There is a mistaken idea in our world that all that matters are the facts. We have a tendency to distill information down to bullet points and headlines and end up ripping away (or ignoring) context and nuance to fit into our 160 character reality. We are running short on attention to give these days so we just want the numbers, the data, the cold hard facts.
In a world which allows each person to ratify their own “facts”, can you see the problem with which that presents us?
As an adult in a fast-paced world, have you lost your love and respect for the whole story? Does it feel like a waste of time to pick up a novel and read? Maybe you’re thinking, “Shouldn’t I spend my precious little down time reading the Bible, or sermons, or the work of great theologians?”
I implore you, do not think so little of the humble story. Our Lord doesn’t, so neither should you.
God hard-wired us to understand our world through narratives. If we distill the idea of “narrative” down to its most basic form, you could say that it is a string of one or more related events. The very synapses in our brains help us to remember things by firing in connected patterns. We don’t think in unrelated snippets of information and data. As we think and process our world through these connected neural processes, we give the “data” meaning. This is why it is easier to remember a sentence than a set of unrelated words.
And going even further back, our sovereign God, who exists outside of time, created a universe that is bound by time necessitating that it unfold in a series of related events cascading toward the end that He predetermined for it. We won’t spend much time here, our mortal brains can’t fully comprehend the ways of the author of the universe, but the point is that narrative is woven into the very fabric of our Lord’s creation.
Not only did He create us and the world in which we live in terms of stories, He chose to use narrative as the primary means through which we learn about Him, His character and His plan for creation. The Bible is not merely a collection of stories but rather it is purposely and emphatically one narrative made up of many that our Lord ordained to reveal to us the keys to our eternal salvation.
Notice the word “purposely” there. If we believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, inspired word of God, then we must believe that everything in it and everything about it is purposeful. It is not by accident that God’s word, which reveals all we need to know concerning life and godliness, is delivered through rich narratives and teachings rather than simple bulleted lists. God orchestrated not only the form of this epic, persuasive story, but the whole preceding history of narratives it records that played out in real life.
The climax of the story is Jesus. All of the Old Testament points to Him as the coming savior. It is here we see that God chose to give us our means of salvation through a story. The gospel itself is a narrative! It is not a set of unrelated facts or a checklist or parameters for what makes you fit to reside in heaven when you die. When we give someone the gospel, we tell the story of Jesus’ life and ask them to believe that it’s true! That He was sent to earth, lived a perfect life, died a death He did not deserve, took the wrath of the Father due us for our sins onto Himself, and defeated death by rising from the grave on the third day. We tell them the story of Jesus!
If our great God ordained our world, our bodies, and our very means of salvation to be understood through stories, then who are we to abandon them as frivolity?
As our Lord has told His story in narrative form, so we must work to master our understanding of that form. Becoming familiar with the DNA of stories, widening our vocabulary, identifying literary devices, and regularly immersing ourselves in stories helps us to work out the muscles we use to understand the greatest story of all.
So while reading sermons and treatises on theology are good and right it may be just as good to pick up a great novel or memoir. Whether fiction or nonfiction, written or spoken, there is much we can glean from stories.
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
– GK Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles
Here is a great article that further defends the study of literature from a biblical perspective.
