The Bible as Story: A Better Way to Truth

Why truth as story is a better way to reach today’s world. And what this has to do with the Church of God.

Movie scenes can often get to the heart of a point that would otherwise take a blog or sermon to explain. This was the case when I watched the emotional, award-winning movie The Theory of Everything, about the life of the great physicist, Stephen Hawkins.

In one scene, Hawkins took his date, Jane (who would become his wife), to the university ball. As they got to the dance floor, under the lawn canopy, Hawkins – noticing the florescent glow given off from the white shirts and bowties – gave an explanation for the formation of stars, impressing Jane with his understanding of the universe. Then, later that night, both looking up into the night sky, Jane’s gaze was met with the dazzling stars Hawkins had described earlier. There was silence. The beauty elicited a response from Jane, who softly spoke these words, “In the beginning, was the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and the darkness was on the face of the deep.”

In this scene, bookended by these two statements about the cosmos, both had expressed truth. But there was a difference: one was truth as system (science), and the other was truth as story (the Bible).

But why am I sharing this? Because even though humanity has lived through the scientific revolution – and from it gained multiple systems of facts describing the world and our place within it – there has been a growing realisation that, despite this, we humans have never stopped using the mechanism of story to understand the world and our place within it.

So, what does this mean? And what’s it got to do with the Church of God? More than we think.

Professor and screenwriter Robert McKee says that narrative is essential to all cultures: “Story is the currency of human contact.”[1] Stories are the means in which we transmit our values, our identity, and history. This is why historian and atheist, Noah Yuval Harari, in both his best-selling books Sapiens and Homo Deus argues that collective belief in a story made it possible for humans to come together in cooperation and form societies. But stories are also important on an individual level. They are the framework for our individual experiences. “We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative,”[2] said literature scholar, Barbara Hardy. However, stories also give us something deeper. “It is through narratives that we begin to learn who we are and how we are called on to behave,”[3] explains the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. “To know who we are is, in large part, to understand the story or stories of which we are a part.” He continues, “The great questions – ‘Who are we?’ ‘Why are we here?’ ‘What is our task?’ – are best answered by telling a story.” Isn’t that interesting! These big questions are the same questions the Church of God seeks to answer, too, and they’re best answered through story.

Jordan Peterson’s rise as one of the most renowned cultural intellectuals of our time has been in no small part due to his ideas on this reality of human nature. He posits that humans do not understand the world as a system of facts, but through a story. This story is the frame of reference in which we perceive the world and act within it, thus the “frame [story] is the thing that produces our motivations and emotions.”[4]

As a Church who seeks to give people basic answers to the big questions of life, it’s important to realise that truth as story, rather than truth as system, is more important to the human psyche in understanding ourselves and the world in which we live. But there’s another reason why it’s helpful for the Church of God to grasp this idea.

On the wall in my apartment entrance, I have framed the 18 restored truths that Herbert W. Armstrong articulated during the heyday of the Worldwide Church of God. And today, truth is still what we treasure the most. Being laser focused on understanding the truth of God drives us to deeper understanding—a system of spiritual facts, insights, and truths. This, of course, is right and proper. But this frame of reference is primarily a system of truth, not a story of truth. So what? you might ask. The “so what?” comes when we take our framework — a system of truth — into a world that understands life through a different framework: a story. If our primary currency in interacting, preaching, and witnessing to the world is a system of doctrines, how much will this connect with the average person on the street who understands themselves and the world around them through the framework of story? One of the primary purposes of the Church is to preach the Gospel as a witness to the world. In a world that thinks in story, is presenting a list of doctrines the most effective way to do this?

Communicating in narrative form as a means to truth was not unfamiliar to the early Church. Paul did it. In Acts 17, Paul’s encounter on Mars Hill—our modern-day TED—with those who he identified as “very religious,” illustrates his ability to preach truth as story, rather than truth as system. After noticing one of their statues “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” (just in case they had missed one!), he did not upbraid them for their idolatry by quoting from the 10 commandments, something he would have been fully justified in doing. Instead, he tells a story. From verse 24 to 31, Paul, in low resolution form, starts from the beginning with God, then moves to the creation of man and nations, and finally gets to Jesus and the appointed future day He will judge us, to steer them away from their idolatry and ignorance (all in just 8 verses!). Read it. There’s so much to learn about the way Paul approaches and words this speech. And the story has all the punch and truth-telling but without a run-down of the top ten doctrines to believe.

So how might this story-telling approach work in our life?

The presence of evil and suffering in the world is a common objection to a belief in a benevolent God. When asked about such a paradox, I wonder whether an explanation of the consequences of breaking God’s law and the doctrine of sin would be less effective than just telling the Genesis 1-3 story. This story has all the explanatory power necessary to help us understand why we see both beauty and tragedy in the world. In the opening scenes of God’s story, we get an answer to how we go from a perfect God and perfect world to a world of death and suffering—a transition that pivots around free moral agency. (We are the ones who got it wrong, not God!) Although I believe what the Bible tells me, I have not yet heard a better explanation than that of Genesis in giving reason for the moral tension between the coexistence of a righteous and loving God and an evil world.

Therefore, in a world where people’s pain and purpose are understood through the mechanism of story, let’s remember we are recipients of the greatest story ever told. A story that started with the personal presence of God in relationship with us. This Eden was an environment of perfect internal and external peace. But because of the desire of man to decide to write his own story, we lost the peace of Eden and broke our special relationship with God. However, God did not finish with us; He did not give up on His story, He simply started a new chapter. He has a plan to restore Eden: to restore personal and universal peace; for us to become part of the very family of God, chosen to help renew the earth in the greatest restoration project ever undertaken. A story He is writing each and every one of us into in our own time.

In the end, God’s story, God’s message, the gospel Jesus preached of a soon-coming world peace and restoration of His government, is still the most relevant, necessary, and urgent story to tell. For this story tells us like no other narrative what the world was, is, and will be.

Endnotes:

[1] Stephen Mckee, Story, (New York, N.Y.: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1999), page.27.

[2] Barbara Hardy, An Approach Through Narrative, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 2 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968), page 5.

[3] Covenant & Conversation | Ki Tavo | A Nation of Storytellers | Rabbi Sacks

[4] The Uniting Power of Story | Angus Fletcher | Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4: E62 – YouTube