a brief comment on stories
#There’s a lot of sentimental and just plain dopey talk about “story” these days. “Tell me your story.” “Everyone has a story.” Yuck. But the remedy for this problem, for Christians anyway, is not to eschew storytelling but to tell better stories – tell stories that are connected to the Great Narrative of salvation history. The only account that Christians can give of what they believe centers on a series of unrepeatable events in history that are invariant in sequence: Creation comes before Fall, Fall before Incarnation, Incarnation before the Four Last Things, and so on. All Christian theology is, intrinsically and inevitably, narrative theology. And that has a personal dimension as well as a world-historical one. I tried to write about that personal dimension in this book, which is summed up, sketchily, in this essay.
(And while fetching the Amazon link for the book I just discovered that the Kindle edition is on sale for $.99. What a deal.)