Story Is Who We Are
a sneak peek at the next book
I’ve been trying to figure out how to “dive into” an explanation of how I read, teach, and write about the Bible, and since we already kicked off a discussion of narrative and narrative theology with Tyler’s post on Sunday, I’ve decided to share with you a relevant snippet of the first chapter of my book on Simon Peter. There’s more to be said, and I’d love to engage your thoughts around the Bible—and ourselves—as narrative, too.
I really thought I knew the disciple formerly known as Simon. If you’re at all familiar with the New Testament, you probably think you do, too. The guy’s chronically impulsive. Almost terminally foot-in-mouth. Earnest and emotional. I even wrote him that way in a novel. But that was before I climbed into his story. Maybe you and I weren’t wrong, exactly, in our previous impressions. But getting to know a disciple through paying attention—not to application points but to his own story— showed me that this disciple was much deeper and more complex than I first thought. Through immersing myself in the details of the biblical text and following Simon’s own journey, what I found was a human being who discovered both God and himself through the person of Jesus. That discovery, in turn, helped me find more of God and myself. I have a hunch it could do the same for you.
Certainly Jesus’ teachings helped Simon make sense of everything he was experiencing once he gave up fishing to follow a rabbi. But it was the story that changed him. I mean, the story he was living by being with Jesus—watching Jesus, interacting with Jesus, being loved by Jesus, and learning to love Jesus in return. Stories are, after all, how we humans learn best. Maybe that’s because stories are who we are.
…It seems a little weird that many if not most Christians come at our holy book, the Bible, as almost anything else but stories by which to be changed. Most of the Bible is not rules and teaching—at least, not in the way we usually understand those terms. It’s also not a science book, even though it describes (admittedly quite differently) some things that science also describes. It’s not a psychology book, even though we can see human psychology in play all the way from Genesis through Revelation. It’s not a history book, even though it is full of people who really lived and breathed and did crazy stuff, sometimes opposing the will of God, and sometimes by the power of God. It’s also not an instruction manual, even though both the Old and New Testaments contain sets of instructions.
Most of all, the Bible is a storybook. Let me explain. In spite of the fact that when many people hear or say the word “story,” they think “fiction,” or “not true,” or even “lie,” that’s not what story in its truest sense means. Some stories are fiction. Some are nonfiction. Both kinds can be a way of telling the truth. They just tell it differently than, say, science or psychology or history—or rules—do. The Bible’s stories all tell the truth—but they’re still stories. That is, they are narratives, with vibrant characters, discernible plotlines, conflicts, climaxes—all the elements of a good story. Some people, including the author of this book, would argue that the entire Bible itself is really one big story that is still being told.
Depending on who you ask (or which internet search links you click, maybe) only ten percent of our Bible could really be considered a handbook, but most teaching in most churches, as well as many Bible study materials, focuses on that ten percent. When we do try to engage the stories, we are still thinking in terms of the ten percent. And so we wrestle principles out of the stories to “apply to our lives.” This can be easier to do with some of the stories than others, and while looking for application is not a terrible exercise, what if the stories are primarily there for another reason? What if they mean to introduce us to people like us and to show what happens when those people do (or don’t) merge their stories with God’s? What if the stories are an invitation for us to do the same thing, and—in the process—to be changed? What if the change God hopes for is not for us to fill our heads with information or systematically check off a list of rules, but for us to encounter Jesus, the Word of God who is telling—and inhabiting—the Story?
Follower isn’t a novel like Favored One, but both books reflect the same focus on encountering the Living Word (Jesus) through the stories in the written word (the Bible). Since you can’t get Follower yet, why not pick up a copy of Favored One in the meantime? (It now comes with a free download of the whole chapter from which the above was excerpted.)
A pastoral colleague and all-around deeply supportive friend managed to enlist over a dozen people at her church in purchasing and reading Favored One together this season, and we’re all going to meet up in early January to talk about it. You should know I love doing this (and I can easily meet with your book group virtually, of course), so please let me know if you’d be interested in setting up a book club meet around Favored One, too!
I’ve been told that one of the women from the group in question had to ask her husband to hide the book from her because she couldn’t stop reading it and wasn’t getting anything else done. It’s that good, I guess! [It’s not writerly to insert a laugh emoji but I really really want to insert a laugh emoji here.]