The information age has, in many ways, brought about a deep slumber. With eyes transfixed on devices and ears filled with endless streams of content, many are effectively sleepwalking and can no longer hear the world around them.
Martin Shaw, a well known writer, storyteller, and mythologist, sees stories as the antidote to this digital drowsiness:
The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.
We need stories to open our eyes. However, our storytelling abilities are weighed down by a technological sleep paralysis. Our myth making muscles have atrophied under the burden of modern life. We have lost the capacity to tell the stories we need to wake up.
In his 2024 book, The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han argues that we are living in a post-narrative world. We no longer know how to do storytelling apart from storyselling––monetization has replaced meaning as the goal of stories.
But the true purpose of storytelling, Han argues, is not to sell products, but to provide an anchor of meaning and identity across time. Throughout his book, Han contrasts narration with mere information. True, meaningful narrative has breadth. It inhabits history; it has temporal distance—with hands in both the past and future. It transcends our momentary blip in time and includes a far off “long ago” and a distant “ever after.”
The modern information age, however, is characterized by what Han calls the “progressive demolition of farness”––mere information has no ties to history, no connection to the future. There is nothing far about information; it is immediately available. Therefore, we have a crippling lack of vision, of longing, because these are inherently anchored in farness.
Han attributes much of this demolition to digitalization. For him, digitalization rips reality from narrative and divides it among information:
Digitalization intensifies the atrophy of time. Reality disintegrates into information that is relevant only briefly. Information lives on the allure of surprise. It thus fragments time. Our attention also becomes fragmented. Information does not permit any lingering. In the accelerated exchange of information, bits of information quickly replace each other.
Narrative is condensed time––a recounting of an entire, cumulative history of meaning. Information, on the other hand, is cut up time––additive bytes that amass but never cohere into a meaningful story.
Han explains the difference and its outcome:
Today, we primarily perceive the world with a view to getting information. Information has neither distance nor expanse. It cannot hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine…. Information therefore… disenchants the world.
Disenchantment for Han is the evaporation of magic from much of life. The world no longer looks at us or speaks to us with its dazzling roughness. The world, Han says, is no longer a vocal ‘Thou’ but a mute ‘It’. (It’s worth noting that another sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, identifies such muteness of the world as the root cause of anxiety, depression, and burnout.)
Such muteness is, in many ways, a result of our having merged with our technology to the point of being identifiable as, what Han calls, Phono Sapiens. Nearly every part of life is mediated through a screen. Most of the ways we engage on these screens only exacerbate our fleeting dream state. The predominant examples are Snapchat snaps and Instagram stories. Han notes how these have no narrative duration. These digital “stories” evoke a sense of fleetingness that creates a compulsion to communicate more, while never condensing into a narrative of meaning. We are compulsively enticed to engage in immediacy; our capacity for longing has been short-circuited by stimuli.
Everything is immediately available. However, this increase in availability of information and people (via text, shared location, etc.) has led to a decrease in physical connection. It is interesting that Han connects the loss of narrative with what he calls the “retreat of touch”. He even goes so far as to argue that this loss of physical touch is a driving factor in our ailing mental health. Without touch, he says, we remain entrapped in ourselves; proper touch pulls us out.
Poverty in touch ultimately means poverty in world.
We need narratives to wake us up, to provide meaning, and pull us back into embodied relationships lest we lose touch with ourselves—and with others—in the “thick forest of information” and self.
For such narratives we are not without options. In fact, many young people are waking to their need for story, and are finding it in various spiritual narratives. However, the Christian story has unique narrative power to draw us out of the tsunami of slumber.
At the center of the Christian narrative is the idea of covenant. Covenant is a concept that requires history. It is not merely words spoken in a solitary moment with no bearing on time; rather, covenant binds parties temporally. Covenant is a promise with hands that grip both past and future. This is true of any contract. Think of marriages or mortgages––there are clear temporal bounds with each: thirty years or “til death do us part.” In other words, covenant, like narrative, has distance.
Thus, for people awash in the deluge of watery bits of information, covenant is an anchor. And it is this anchor of covenant that provides the framework for inspired Scripture. As God-breathed communication, Scripture is not information to be studied––it is the self-revelation of the covenant God. Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer shares Han’s language when he says we cannot engage with Scripture in an “I-It” relation; it is an “I-Thou” affair.
Scripture, as a means for us to encounter the living, covenant God, gives us two key terms repeated throughout for how we are to relate to his covenant: remember and keep. Both these terms are anchored in time––remembrance being our connection to the past, and keeping being our active connection into the future. We are to both remember and keep God’s covenant, emboldened with the knowledge that He both remembers and keeps it himself.
Early in the story of God’s covenant, when the world had become mute to Israel under the weight of slavery in Egypt, they cried out to God. We’re told God heard their cry and remembered his covenant. His very next action in keeping his covenant was to send Moses––a redeemer––who would lead his people out of slavery. God remembers his covenant and keeps it by giving a redeemer.
This pattern of God remembering and keeping covenant with his Redeemer is fulfilled in the New Testament. The Hebrew arrangement of the Old Testament ends in 2 Chronicles with the words, “Let him go up”––an invitation to the covenant people of God to worship the LORD in the restored temple. The implied cry then is: who will go up?
The New Testament then opens, each gospel account providing an answer to this question in their own way. The gospel of John does so with an intensely unique picture of God’s Redeemer––both the answer to an enslaved peoples’ cry and the invitation of 2 Chronicles. Not only is he the Redeemer greater than Moses (v. 17), he is the eternal Word––the Narrative whose voice answers the muteness of the world.
While many major religions espouse the distance––the transcendence––of God, only the Christian narrative is the good news that Distance came near. When Jesus took on flesh and dwelt among us, he did so as condensed divinity––in him the fullness of God, with all the farness and expanse of glory, was pleased to dwell. In Jesus Christ is the God who gives the dazzling sunshine and rough winds their voice.
And it is this Jesus, fully God and fully man, distance and availability, who not only taught––transmitting information––but touched. His healing touch was the physical manifestation of what John says he came to accomplish spiritually: In him was life, and the life was the light of men. He came to shine the light of the glory of God into the hearts of men and give eternal life. Such life heals hearts, turning men into lights.
Jacques Ellul, who was prophetically concerned about our technological demolition, noted that it is this light of men that actually situates us within the Christian narrative:
In another sense, this light of the world is what gives meaning to the world’s history, what orients and explains it. As a mere sequence of events, the course of history reveals no logic or certainty. The logic emerges through the church’s presence, as odd as this may seem. This is why Christians, by being light, are a factor in the world’s life. In addition to their work of preserving the world, Christians are instruments of revelation and bear witness to salvation.
Not only are we invited into the life, death, and resurrection of Narrative himself, but through his life in us, we are made to shine in the world as living stories. His life in us is not only our salvation, but also our participation.
In him, we wake up to the world.