“The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith and with thanksgiving.”
When it is my turn, I join the line shuffling forward to receive. Lines of late afternoon light peel over us as we make our way to the altar, hands cupped, both anticipating and remembering.
I smile, because we are making theatre.
Earth began in the theatre. Ancient Near Eastern peoples gathered to recollect the liturgical drama of an endless, creative God spilling forth speech that became planets, lightning, and rib cages. In the darkness of primeval matter, God performed creation and we have remembered it in oral traditions that became written traditions that are now performed once again. Words sustaining communities, spoken over and over and over firelight, eventually meeting paper, finally being cut into chapters and verses.
The oral traditions of the Israelites are not unique either in practice or content, but as Garrett Green aptly writes,
“the important point to be emphasized, to theologians especially, is that this [biblical] story, however enigmatic, is the true story, the only story Christians have to tell, and that it has no unstoried form… the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.”1
The fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.
It is tempting as a Christian to cling to a sense of exceptionalism about the Bible, and then to experience disillusionment when learning that other ancient cultures also collected stories and rehearsed them together. However, even this realization offers a revelation of God’s character, and mirroring it, the imago Dei. Sure, oral traditions weren’t invented by Moses or Miriam, but then why do we tell stories when we worship? If 43% of Scripture is narrative and another 33% poetry, what does that tell us about our God? Then we look at the content of our stories and notice: our God creates from speech where other gods create from violence. Our God is a storyteller.
In any version of “Christian art”, they will tell you that the imago Dei appears as a creative instinct, a little bit of an ability to create ex nihilo. “God gave us some leftover clay,” they will tell you. “It is good that we are composing music, it is good that we are painting things we have never seen before.” Perhaps this is true, but I think something else is more intrinsic to the human experience lived in light of God. In my view, the human impulse to create is also an impulse to recreate, to rehearse the stories that made us and ultimately to rehearse the story of God.
And thank goodness for stories, because they are often the only way to speak truthfully about God. In the quote I just shared, Garrett Green admits that the biblical story is enigmatic. How relieving, to admit that God is mysterious and God’s storytelling is likewise weird. Emily Dickinson cautions us to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”2 and this is why art and narrative are so viscerally accurate at capturing the divine: they do so in periphery. If God creates in stories, we worship by telling stories back. We brush up against God in parables, cantatas, and stained glass. Somehow it is clearer and brighter to explain Aslan than to type up a satisfactory account of the Incarnation. We spill ink (and blood)3 trying, but in the end the stories do it best. We return to the table and act it out to understand.
“How did the God-man happen? Let’s see it again.”
Similarly—or perhaps just as another name for ancient religion—theatre began as a form of spiritual ritualism, of recreating stories of the gods for worship and for communal unification. The earliest dithyrambs of the Greek stages were poetic reenactments of their gods’ stories performed for the entire community not as mere entertainment but as a religious celebration. Theatre, in as formal or as informal a definition as you’ll allow, continues to express the instinct to recreate. It is not an obsolete practice restricted to antiquity. It is how we worship, by performing.
Performing here does not suggest falsehood or inauthenticity, but submission to a larger narrative. When a priest stands in persona Christi, we don’t resent them their robes or gestures, we recognize them as elements of the story we’re telling together. Even the most ascetic traditions succumb to the dramatic impulse; someone stands up in intentionally chosen clothing and tells us how God came to earth. But the liturgical traditions perhaps reveal this theatrical bent of the imago Dei the clearest, especially in the sacraments. The Eucharist mirrors this form of old theatre, using sacred texts and a repeated physical act to contemplate a divine reality, in this case, the Last Supper. It is especially relevant to ancient theatre because it is rooted in the cosmogonic Christian narrative of Christ’s Passion, echoing ancient theatre’s instinct to express divine origins.
We stand to hear the word of God read, we kneel to pray, we listen to the preacher, we cup our hands around Christ’s body. “Our God is a storyteller,” our services say. “Our God makes theatre and so do we.” We recreate, repeat, remember.
G.K. Chesterton wrote about the impulse to recreate, saying,
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon.”4
We have been performing and retelling the story of God in a hundred different ways since God first spoke. Theatre—as subtle as liturgy or as bold as a Corpus Christi play—helps us legitimize this divine-human impulse: to tell it again, to revel in repetition.
The eyes of the priest crinkle as we marvel together at the bread of Heaven and the cup of salvation. I savor the acrid wine-soaked styrofoam dissolving on my tongue while I act out my role in the salvific narrative. We’ll do it again next week. Like children, we’ll flip back to the first page of the picture book and say, “In the beginning…” Like Ancient Near Eastern people, we’ll gather to hear it performed again.
Cover Image: The Great Pyramid by Adrien Dauzats, 1830
Garrett Green, "‘The Bible As . . .’: Fictional Narrative and Scriptural Truth.” Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation.
Emily Dickinson, Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263).
Re: Most of Church History.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
"I smile, because we are making theatre." This sentence made me smile.