Gospel as Story 3

C. S. Lewis saw a good story as providing “concrete experience of the universal.”  He held that thinking and experiencing, by themselves, were not complete. Paul F. Ford explains what Lewis thought about story this way:

“Essentially, Lewis saw story as the bridge between two ways of knowing reality: thinking about it and experiencing it. Thinking is incurably abstract; experiencing is always concrete. The human dilemma is that ‘as thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; [as experiencers] we do not clearly understand [what we are experiencing]. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off; the more deeply we enter into the reality, the less we can think.” (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction; pg xxi)

As products of modern and post-modern society, this dilemma becomes more and more urgent. In my case, I think way too much. My need is to become more active to assimilate the reality of what I think. Others around me, though, are simply too active. They just don’t have time to be contemplative. Because of the choices available, we can pursue those activities that make us feel most comfortable without ever needing to do the work necessary to bear fruit using the opposite method. If you’re active, you can be always active without ever needing to be contemplative. If you’re contemplative, you can certainly find the books and websites that feed your contemplative nature without ever needing to be active.

It is not that this is any different that at any other age, just more pronounced.

For Lewis, the “thinking and the experiencing come together in one place: a good story.” It is a combination of the ideas of looking at something and looking along something. Looking at corresponds with thinking and is abstract. Looking along corresponds with experience and is sensory, concrete. A good story, because of the design imposed by its author, brings forward those things that are of ultimate importance. C. S. Lewis said it this way:

“As a work of the imagination, [a story] helps people to both contemplate and enjoy either an aspect of reality they already know or something that they don’t know and the author of the story thinks they should.”

This is why the gospel’s original form is as story. When wrenched from this original form—to some propositional formula, for example—the gospel loses its’ power.

When I’ve talked about this idea in the past, the idea that comes across is that it is the story that’s important, not the subject of the story. And, sometimes, it is perceived that because I’m using the word story (remember the word fantasy from yesterday’s post?), or because Lewis says that story is a “work of the imagination” that the content of that story may or may not be true. If we tell the gospel as story, can we rest assured our audience will consider our story as fact? Do we undermine our case by using story?

I don’t think so. The gospel has always been story, from its inception. Even the gospel in the Old Testament is told as a story. Its form as story in no way undermines it as fact. Additionally, if Lewis is right, this is the way the gospel was designed, so that its hearers could respond to some “concrete experience of the universal” even if they weren’t around to see Jesus heal or hear Him speak.

But, there’s one other thing about story that is even more interesting. Eugene Peterson, in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, takes these ideas a step further when he says,

“Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn’t know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

As such, stories are initial building blocks of community.

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