At GospelFutures, Neil Williams’s next post is up on the power of story for providing coherence for the human drama. He addressed “Why Story” in his previous post. Today he looks at the Christian story specifically.
As far back as we have written records, humans have used stories to figure out their world and to help them understand what it means to be human. We are story-telling creatures—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter….
A question that remains is, “why this story?”
Why choose this story to live by? Why privilege this story? This is a non-trivial question. For one thing, if we were raised in a different time or place—Morocco, Sri Lanka, India, China, or Greece—we would have likely accepted a different religious story—be it Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or the Roman and Greek pantheons. And we would have likely used similar reasoning to explain why we prefer and privilege our particular religious story.
To read this entire post, visit the GospelFutures blog here.
Neil Williams (D.Th., University of South Africa) is a writer and speaker, and
lives outside Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. He is ordained in the Reformed Church in America, and is particularly interested in inter-personal transformation and the dialogue between theology, the sciences, and music. His most recent work is The maleness of Jesus: is it good news for women?
