Because we're made in God's image; because God, with whom we are indelibly stamped, believer and unbeliever alike, is a God of story. All of human history is structured with a beginning (creation), a problem (sin), a thickening of plot (salvation history and one failed human deliverer after another), a climax (Christ), and a resolution (the new earth). Movies, novels, having personal goals, making sense of our lives, having a sense of meaning that helps us hit the alarm and get out of bed one more day, all derive from this. Hollywood is big because of salvation history.
Vern Poythress has me thinking about these things. Tonight I read:
Redemption by Christ is a story. It is a story of something that really happened in history, in space and time. Because it is at the heart of God's purposes for the world, it is the one central story. So, in the end, all the other stories about working out human purposes derive their meaning from being related to this central story. We should not be surprised that the categories for stories in general analogically reflect the character of redemption, that is, the one central story. (Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language: A God-Centered Approach [Crossway 2009], 206)
This is not, by the way, story instead of propositions as a way of accessing truth. It's not Hodge and Henry or the Wright brothers (Chris and Tom). It's a both/and. Human bodies only function if they have fleshy, squishy parts and a rock-solid skeleton. Not an either/or. Both are very different, but equally needed.
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