Stories have been around for as long as storytellers have had the ability to engage an audience to get lost in the tale they are spinning. Our imagination plays a great part in the process of listening to a story. When I was a kid, before TV, I listened every Saturday evening to several radio dramas like The Shadow . You could hear the voices, the footsteps, the music, but you had to imagine what the people looked like and what the set looked like as they were playing out this drama. It made for a lively Saturday evening. It seems to me that TV simply spoiled the opportunity to imagine. Watching TV causes us to visually see what someone else imagined and then we take their imagination as reality for the drama being presented. Some believe that storytelling might be the most fundamental way that humans communicate. It just may well be that storytelling is the oldest human communication.

Stories are powerful. Alister McGrath tells a story in his book Christian Spirituality. More

It seems that story, (Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, 19.) not proposition, is the design God picked to call us to our vocation: partnering with him in the redemption of his creation. The Story of Scripture is a continual Story beginning with Creation and moving toward the New Creation, although somewhat chopped up in the way our printed Bibles present the texts to us in its canonical form. It is not my purpose to resolve the question: Does inspiration include the form of canonization that we have in our modern Bibles? The short answer is: the form of the canon is an effort by humans to ratify what the church in the first three centuries thought to be in or out. The overall form is somewhat chronological in sequence, i.e., Gospels (the life and ministry of Jesus); Acts (the life and ministry of the church); Letters (the problems of the church presented in an ad hoc way listing Paul’s letters from largest to smallest with one exception and then the letters not from Paul); finally, Revelation (the consummation of the Kingdom). However, the overall form is not chronological to the time of writing in which the letters of Paul would have come to first. More information on canonical formation can be found in the Dictionary of New Testament Background (Porter, S. E., & Evans, C. A. “Canonical Formation of the New Testament” Dictionary of New Testament Background: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). More

Story has become fashionable to write about in the two or so recent decades. William Bausch says in the introduction to his book, Storytelling, “We are creatures who think in stories,” but have been trained to think in propositions. (William J. Bausch, Storytelling: Imagination and Faith, 9). Propositional thinking has caused us to reduce the text of Scripture from an overarching Story with many smaller stories to a set of propositions to believe. In the book Why Narrative? Stanley Hauerwas states, “In recent years appeals to ‘narrative’ and to ‘story’ have been increasingly prominent in scholarly circles, to the delight of some, the consternation of others, and the bewilderment of many. Such appeals have caused delight in that narrative and story appear to provide a cure, if not a panacea, to a variety of Enlightenment illnesses: rationalism, monism, decisionism, objectivism, and other ‘isms’” (Stanley Hauerwas, and L. Gregory Jones, Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, 1.) and one might add fragmentary-ism.

The rise of propositional thinking in the Enlightenment, aided by the previous addition of chapters and verses in the text of Scripture, has led readers to read the text of Scripture in a fragmented way.

The rise of foundationalism was the result of Descartes’ decision, in the midst of culturally based and culturally dependent beliefs, to seek to find certainty for a knowing mind. The concept of foundationalism moved from the philosophical realm to the theological realm and led many eighteenth-century religious thinkers to arrive at two conclusions. First, the Bible or the church was a sure foundation. Second, the embracing of skeptical rationalism.

Nineteenth-century theological thinkers sought a new foundation. Two separate conclusions were drawn: Schleiermacher’s “experience of God consciousness” or Hodges’ “error free Bible” could be foundational. Hodges’ concept led to systematic theology and Scripture’s division into chapters and verses aided the foundational mindset along in producing systematic theologies. The systematic theology mindset has influenced a myriad of variations of the Biblical text which leads to fragmentation of the text and away from its Story intent. Educational materials are often built on the smallest fragments of Scripture: verses or sets of verses, topics made up of verses, or individual stories with no tie to the larger Story.

The church and individual reader is presented with a quagmire: fragmentized reading of the text of Scripture. What is the antidote to this problematic situation? Story!