, another story or enlarge our existing story so that we can make sense of our lives in the light of our new experience. I underwent such an epistemological crisis when my existing Pentecostal story could not explain my new experience of how the oppressed people were experiencing life in South Africa. A brief time in the reconciliation ministry convinced me that the third way theology that was being done there did not work. Neither could I find satisfaction in liberation theology. Eventually I came across the theology of Kwame Bediako who introduced me to the notion of worldviews and their impact on how we construct the story of our lives. This has opened up for me new dimensions of theology and philosophy that are Afro-centric rather than Euro-centric, meaning that human beings are central but live in a vulnerable relationship with each other and with God in a spiritual universe. Enchantment We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn hate and love by narrative. 1 Stories are not simply about how things start and how they end. They are also about constructing meaning. This means that stories have to do with epistemology. If we are not able to tell the stories of our lives coherently, then we are having difficulty finding meaning in our lives which means we are probably undergoing a crisis on a very profound, epis-temological level. Alasdair MacIntyre uses two celebrated epistemological crises to try to underline the importance of what it means to be able to tell our stories or, to put it another way, to locate our stories within the wider context of a tradition or meta-narrative. One is the crisis of Hamlet and the other the crisis of Descartes. The phrases "to be or not to be, that is the question" and "I think therefore I am" are amongst the best known phrases in the English language. This is because they have become paradigmatic of an epistemological crisis. They were originally spoken by two people who had made the paralyzing discovery that they can no longer take for granted the reality that they have hitherto been used to, that they are susceptible to rival interpretations of reality, and that unless they are able to formulate and choose a set of schemata by which they can make their thinking and action intelligible, both to themselves and to others, then they are probably on the verge of a mental breakdown. To resolve such a crisis, according to MacIntyre, a recognition needs to 1 Hardy B 1975. Tellers and Listeners The Narrative Imagination, Athlone Press, p. 4.