Tim Keller on Stories

Tim Keller speaks on the power of stories. The video isn’t footage of him but a random images so feel free to ignore that and just listen:

You can find the J.R.R. Tolkien material that he references here.

So awesome and well worth your time. Here are a few quotes surrounding the word Eucatastrophe that he brings up:

Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy- story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Abraham Storying Prep

Genesis 11:10, 12-25
[Noah’s son] Shem fathered Arphaxad who fathered Shelah who fathered Eber who fathered Peleg who fathered Reu who fathered Serug who fathered Nahor who fathered Terah who fathered Abram.

Preparing for Storying sessions 5 and 6 coming up regarding Abraham…just 57 shout outs regarding his original name Abram and 235 mentions after his name was changed to Abraham to sift through!

Reading the Bible as One Story part I

Michael Goheen writes an excellent book called The Drama of Scripture. He walks you through the bible as a story in 6 acts: Creation/Fall/Israel/Jesus’ life, death and resurrection/Church/New Creation.

In this short paper, Goheen, gives many thoughts on why using the term “story” is a helpful framework for how we deal with, talk about and understand the scriptures. I’ll spend about 3 posts listing quotes from the paper and then from their write a response giving my impression. You can download the 9 page paper here. Below I will throw out some of the quotes and comments that caught my eye:

“Jesus announced the good news: ‘The kingdom of God is breaking into history.’ This is not the kind of announcement that could be relegated to the religion page of a newspaper. This is world news-front page stuff! This is headline news on CNN. It was an announcement that God’s healing power was invading history in Jesus and by the Spirit to restore the whole creation to again live under the gracious rule of God. His proclamation of good news stood as the climactic moment of a story of God’s redemptive work told in the Old Testament that stretched back to God’s promise to Adam and Eve.”

“Jesus’ announcement declares a resounding ‘yes’ to his good creation and at the same time a definitive ‘no’ to the sin that has defiled it. The gospel is about the restoration and renewal of the creation from sin. In the history of the Western church redemption has often been misunderstood to be salvation from the creation rather that salvation of the creation. In the proclamation of the gospel Jesus announces that he is liberating the good creation from the power of sin.”

“So, on the one hand, if we are to understand the gospel of Jesus we must see Jesus in the context of the Old Testament story (cf. Luke 24:25-27). On the other hand, if we are to properly understand the Biblical story, we must see it through the lens of Jesus and the gospel (cf. John 5:36-57; Luke 24:44-45). But not only is Jesus the climactic moment in the story, he points forward to the end. The end has not yet come (Acts 1:6-7). Thus attending to Jesus points us back to a story told in the Old Testament, and forward to the end of the story.”

“All of human life is shaped by some story. Consider the following event: A fox compliments a crow and tells it that it has a lovely voice. He asks it to sing a song. What is the meaning of this event? It is not too difficult to see that the meaning of this event can only be understood in terms of some story.”

“N.T. Wright says that ‘a story…is…the best way of talking about the way the world actually is.” It is because the world has been created by God in a temporal way that story can help us understand the way the world is. Brian Walsh says that ‘because the world is temporal, in process, a worldview always entails a story, a myth which provides its adherents with an understanding of their own role in the global history of good and evil. Such a story tells us who we are in history and why we are here.'”

“There is no more fundamental way to speak about the nature of God’s world than to speak of it in terms of a story. Nor is the biblical story to be understood simply as a local tale about a certain ethnic group or religion. it makes a comprehensive claim about the world: it is public truth. The biblical story encompasses all of reality-north, south, east, west, past, present, and future. It begins with the creation of all things and ends with the renewal of all things. In between it offers an interpretation of the meaning of cosmic history.”

Donald Miller-Every Good Story Must Include Conflict

Below are Donald Miller’s thoughts on good stories being full of conflict and not simply nice, clean or safe:

Recently I started reading the New Testament again. My friend Ron Frost recommends reading the Bible all the way through, then reading it again, and then again, until you die. So I am taking his advice. And I’m enjoying it. I didn’t start in Genesis this time, I started in Matthew, and so read the account of the Birth of Christ.

Each time I read the Bible I’m taken aback by how much we dilute the power of its stories with sentimentalism. The story of Noah and his Ark has been reduced to a Children’s story (a God-orchestrated massacre of all humanity) and the story of the Birth of Christ into a regal pageant complete with gifts and robed choirs of angels (A poor virgin and her new husband delivering a baby in a manger of a stable. Followed by an angry king slaughtering all children under two years old to try to kill off the Messiah.)

What I like about the Bible is it doesn’t clean up history. It isn’t a clean book, and God does not always look good (from our finite perspective) and yet it doesn’t hide or sell or bait and switch, it just tells the truth.

One of the problems with sentimentalizing the text is that we begin to sentimentalize our actual lives. We begin to think the Christian life should be free of hardship. We think God is going to navigate us around the hard things. But there is really nothing in scripture that should lead us to believe this. What God offers, instead, is to be with us, to not abandon us, even in the midst of our hardship.

Laying in bed this morning I was thinking about a difficult thing I have to do. It’s nothing compared to some of the stuff you might be dealing with, just a big job I have to complete. I remembered the scripture from Philippians 4: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” I’ve said that verse to myself a thousand times, I am sure. But laying there, I realized something the verse didn’t say. It didn’t say “I can do all things through Christ who makes it easy.”

This paradigm shift is important because if we think God is going to take away our troubles, we assume there is something wrong with us if He doesn’t. We assume we did something bad, or that God doesn’t like us, or perhaps even God Himself isn’t good. To be sure, some of the hardships in our lives happen because we made bad decisions, but even in this we are given the grace of a God who is willing to discipline us in love and restore us. A careful understanding of Biblical stories reveals every hero goes through difficult trouble. Nobody is spared.

In an age where we are taught through commercialism there should be no struggles in life that the purchasing of a product won’t relieve, the Bible is incompatible. But the age of commercialism has let us down. Many have found their stuff has made life more meaningless. What we’ve forgotten is that every great story has to involve a difficult ambition, and must then travel through the land of conflict. The best stories have their protagonist wondering if they are going to make it. What scripture teaches us, then, is that God will be with us in that place, and will give us the strength to endure a hard thing.

Here’s to the courage to face conflict, the bonding benefit of hardships, and to living better stories.

Quotes on Story

The impact of stories is echoed in the movie Walk the Line between a scene with Johnny Cash as a boy with his brother.

Young J.R.: [to Young Jack] How come you’re so good?
Young Jack Cash: [laughs] I aint!
Young J.R.: You pick 5 times more than me.
Young Jack Cash: Well, I’m bigger than you are.
Young J.R.: You know every story in the scripture.
Young Jack Cash: Well, you know every song in mama’s hymnal!
Young J.R.: Songs are easy.
Young Jack Cash: [laughs] It ain’t for me.
Young J.R.: There’s more words in the bible than in the Heavenly Highway Hymns.
Young Jack Cash: Look, J.R., if I’m going to be a preacher one day, I gotta know the bible front to back. I mean, you can’t help nobody if you can’t tell them the right story.

What is CBS?

CBS stands for Chronological Bible Storytelling. It is used in reference to helping people to understand the sweeping story of the bible. It involves taking a specifically chosen number of stories in the scriptures and working through them in chronological order. The story choice is usually based on pivotal moments and people which allows the participants to interact with (rather than being lectured at) to get a grasp of the whole Bible.

Michael Novelli describes seven main acts of the Scriptures diagrammed by the picture below: Creation/Fall/Israel/Jesus’ life/Jesus death & resurrection/Church/New Creation.

Included within those 7 acts they encourage CBS on 24 occasions as pictured below.

What does a Chronological Bible Storytelling gathering look like? Glad you asked. I’ll be leading one this Sunday with our FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) Village this Sunday. Michael Novelli presents these 6 elements to a CBS gathering:

1. REVIEW of previous stories
This is a fast-paced and fun look back at stories you’ve already told. Use art and media– whatever medums you can to help students reconnect. Review helps get everyone on up to speed and allows another opportunity for students to see connections between the stories.

2. PREPARE for imaginative listening
We live in a culture of distraction. It is essential to the storying process that you set a relfective tone and challenge your group toward imaginative listening. Slow down, light a candle, and help your group concentrate so they can see the story unfolding in their minds.

3. NARRATE the new story
This is where we tell the Bible story in a way that sparks imagination and brings it to life. I stitch together my own narratives from the Bible text in order to smooth out the language and make them more readble.

4. REPLAY the new story
The key to replaying is variety and fun. Use lots of different activities that will connect with different types of learners. Use art, drama, music–play and laugh together!

5. DIALOGUE about the story
Dialogue is where key truths emerge and the story starts to becomes “our” story. Questions are used to direct students to discover insights from the stories. The goal is not for everyone to give the same answer–it is to spark wonder and careful observation of the story. In the midst of curiousity, connections and applications surface naturally. I use these kinds of questions to help spark thoughtful responses:

Wondering Questions to spark imaginative responses: “When you listened to this story, what did you see in your mind?”

Remembering Questions to recount the details: “How did this story describe God’s relationship with Adam and Eve?”

6. CONNECTION groups
Often I will break my students into smaller groups to process how the story is connecting with their own stories. This time will center on discussion and prayer focused by a question like: “You were created in God’s Image. How should this change the way you live?”

Bible Storying is just one method to engage with the scriptures. Like any other, it has it strengths and weaknesses. Where it stands apart is that is gives students great opportunities to think for themselves, wonder, engage through multiple learning styles, and use reason and imagination congruently to enter the Biblical Story.

Bible Storying is an adventure…it’s a call to explore creative means, embarking on a new path of learning that asks a lot from our students and us. The reward of this adventure is great…a community of people transformed by God, ready to change the world. Together, may we find ourselves in the most amazing story ever told – God’s Story.

Resources for Understanding the Story

In the past few months I have begun the journey of thinking critically, practically, ecclesiologically through understanding the Bible as Story. So maybe the place to begin is to list some of the resources I have been reading through. I hope to do blog posts on these different books in whole and a series of posts on some of these books specifically.

Here are a few of the books and a quick quote from each of them:

The Drama of Scripture

“In other words, the Bible provides us with the basic story that we need in order to understand our world and to live in it as God’s people. We know that is is one thing to confess the Bible to be the Word of God, but often quite another thing to know how to read the Bible in a way that lets it influence the whole of our lives. There can easily be a gap between what we say we believe and how we live. If God has deliberately given us that Bible in the shape of a story, then only as we attend to it as story and actively appropriate it as our story will we feel the full impact of its authority and illumination in our lives.”

The Story of God, The Story of Us

“The problem is that the prohibition is what we tend to remember most about the God who creates. We pay little attention to our vocation and our freedom. Yet prohibition is only meaningful within the context of freedom; only when we can say ‘no’ is our ‘yes’ meaningful. God has given us everything that is necessary for life. But if our freedom to enjoy God’s generosity is to be meaningful, we have to have the possibility of disobeying God.”

The True Story of the Whole World

“The world of the Bible is our world and its story of redemption is also our story. If our lives are to be shaped and formed by Scripture, we need to know the biblical story well, to feel it in our bones. Further, we must also know our own place within it-where we are in the story, and how we live it out in our lives.”

Shaped By Story

“Storying, by the way of definition, is a unique dialogue-centered approach to teaching the Bible. Guided by imaginative listening, creative retellings, and interactive discussions, storying inspires participants to find themselves in God’s Story.”

The Blue Parakeet

Missing the difference between God and the Bible is a bit like the person who reads Jonah and spends hours and hours figuring out if a human can live inside a whale – and what kind of whale it was – but never encounters God. The book is about Jonah’s God, not Jonah’s whale.

The Bible as Story

The scriptures begin with a story about people in a garden and it ends with a story about people in a garden city.

The diagram above has a bar graph that runs along the bottom representing all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

Everything is connected. Like a story.