Recapturing Story

Recapturing Story 

Personal Choice

September 18, 2016

The Enlightenment was a time of intellectual awakening in Europe in which certainty was sought through science and reason. Finding itself under attack from these developments, the church needed to respond to the spirit of the age. In their response, the church disowned her true identity as the mystical body of Christ, using the same rational methods of the philosophers to defend themselves. By adopting the rational approach as their own, the church undermined the very cause it sought to defend and put the nail in it’s own coffin! It’s no surprise that since the Enlightenment the church gradually lost it’s place in culture and society. In adopting the rational approach, the church began to demystify faith. God became a concept and faith in him became a matter of certainty. The Bible became a textbook to be defended and upheld rather than a story. The essence of Christianity was lost and the gospel became small and unimpressive. 

Today we live in the wake of these failures. There is just as much to be hopeful about as there is to shake your head about. Recapturing story is what I believe it will take to transform the church and make it culturally relevant once again. What are all the major religions but grand stories? And yet we have lost the power of story by presenting the gospel as a set of facts, making faith left-brained and antagonistic. When I read the Bible as story, I have no need to defend the historical or scientific soundness of it because thats not the point of story! These things become small. What truly matters is the significance that story has on my lived experience. A scientist could disprove all of Christianity tomorrow and I would still hold fast in faith because my faith is not grounded in scientific soundness but in story. 

Every story contains three parts: structure, style, and content. Since the Enlightenment, the church has over-emphasized content. Often, it’s all we care about. Thats why you see people bringing their Bibles to church to fact check the pastor. All contemporary worship songs sound the same because all they focus on is having the right content. Has the church become an institution that restricts the artist rather than empowering him? I’m afraid so. No longer do the stories of Scripture shape and inform our culture. It’s now the movies of Hollywood. Why? Because Hollywood understands story. They are far better at incorporating beautiful style and structure into their stories than the church is. Until the church comes to see this, they will continuously remain irrelevant and insubstantial.