Story

Persons are fundamentally known through stories. Stories themselves bring into our minds persons which do not actually exist. In a sense we feel that through a story we even know these fictional characters. Huck and Jim are not actual people, but in their story we get a sense of what human friendship is. 

Without the story we could not know Huck and Jim. But it goes further than that. We do not just know fictional characters through narratives. We know ourselves this way, and this is how we know those closest to us. We actually say that we know them because we know and even play a role in their stories, which are weaved back into our story, and also into the larger narrative of human experience. We would never read an online bio of someone, a facebook profile or myspace page and then claim to know the person, that's absurd. But once we have met a person and talked with them, and had a chance to hear their story, then we might start to say we know them on some level.

So stories in their varied forms are the bedrock of human knowing. We hear, and are taken back to places where someone else has been, and we begin to know. This particular type of knowledge is no less powerful than knowledge widely regarded as science. When the science doesn't fit our story, well... we find reasons to discredit that science so we might keep the story as normative. The science really isn't as foundational as we think. Rather, the chosen narratives is how we orient and organize the science. Fundamentalism isn't just rejecting the science, its also rejecting the perceived narrative which is being pushed.

Which brings me to the story which is normative for all Christians --- the Gospel. In the first few weeks of seminary I was assigned a reading by Tom Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham, and world famous Christian scholar. In his chapter titled "Knowledge: Problems and Varieties" in his volume The New Testament and the People of God, Wright suggests that stories are what form the epistemological foundation for all other knowledge. This can be seen in multiple ways as we take in the world. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a number of stories told. There is the Enlightenment narrative of progress and progressive improvement of humanity. This narrative is picked up and retold several ways. President George W. Bush tells the narrative of democracy and freedom. Everything he writes and says centers around his narrative. Hugo Chavez contrasts Bush's story with his chosen narrative of communism and revolution. The real disagreement is not on facts but on what narrative to believe in and enact. To one America and much of the West is a benevolent empire of justice and peace, and to the other its an empire of war and oppression. You can argue for either, but which way you argue is not so much telling of your handle of the facts, but of what narrative has shaped your worldview.

Creation. Fall. Redemption. Restoration. These are the acts of our story. What has struck me so much in pondering this idea of story is that a story, made up of many stories, is actually what God has given us in much of the Bible. Its not a philosophical treatise. It has law, but even that can only be understood in light of the narrative of God's people, in light of slavery, oppression, exodus, and new hope. The law really isn't the point. The story of what God did, and continues to do is. Unfortunately, stories are often treated like clumsy tools for conveying the real knowledge of principles or truth. This obscures how God has actually chosen to communicate with his people. The story of the Gospel is the point. Bending the story to point toward some other principle we see in the text, is nothing less than a misuse of the narrative.

God is personal. God is a person. His free disclosure of himself through the story of the Bible is consistent with how we come to know each other. We don't know people by studying definitions or an anatomy book. We know people through the particulars of each persons life story. In the story of Scripture we must never let the knowledge about God or definitions about God ever overshadow the narrative of his acts in history. Its more important to know what God has done about sin and evil, than to merely know that God is all powerful and can do anything he freely choses. We know him through the story.