Towards Understanding of the Practice of Proclamation: The Core Element of Russian Baptist Worship, Timofey Cheprasov, 2015

the person’s behaviour.” If you are given a chance to look into the life of a person, from a madman he may turn into a librarian who confused you with someone else, or a spy, pronouncing a password, etc.*® This example points to the importance of narrative that fills actions with meaning. ‘[If] human actions are intelligible only with respect to stories that contextualize intentions, then that which unifies actions into sequences and sequences into a continuous whole is the story of one’s life. My life as a whole makes sense when my story is told.’*? MacIntyre argues | can only answer the question ‘What am | to do? if | can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do | find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters — roles into which we have been drafted — and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them © Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ill., University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) p 93. 37 Macintyre argues that identification of a speech-act is not enough as 'speech acts and purposes too can be intelligible or unintelligible.’ (After Virtue, p 210). 38 Macintyre, After Virtue, p 210. 3° Kallenberg, “The Master Argument of Macintyre’s After Virtue,” p 23. 173 are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories... that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. *° For Christians, this story is the story they read and understand from the Bible,*” - ‘the individual's life story gets its telos from the role she or he plays in the church [the story of the church] and in God’s greater purposes [God’s story]. Such understanding of narrative helps to introduce a concept of tradition. Macintyre views tradition as ‘an historically extended socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute the tradition’.”* Kallenberg identifies three components of the tradition. Firstly, tradition has history, or story. Every community ‘has its continuity,’ despite the fact that it always loses and receives new members. Therefore, every new member enters an ongoing history, becoming part of it. Secondly, tradition requires community as it ‘has its inception in the formation of the community that is defined by those who have pledged corporate 744 allegiance to the tradition’s authoritative voice or text.’””” As this authoritative text is “° Macintyre, After Virtue, p 216. “* Cf. ‘The church says to us, ‘We’re not giving you a story that you can choose. You don’t get to make God; God gets to make you. You are made