Narrative – Living Story
Narrative is one of the most impactful ways to tell a story. Think back on your favorite stories. Whether it’s a personal memory, a piece of fiction or non-fiction, a movie, a book, or a television series, narrative is the norm of how stories are told. It’s the main way we tell what has happened and how we communicate experiences with each other.
Part of what makes narrative so profound is the way it envelops you into the tale being told. Whether journeying through Middle Earth with Frodo, walking through an account of history, or listening to a loved one retell a cherished memory, narrative draws us into the world of another. It invites us not merely to observe, but to participate. Facts can inform, but telling the story has a way of involving the whole person. I love narrative precisely because of its ability to pull us into a different space or moment. It’s the encounter with a good narrative that I love.
In my previous post, I shared about exploring the context surrounding the Reformation. Continuing that study of setting and the world around a preacher, I finished a book that has been recommended to me by several friends and colleagues: The Shadow of the Galilean by Gerd Theissen. Theissen, a New Testament scholar from Germany with interests in sociology, history, and theology, writes something that I think would be classified as historical fiction. Rooted deeply in historical research, he tells of the social, economic, political, and religious world surrounding Jesus. He uses some fictional characters (and some historical) to create a narrative that draws readers to inhabit that world.
What struck me was not simply the information I learned, but the way narrative allows one to feel the tensions of the setting. Roman occupation, social divisions, religious anxiety and intermixing, socioeconomic realities, hope, fear, the longing for liberation. All of that can be felt in tangible ways when the history is given as a narrative with characters living in the story that draw us in intellectually and emotionally.
Perhaps that is part of why scripture often comes to us narratively. God certainly could have revealed himself primarily through abstract propositions or systematic explanations. Instead, scripture gives us wandering Abraham, wrestling Jacob, grieving Hannah, fleeing Jonah, failing Peter, doubting Thomas, and the living stories of those around Jesus. The biblical account does not arrive detached from human experience. It comes through people and history’s story. It intersects the lived world through meals, betrayals, deserts, storms, tears, and resurrection mornings. Further, we as human beings understand ourselves through narrative too. We carry stories about who we are, where we belong, what has shaped us, what we fear, and what we hope for. All of which we bring individually to our hearing of stories (including scripture).
The more I reflect on the impact of narrative the more essential and central it seems in communication. Narrative is the air we breathe. The stories we tell, the stories we are shaped by, the narratives that accounts for it all…we are living story.
