Storytelling
And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”Matthew 13:10 NASB
Parables– Let’s consider the biblical approach of communication. Why doesn’t the Bible just give us a list of rules or a well-organized theology? Why does it sort of ramble around, throwing in parts of different genres of literature rather randomly? Why do most of the important theological passages actually come from stories or letters? Lionel Trilling provides some insight. The Bible is really a narrative, a story. It isn’t a textbook or a creed. And narratives have particularly interesting methods:
“A chief part of the inauthenticity of narration would seem to be its assumption that life is susceptible of comprehension and thus of management. It is the nature of narration to explain: it cannot help telling how things are and even why they are that way.”[1]
The Bible keeps insisting on telling us how things are and why they are that way. It does this from the very beginning:
“‘In the beginning . . .’ But a beginning implies an end, with something in the middle to connect them. The beginning is not merely the first of a series of events; it is the event that originates those that follow. And the end is not merely the ultimate event, the cessation of happening; it is a significance or at least the promise, dark or bright, of a significance. The tale is not told by an idiot but by a rational consciousness which perceives in things the processes that are their reason and which derives from this perception a principle of conduct, a way of living among things.”[2]
This means that the Bible, as a whole, is a story, a narrative with beginning, middle and end. This means that one cannot start the story in John or Matthew. The “novel” of God’s interactions with men doesn’t start with the birth of the Messiah. Oh, and it doesn’t end at the book of Revelation. This also means that the Bible is far less subject to prying apart and proof texting in order to create neat little categories for theology. Every time we provide a proof text without context, we disrupt the story. This is why the story of Abraham isn’t over until we get to Joseph, and Joseph’s story isn’t over until we get to our own confrontation with survival trauma.
But it’s hard to read the Bible like this. It means reading all of it rather than just those favorite or useful parts. It means withholding conclusions about the topics until we see where the total train of thought takes us. It means trying to ask, “Why did this author write the story in this way?”
It also means that modern society, bent as it is on contemporary experience, has enormous resistance to the past as a way of understanding life today.
“. . the great narrative historians in some considerable degree maintained the weightiness of things by thickening the past, making it exigent, imperative, a sanction of authority, an assurance of destiny. The tale they told interpreted the sound and fury of events, made them signify something, a direction taken, an end in view . . . there was a required and right course for them to follow.”[3]
“But now the narrative past, like the divine Beginning for whom it was for a time the surrogate, has lost its authenticating power. Far from being an authenticating agent, indeed, it has become the very type of inauthenticity. Here and now may be unpleasant, but at least they are authentic in being really here and now, and not susceptible to explanation by some shadowy there and then. The disfavor into which narrative history has fallen with historians is reflected in its virtual extirpation from the curriculum of our schools and its demotion in the curriculum of our colleges.”[4]
The Bible did not fall out of favor as a storytelling explanation of life because it demanded ethical discipline. It fell out of favor because modern culture no longer believes the past has anything to say. And it’s not just the Bible that has fallen victim to this form of historical insanity. We who still think that the Bible is a crucial story about human living are in the minority simply because the culture of the West no longer embraces the past. What matters is the next iteration of iPhone, the next diet, the next market up-tick. What happened yesterday belongs in the trash. Click “empty trash” and continue on.
Topical Index: story, Bible, past, parables, Matthew 13:10
Sadly it not only the Bible that “fell out of favor because modern culture no longer believes the past has anything to say,” but people with a long past have fallen out too, or rather, pitched. The older I get (67) the less I have to share with the younger generation. It is not that I suffer from dementia and recall less, quite the contrary, but what I know is no longer relevant. The past is darkest to those who think their future shines brightest. Whatever life lessons I’ve learned and want to pass on to the next generation are suddenly no longer valid. My blood and tears are no longer currency in the realm of the new. It’s New Math for philosophy. Perhaps this is why Apocalyptic Eschatology is so popular with many Evangelical Christians. Come quickly Lord Jesus before I am rendered obsolete and swept into the dust bin of history …oh, wait, I mean click-empty trash-Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Poetry in prose. Thanks Michael. I really enjoyed this.
Ditto
Agree, one of the first phrases that I repeated was… Renewed Covenant same Covenant to a new generation of people. And it is passed on to us today. Like a relay race. We can all relate to each other and should pass it on like the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob. Being the . God of family relationships
I think there are reasons why today people think the past specifically regard religious portrayals is worth laying aside, maybe its because of the way it has been taught and the way it has been rightly viewed in certain respects, empire building by population control, wars and murder, conform convert or die…. turn or burn…Jesus or Hell…Catholics, Protestants, Islam, Crusades, Reformers,. I was reading how many native Americans died bringing religious thought to New America…….. What has happened to me having gone beyond the religious narative presented to me and trying to reconcile some of the history that
I discovered apparrently in the pursuit of ushering in the kingdom of Jesus waa horrific, the presented theology didnt seem to match the heart of the matter OR the displayed behaviour and methods…… one answer given to me to defend certain attrocties by certain reformers was they were allowed to execute or kill ( murder) under the law……. in the pursuit of the kingdom.. What has changed, well, just as Mr Moen says he is doing one hebrew word one hebrew thought at a time, revising things to help set the record straight…. The way biblical history and its narrative has changed almost completely since i continued the search for greater understanding outside of my religious paradigm ….. tte truth is the past has a totally different truth to the one portrayed. The one i am now seeking to learn about has and continues to transform my life and my environment for the better maybe the spilt haemorrhaged blood of the ages and in my life will come to mean sometning ……to revise history to change the direction of a life and set the record straight is a battle worth fighting.. we need to continue to present a
‘Renewed’ covenant. and learn the appropriate lessons from history putting it in its appropiate context and stop putting lipstick on a pig ( hope thats not offensive) encouraging people not to through the baby out with the bath water. I now find the past completely absorbing so…… it can work.
Wow…this helped organize quite a bit of my otherwise random synaptic firing… thanks!
Skip, in your narrative (sorry, couldn’t resist) did you just explain why it is said that the Jews ‘invented history’? Was it because they were the only ones who “believed the past had anything to say”? Does this mean that we are doomed to repeat the past not only because we forget history, but also because of WHY we forget it?
Do we resist wanting to believe we are part of a story because that would imply a Storyteller? I think it could also imply that we are embedded not only in that past, but in the continuum of the future, too, which brings up culpability: responsibility. Perhaps even more frightening, we would have to face the fact that the choices of the past shaped us: made us ‘ourselves’; which would completely negate the central tenet of the religion of the ‘self-made’ man! Can’t have that!
Ugh; that also brings up the biology of the past, too, for it would mean that we are shaped not only by the external environment that that past chose for us, but also our very bodies, mindsets and ability potential were shaped by the choices of others, as we would be shaping the same for our posterity and their environment. Nope: too much power of the past over us, and too much power (responsibility) of us over the future! Better to just deny the past and tell the future it has to ‘make’ (“evolve”) itself!
Laurita, TW and the responses/discussions of “the group” have me stroking my beard and musing (yet again)… hmmm… Thanks!
Man can’t handle the truth,
no matter how you tell it or in
what tense it’s told.
Rich, so true. Pointed instances in the life of Messiah: when He announced that we must be included in His flesh and blood, and include the same in ours, all but the twelve left Him. Again, when He wrote (probably the specific sins) of Mary’s accusers in the dust, all left BUT HER. (Interesting that she was the only one in a position to not run from the truth.)
The crowd goes silent and disappears when the Truth shows up, and I think it is not only because we don’t want to hear it, but because we already know it, but are looking for fiction to hide ourselves behind. One thing is for sure: all the best things in life are free: air, love, rain, sun, all the interest of heaven; even life itself. Why would the truth be an exception? Why is it free? I think it is because nobody is interested in paying a plug nickel for it!
“Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.
Proverbs 23:23
Apparently spiritual things are not subject to Adam Smith’s 3rd Law of Supply and Demand. If it had, truth would be priced out of the marketplace because so few seek it. But Isaiah bid the exact price on Kingdom version of the “The Price is Right”: “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”(55:1) I’m sure would have won the Showcase round too. “COME ON DOWN. YOU Are the Next Contestant on The Price is Right.”
……”The tale they told interpreted the sound and fury of events, made them signify something, a direction taken, an end in view . . . there was a required and right course for them to follow.”
I am currently reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin which is an American all-time best seller published in 1852, (but not part of Canadian culture although maybe it should be). Young master George saying goodbye to Uncle Tom, “I’ll never do either, (buy or sell slaves), when I’m a man. I’m ashamed, this day, that I’m a Kentuckian. I always was proud of it before.” To which Uncle Tom replies, “God almighty bless you. Kentucky hasn’t got many like you.”
This reminds me of an episode in Truman’s days as President when a Republican bill was presented to him that many Democrats wanted him to veto and he replied, “the right thing to do is always the right thing to do”, and he passed it.
These words should resonate more with politicians today.
One can’t appreciate history until one has a history. 😉 But seriously, the history classes I took in high school and college were all about memorizing facts. Boring and irrelevant. Maybe if they had taught history as a story and not a collection of facts like dates and names of wars. The Bible is a story not a theology book, but there is theology in it.
Marsha, you connected some more dots for me. Thank you!
I think stories are about life. All of theology is contained in life: any life: even the most humble. Within life, in fact, is the only place true theology can ever be found, for, if you think about it, it can exist nowhere else. Perhaps theology itself is the story of the Lifegiver in life?
You gave me enough Mentene to chew on all day! Now I can go to work. Thank you again, Marsha!
Marsha, One of my favorite authors, perhaps 2nd only to Skip, is Frederick Beuchner (pronouned Beeker). I subscribe to his “Daily Word” too and this portion from one of his many books “Listening to Your Life” came in just yesterday and is relevant to your point.
“What I began to see was that the Bible is not essentially, as I had always more or less supposed, a book of ethical principles, of moral exhortations, of cautionary tales about exemplary people, of uplifting thoughts—in fact, not really a religious book at all in the sense that most of the books you would be apt to find in a minister’s study or reviewed in a special religion issue of the New York Times book section are religious. I saw it instead as a great, tattered compendium of writings, the underlying and unifying purpose of all of which is to show how God works through the Jacobs and Jabboks of history to make himself known to the world and to draw the world back to himself.
For all its vast diversity and unevenness, it is a book with a plot and a plot that can be readily stated. God makes the world in love. For one reason or another the world chooses to reject God. God will not reject the world but continues his mysterious and relentless pursuit of it to the end of time. That is what he is doing by choosing Israel to be his special people. That is what he is doing through all the passion and poetry and invective of the prophets. That is why history plays such a crucial part in the Old Testament—all those kings and renegades and battles and invasions and apostasies—because it was precisely through people like that and events like those that God was at work, as, later, in the New Testament, he was supremely at work in the person and event of Jesus Christ. Only “is at work” would be the more accurate way of putting it because if there is a God who works at all, his work goes on still, of course, and at one and the same time the biblical past not only illumines the present but becomes itself part of that present, part of our own individual pasts. Until you can read the story of Adam and Eve, of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, as your own story, (James) Muilenburg said, you have not really understood it. The Bible, as he presented it, is a book finally about ourselves, our own apostasies, our own battles and blessings; and it was the discovery of that more than of the differences between the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomic, and Priestly sources of the Pentateuch…
Like you Marsha I wish I would have had better history teachers and now that I have a history, I too, can appreciate history more. While we’re at it I wish I would have had a better history as well. But this is the one I created when I was young and dumb. Perhaps, now that I am older and a little smarter, I can author a Revisionists Version of History like many liberal scholars do with our children’s history textbooks.
I am ordering the book IMMEDIATELY!
Few want to learn from looking back. Onward to bigger and better things! Most have their eyes on the future.
There is a benefit to considering the future and even better if one does so with an eye to the past!
Few want to consider the fall of every empire in regards to the current state of the United States. The past is necessary to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over. We as a people are stubborn and have allowed ourselves to be hijacked by a few who write their own histories!
Thank you for this reminder today of how valuable the past is for the future!