Story

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about the concept of story. When I think about the importance of story I think about people like C.S. Lewis, Eugene Peterson, and John Eldredge. They each in their own way have pointed us to the bigger picture, the story that we find ourselves in as the people of God.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine that I work with about the truths of the Christian faith and the fact that I believe that not only can the Bible be proven by science, but it has been proven by science. It seems that there is a long standing tradition in evangelicalism of believing that science and the Bible are compatible and in fact that one supports the other. There are things that science can't answer and the Bible doesn't tell us what light is composed of for instance, or the speed of sound.

He said that we should only look to the scriptures for spiritual truth and shouldn't necessarily expect them to be 100% factual when they speak on matters of history or science.

I offered him this quote from John Wesley, at least as best as I could remember it:

Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth.

I do believe the Bible can be proven to be historically accurate with scientific precision. I don't think that God expects us to take a blind leap of faith in that sense. But, we will never have all of our questions answered and we should accept all of the Bible primarily because we know that it's true because the Spirit has revealed it to our hearts, not because it can be proven by science.

But, I still agree with John Wesley, How could we trust a book that has factual errors in it? It would be untrustworthy.

I know that there are many out there who would deny that the Bible is 100% accurate or 100% the words of God. They would say that it's at least a mixture of God's words and man's words.

And, some of those people would say that story is important and they would say that the importance of story is part of the reason that they don't fully believe the scriptures since people who believe all of the Bible sometimes tend to be dogmatic and logical rather than being more free and abstract thinkers that would value story.

I believe that story is important however. Perhaps it's my short stint with the more conservative part of the Emerging Church. Or maybe it's just because of my age and the fact that in certain areas I tend to be more post-modern in my thinking. But, I love stories.

You know, God is telling a story. Most stories begin with "Once upon a time". And God's story is no different. Twice in scripture we read the phrase "In the beginning", in Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1. The gospel, in part, is God calling us into this story that He, the master storyteller, is weaving through all of history.

But, if we don't believe all of God's book where we find the story that He's telling, then how can we believe any of the story?