Kingdom Ready Blog

I’ve been struggling a bit to figure out exactly how to express this idea about Story. I use a capital ‘S’ to denote the concept of Story, not a particular story or stories. Interrelated to this idea of Story is Symbol. Symbols are attached with a huge meaning, a story. For example
This piece of art has become a symbol of an entire time period, artistic and cultural shift in the modern western world. If an image is worth a thousand words, a symbol’s worth cannot be counted in words. Another example is the Crucifix. It stands for Jesus’ death, passion, atoning work, and suffering, in addition to his resurrection, ascenscion, an identity for all Christian peoples of all time and worldwide. I could clearly go on. The Crucifx embodies a very specific and solid story, whereas Warhol’s Campbells soup cans is a little more fluid, but still evokes a meaning, especially to those in the art or cultural studies. So why is story important? Because story is a fundamental building block to how we ‘know’ things.

This “theory of knowing” is called epistemology. We’ve interacted with it here on the blog before when talking about the New Atheist movement. Since we live in a largely scientific culture, the preference for “proof of knowing” is empirical. And for a good many things that is entirely appropriate. However, when dealing with people, it largely falls short of being useful. A simple example that is usually trotted out: How do you know your wife loves you? You can’t empirically prove that. Just because she helps out and seems to care for you doesn’t mean there isn’t an ulterior motive (not to get sidetracked). There seems to be a good deal of evidence for our fundamental “knowing” to be related to Story. After all, information has been handed down orally in the form of Story for thousands of years before it was ever even written down, let alone bound in a book, classified into genres, had a table of contents, indexed, a bibliographical outline, or now, searchable. Our language is built to tell stories, because we were making stories and relating in stories before we had our languages.

NT Wright in The New Testament and the People of God offers an amazing defense of these ideas (roughly 150 pages on Story and epistemology), and I think it is useful that we understand them, not only for our reading of Scripture, but even for living. As you’re about to see, you already do this to a degree, and you might not even know it. Wright begins to tell a story about hearing a loud noise while driving his car. The loud noise could legitimately come from several things. It could be a blown out tire, a gun shot, or an explosion. Sure, we could empirically analyze the sound waves as they pass and test that against known noises in these categories – but how long would that actually take? Do we really do that in our lives? No, we have a story, and we stick to it. If the cars handling starts to go – you’re going to think you have a flat. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see the tires, you are responding to a story. Chances are you have a flat, not that someone shot a gun, and your car, for some other unknown reason lost its ability to stay on the road at the same time. Yet, sometimes when we read the Scriptures we act just like that. But, if you were driving through a nice neighborhood, you wouldn’t think it was a gunshot. Even though there is still a likely chance that many people in that neighborhood might own a gun, for sport, or protection. You’re reacting to a story that you believe. It couldn’t possibly be a gunshot, that house I just drove past is worth half a million dollars. But, if your car is fine, and you see a fire truck come blaring down the street – what is the story you are going to tell yourself about the loud noise? Maybe a gas or oil tank exploded nearby. We’re just putting together our experiences with the data we already believe. And yes, believe, not know. Even those who claim to be the ultimate cynics and not believe anything. They are acting on their beliefs, not what they might or might not know. They are reacting to a story that they inherently believe and tell themselves. The new experience (data) might uphold or contradict the Story that they tell themselves.

But we all do this with Story. There are certain events in our lives that create a story for us. And those stories are incredibly powerful – so much so they modify our behavior and decision making years and decades after they happen to us. Imagine a woman who is raped while she is young. That is a powerful and traumatic action that can create a very negative Story around the woman. She can ultimately have strange and erratic behavior that her friends or family cannot understand. All because the rape creates a new Story that re-evaluates her self-worth and sexuality. When I was a child, my father told me a story about his days as a young adult doing drugs. This created a powerful story to me, and he didn’t have to go into great details. I saw the powerful man my father was reacting in ways I’d never seen, or imagined he could, remembering and telling me these stories. I knew, based on what it did to him, that drugs was something I was not interested in. He created a Story around drugs based on his experience that profoundly affected me. I’ve never tried drugs in my entire life. Not because I’m a policeman about it, or not had the opportunity. I was genuinely never interested in it because of Story.
Think about the hardest things you have ever done in your life. Did it create a new meaning, change you down to the core? Where you learned something surprisingly new about yourself or the world that made you a different person? These are the moments that create Story for you. And it is also why they say doing hard things, or hard work, creates character. Character, in the folklore, is just having a robust story in which to understand the world. And, in a way, “religion”, is just that: a Story in which to understand the world. Though “religion” in this case cannot be nicely dissected and separated from every other aspect of our lives, that is only a modern fiction. Science, politics, and religion/philosophy all form a composite picture in which to understand the world. Some try to squeeze others out of the picture completely, but it rarely works in situations with a robust meaning in each position.

Again, why is this idea of Story important? Because the Gospel is a Story. But that is for part two.