Faith and Story

“Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories.” ― Chaim Potok, Old Men At Midnight

One Sunday after church, my daughter and our very hip lead pastor began talking about Harry Potter. With the names “Tonks and Lupin,” the differences in education, experience, gender, age, fashion, and food preferences disappeared. Their shared passion for the Wizarding World—from its canon to its sorting hat quizzes and merch—meant that they somehow belonged to each other. The literature teacher in me was delighted by the power these novels have to create such a powerful community through reading. But in that moment, I suddenly found the conversation between my daughter and our pastor disturbing—and not because of magic and witches.

Watching the exchange between my daughter and our pastor over Harry Potter crystallized a crisis of the Christian imagination for me. I want my children and my students to inhabit the real world of Christian faith with the same hunger, passion, and purpose that some find in the Wizarding World. I want them to understand that their identity in Christ is as profound and immutable as being a wizard is for the fictional characters in Harry Potter. I want my children and students to believe that no matter how messed up the community is or how much evil seems to be winning without (and within) the community, walking away is simply not an option, just like no wizard would ever choose to be a muggle (and such a choice simply wouldn’t be possible). I want the story of God and God’s people to shape us with at least the same power as our favorite fandoms. This story is, after all, the true story of who we are, the true story of our world, and the true story of where we are headed. But too often we have made the story of the Bible into predictable plots, cringeworthy sing-alongs, and comforting self-help.

Forgetting the central place of story cripples all our subsequent work as Christian academics. Christian institutions continually talk about the “integration of faith and learning” without realizing that the very grammar of this phrase implicitly embraces a worldview in which learning and faithfulness are alienated. In the Christian worldview, every person and everything we know exists within a story—and not all stories are true or good. Alistair McIntyre theorizes as much in After Virtue, and yet we still act as if stories are less real than the organization of math, less binding than categories of science, less meaning-filled than empirical reasoning.

In the Bible, moral directives, ethical knowledge, and legal statutes exist within the story of God’s mighty deeds and Israel’s consequent identity as God’s redeemed people. It is the story that simultaneously binds the law into a meaningful system while challenging the normative prescriptions of that very law, reminding us that the youngest sons sometimes inherit the blessing, that women perceived as prostitutes may be more righteous than the heir, and that wrestling with God is the posture of faithfulness.

So, what does it look like to be bound by the plots and characters, instructions and practices, rhythms and moods of the Bible? The purpose cannot simply be right thinking, a word search for orthodoxy that, when complete, will provide an answer key for a cosmic exam where the results determine whether or not we’re saved. As a literature teacher, I know well that nothing kills a story faster than when students feel like they are simply searching the text for a set of predetermined answers.

Perhaps the beginning of an answer can be found in yet another story.

In the general education class at George Fox University, Literature 111: “Faith and Story,” we read contemporary short stories, novels, and assorted poetry, alongside selections from the Bible (focusing particularly on the stories of Abraham and Ruth). But rather than using the Bible as a lens for understanding the other literature, we read the fiction and poetry first. Then we turn back to the narratives in the Bible to see what we notice anew. One day I had the class make a timeline of Abraham’s life. At this stage in the course, we had read short stories by Chimamanda Adichie and Jumpha Lahiri that foreground the experiences of people living in foreign lands. We had read Chaim Potok’s The Promise and considered what a parent might gamble to save a child. And we had read The Handmaid’s Tale and discussed how the cry against the darkness that characterizes lament is a profound act of faith. And then we returned to Abraham.

The class broke into eight small groups and each group had to add one event from Abraham’s life to the board, with the reference. If a point was already on the board, it could not go up a second time, so the students went quickly to get their plot-point on the timeline. When they finished, the eight points were…predictable. Called by God, a covenant, Hagar, circumcision, a meal with three visitors, Sarah laughing, the birth of Isaac, sacrificing Isaac. I drew a line on the board and asked the class about the gaps. Was chapter 13 important? What about 19?

Over 3 more rounds, all the complicated, perplexing, and downright dark aspects of Abraham’s story emerged from the fog of familiarity. Below the line, the board was covered in the stark reality of human stupidity, confusion, and suffering. Like the characters in the fiction we had read and the speakers in our poems, Abraham was complicated, messy, and even deeply wrong in his thoughts and actions. And what of Abraham’s faithfulness? While Isaac survives the story of Mt. Moriah, Abraham descends the mountain alone and Abraham and Isaac don’t appear together again in the text. Not surprisingly, Abraham does not return to Sarah either. He stays in Beersheba while Sarah is in Hebron. As one student observed, Abraham really did sacrifice Isaac on the mountain.

Term after term, as students read novels and poetry and then turn to the Bible, they find that the Bible comes alive in new, difficult, and even life-giving ways. And God emerges along with the other characters as a character in his own right. But, what sort of God is this?

Considering the rest of the Bible, students begin to realize that God does not always appear in a favorable light. He gets into a betting match with Satan over Job’s life, he can seem overly petty regarding his own holiness, he threatens to walk out on his covenant with Israel, and he frequently loses his temper (especially early in the story). Moses, like Abraham Gordon in The Promise,  takes God to task on more than one occasion. The Psalmists and Prophets, like Offred in Handmaid’s Tale, cry out at God’s inaction. Amid all this God also gets hurt, suffers much for his people, rescues dramatically, and demonstrates great tenderness, even for birds in the nest or the lamb or kid taken from its mother.

In their reading journals and course evaluations, students frequently reflect on how LITR 111 has made them love God more, not because it answered their questions, but because they come to know the heart of God better. They see a God who stays faithful to Abraham despite all his very real failings. They see a God who not only sees Hagar but speaks to her,—a foreign, enslaved, pregnant girl running toward her death. They learn that blessing never comes without wrestling, and that wounding is inevitable. But they also learn that wrestling and wounding are not the exceptions to the life of faith, but the very substance of walking with a mysterious, ancient God. And almost every single student reflects, at least once during the class, on how God has been strangely present in the darkness of their own lives.

Most importantly, students in LITR 111 learn that a story is made good or bad by its ending. While the ends do not justify the means in ethics, somehow narrative has the power to redeem suffering and difficulty when the story ends well, when it ends with life and redemption and peace. Conversely, when a story ends with sterility and death, all the good characters might do or experience becomes deeply unsatisfying, as if something essential is missing.

As Christian readers, we know the end of this cosmic story into which we are joining our lives: God will reign, justice will be established, mercy will cover us all, and there will be peace and flourishing. So no matter how dark this moment is—whether we are facing impossible decisions like Abraham Gordon, or impossible oppression like Offred—the end of the story is love. Like Marilynn Robinson’s character, Lila, we are all being welcomed into a home and into a community that will somehow redeem even our darkest moments. And if students learn to read their own story through this story of God, then a general education literature class has done well.