Encountering other stories Still, our story instinct has a darker side, as Jonathan Gottschall points out in The Storytelling Animal, for it makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, manipulative advertisements, and damaging national myths. That there are ‘helpful’ stories and notso ‘helpful’ stories requires us to be careful listeners of other stories as well as competent tellers of our own. As Steve Wilkens and Mark L. Sandford point out in their 2009 book, the stories people tell betray
Bible & Culture
through Christ, the one in whom God’s purposes for the ‘hidden worldviews’ about what counts as significant. cosmos will be consummated. Worldviews don’t exist as disembodied systems but as So, the significance of story shouldn’t come as a stories which appeal to the gut as well as the intellect. surprise to Christians, for whom there is an Author As such, snippets of conversations in the coffee shop who stands behind our stories, imbuing or Facebook status updates are often them with his grace in a way that points enough to betray the stories that are Our own back to him. Correctly understood, part of the cultural air we breathe, true stories our stories don’t compete with God’s stories which embody worldviews that story, but gesture towards it. C.S. Lewis, are unconsciously absorbed rather than connect J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton were with and are consciously adopted. convinced that all our stories of journeys For Christians, though, Scripture sustained by provides and heroes, of sacrifice and redemption, the control story for how we the bigger speak of humanity’s quest for identity, understand and engage with other purpose and hope. stories on offer. Inevitably, we run the story told in There can be a tendency for us to Scripture, of risk of accommodating the biblical begin with our stories, and then fit the to surrounding cultural stories which we are story biblical narrative into the world of our – whether of scientific materialism, a part. experience. As it is, however, the ‘world’ se cu l a r hu m a n ism , new a ge created by the biblical narrative takes mysticism, individualism, tribalism, priority over the world of our experience. Our own true or consumerism. Indeed, since we are embodied, stories connect with and are sustained by the bigger economic, psychological, political, moral, social beings, story told in Scripture, of which we are a part. The there is likely to be some truth in those stories which desire to ‘tell our stories’ is thus valuable in all sorts we will want to affirm, even though none on their own of ways, but especially if our telling is calibrated by will be sufficient. Our task, then, is to show that the the biblical narrative of what God has done in Christ Christian story not only offers more complete and and is now doing by his Spirit through his people in satisfying answers to the questions and dilemmas of the world. What should our stories look like in the life but also contributes to greater human flourishing. light of that story? Our own stories carry significance We do this not necessarily by a set of arguments insofar as they reflect and are aligned with that grand (though they have their place) but by telling a different scheme of things. story about the origin of the universe and the nature