God's Story Can't be Confined to a Single Story

I have always enjoyed reading. There are times when I will get so caught up in a story that I lose all sense of time. The best stories are the ones that are able to transport us into a different world, allowing us to escape reality even if only for a chapter or two, while at the same time exploring and critiquing the current situation of our reality. But in our society today we often don’t have the patience for such stories, and instead prefer movies that are more about their stunning visual effects, adrenaline rushing action, or the hot star, than the story.

I can’t help but wonder if our loss of stories has contributed to our society’s increasing polarization. Stories not only help ground and form us, they also open us up to other possibilities. Unfortunately, there are too many places in our society that demand a single story (e.g. only black or white, no other perspectives…). Single stories tend to make a caricature of people and ideas, especially those we disagree with or who are different. Those caricatures can be dismissed as simply wrong or worse. There is danger in a single story. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of the church, is its many stories.

The Bible is a book of stories. There are wisdom sayings, prayers, letters, and poetry, but it is the stories that form its center. The Bible tells the story of many peoples’ experiences of God’s activity in the world over many centuries. Inspired by their experiences of God, they are also the stories of ordinary human beings with all their cultural biases, limitations, and imperfections. As a result the Bible is a book of stories that can’t be reduced to a single story. It begins with two distinct stories of creation (Gen 1:1- 2.4a, and then Gen 2:4b-2.25). The book of Chronicles tells its own story about David and the monarchy, the books of Samuel and Kings tell a different one. The Prophets (Amos, Hosea, Micah, or Isaiah) yet another. The New Testament begins with four stories of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (the Gospels). The Letters of Paul are not the Letter of James. The Book of Revelation and its story of the church is different than the Book of Acts. While I affirm the Bible as inspired by God, that inspiration has led to the telling of multiple stories as people of different times and places told the story of how they experienced God’s activity in their world.

Unlike our current society, the ancient world understood the value of multiple stories. We risk
missing what is most important in the Bible, a witness to the truth of God’s activity in the world, when we try to reduce it to a single story. The story of God’s on-going transformation of the world is too complex to be contained and dismissed in just a single story. And if God’s story can’t be confined to a single story, then neither can ours.