Faith-learning integration is a well-worn pedagogical topic, especially at many Christian institutions, but the discussion is surprisingly underdeveloped in the field of biblical studies. Yet even where the conversation is taking place with the most energy, it is complicated by uncertain terminology and is often mired in an over-emphasis on the cerebral. Despite these circumstances, I propose that one meaningful way for biblical scholars to practice faith-learning integration is through stories. The reason for this is fivefold: (1) the Bible is, among other things, a library containing many different stories; (2) stories have a crucial affective component that can reach the whole person, not just their minds; (3) stories play a decisive role in both fashioning and reflecting worldviews; (4) stories connect people to broader cultural and societal values; and (5) my personal faith and that of my students is often conceived of and described in the form of a story of our lives.
The stories that I have in mind are extended sequences of events in narrative form, regardless of media, such as film, television, theatre, literature, and even oral performance. This is an important caveat to offer, given that many of our students have been conditioned by TikTok to prefer bite-sized media consumption with short bursts of entertaining content that the algorithm has queued up. As such, there is less of a desire to engage stand-alone novels (to say nothing of a literary series) and feature-length films (not to mention multi-season shows on streaming platforms). Even serialized and episodic television shows that run 22 or 44 minutes on network television (plus commercials) might surpass their attention span. At the very least, the benefits of stories that I explore in this article go beyond whatever stories might be available on TikTok or in Instagram reels. Hence, there is even more reason to highlight the importance of stories for personal development and formation in this educational environment.
By drawing attention to stories, I hope to offer a more holistic worldview approach to faith-learning integration than is typically done. As I proceed, I would like to situate this story-based approach within the broader scholarly discussion on faith-learning integration, providing some rationale for why a biblical scholar might do integration in this way.
Empty Chairs at Empty Tables
Before turning to the value of stories for biblical scholars pursuing faith-learning integration in their classrooms, we need to establish that something really is missing. As noted in the introduction, scholarship on faith-learning integration unfortunately offers little guidance for biblical scholars and theologians. This is likely due to the implied context where conversations on integration are happening the most and where they matter for things like tenure or re-appointment: evangelical liberal arts colleges concerned with secular drift. This leaves a gaping hole for faculty in theology departments at such institutions, not to mention those in entirely different contexts, like seminaries, where personal faith is always explicit.
Often the advice on faith-learning integration seems to assume that the enterprise is for scholars in disciplines other than biblical studies and theology. Three brief examples will illustrate this point. Arthur Holmes, an English professor at Wheaton College for many years who wrote a seminal text on faith-learning integration, explains the “foundational approach” to integration by suggesting that “an entire Christian college faculty might fruitfully work through the major topics of systematic theology, asking how each topic touches the foundations of its discipline.”[1] Yet if one is a theologian, that is not integration; it is disciplinary work. The same applies to the advice from the historian Eric Miller of Geneva College, who states that scholars should learn to “speak theology” to do faith-integration well, but biblical and theological scholars already do this.[2] Finally, Paul Kaak, a longtime professor of leadership at Azusa Pacific University, wrote an article soliciting faith-integration essays for Christian Higher Education, providing thirteen prompts for essays focused on discipline-specific questions, but only the following was relevant for biblical studies: “Does simply teaching the Bible or a systematic theology course constitute faith integration or is something more needed?”[3] Kaak’s prompt here is hardly generative and serves to demonstrate the fact that not much thought has been put into this area. One could say that this leaves room to think ‘outside the box,’ but I would suggest that there is, as of yet, no box. We are like Marius from Les Misérables (2012), realizing that the chairs around the table that have been set for this conversation are all empty.[4]
Furthermore, despite the ubiquity of discussions on faith-learning integration at evangelical institutions, its meaning is contested, and its application is variegated. Holmes initially offered four approaches to faith-learning integration (attitudinal, ethical, foundational, and worldview),[5] but these have each been critiqued, reworked, and expanded through a proliferation of studies.[6] Part of the trouble, as pointed out by Kenneth Badley, a professor of education at Tyndale University, is that each of the three key words could be understood in multiple ways.[7] “Faith” could refer to a personal expression or a religion; “learning” could be understood as a process or content;[8] and “integration” could have five different interpretations (e.g., fusion, incorporation, correlation, dialogical, and perspectival), which he later expanded to seven (e.g,. incarnational and appliqué).[9] Moreover, in that subsequent piece, Badley argues that faith-learning integration has become an example of an “essentially contested concept.”[10] Thus, Badley contends that a distinction between “concept” and “conception” is the best way forward. As he explains, “A concept represents or contains the agreed-upon, core meaning of a term. A conception includes layers of normative and programmatic meanings that a concept’s users build onto the concept.”[11] The lack of agreement and uniformity, then, is at the level of conception, and rather than ‘dying the death of a thousand qualifications,’ faith-learning integration is better understood as being lived out in a thousand different ways. In light of the dearth of literature on faith-learning integration and biblical studies, this is an especially pertinent realization. It is my contention, therefore, that not only do stories provide a biblical scholar with a possible way forward, but moreover that stories offer a uniquely suitable way to approach faith-learning integration given the nature of the discipline.
When a Man’s an Empty Kettle
The task of faith-learning integration for biblical scholars, I contend, ought to include stories because of the unique issues that confront biblical scholars in this arena and because stories help ensure that we do not overemphasize the cerebral dimensions of our discipline. Having addressed both points, I will then turn to make a positive case for the value of stories in particular.
To be sure, in some ways, biblical and theological scholars run into the same issues as our colleagues in other disciplines, but with one important distinction. The common task that we often share is confronting the secular ideology that informs our respective areas of study. While our subject matter as biblical scholars is theological in nature it does not mean that only religious people are part of the field. The principles of the Society for Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion, for example, are as secular as the major scholarly bodies of any other discipline. There is, therefore, just as much of a need for biblical scholars and theologians to integrate their personal faith into their teaching and scholarship as there is for our colleagues in other areas, and the academic setting for biblical studies is by no means confined to religious institutions. But the key distinction with other disciplines is this: when scholars in other fields do faith-integration, they tend to move from their discipline into biblical studies and theology. It is that pattern that leads me to conclude that the move from biblical studies out into other disciplines ought to be a hallmark of faith-learning integration for those in my discipline. What this looks like for me personally is movement from my faith and the faith—which I express, study, and refine in my teaching and scholarship—out into the world of my students.
In the area of biblical and theological studies, faith-learning integration, however it may operate at the level of “conception,” should have as its telos holistic formation—whole and holy persons. The locus of integration ought to be, therefore, both in the curriculum and in the student.[12] In terms of speech-act theory, we might say that integration done well is what the instructor does with their teaching (illocution), and it is what the instruction leads the students to do (perlocution).[13]
Thus, the integration that we are striving for is not strictly about information. Philosopher Esther Meek refers to our obsession with information as a “knowledge-as-information epistemic,” which she claims is the “epistemological default” that we need to retool.[14] It is an epistemology that is only concerned with “the collection of certainties,” and thus brackets out wisdom, piety, and morals.[15] In the age of the internet, when information (and misinformation!) about any subject is just a click away, our primary objective as instructors should not be to provide more information. Indeed, as historian Yuval Noah Harari points out, cramming made sense when information was scarce, as with any kind of hoarding.[16] Thus, rather than present an abundance of information to our students, our goal as educators should be to provide a coherent way to organize information and to curate what is most salient for them to know about the discipline so as to navigate it wisely on their own. The great media critic, Neil Postman, lamented even before the dawn of the internet that there was an “information glut”[17] and that information was not normally held together for students in a coherent way.[18] Similarly, Harari also states that instead of giving more information, educators need “above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”[19] These comments provide a great articulation for the need to foster a worldview or perspectival approach to faith-learning integration without intending to do so. As Holmes wrote, our culture needs “a worldview that can stick fragmented pieces together,”[20] which is clearly even more true today.
All human knowledge—even all the information found on the internet—is united under Christ’s lordship.[21] This is even more key once we recognize that when the New Testament talks about “faith,” it is not merely (and often not at all) addressing propositions to which people give mental assent. Rather, faith (πίστις / pistis), because it is a personal term, is better understood as a loyal trust.[22] Thus, the faith part of the faith-learning integration ought to imply a kind of allegiance. If “all truth is God’s truth,” then the pursuit of genuine knowledge has theological significance, and if Christ is Lord, then the pursuit of knowledge honors Christ’s rule and reign over all things. To affirm these ideas is to acknowledge the coherence of information as a theological claim, but to do so also provides the impetus for formation.
When we, as educators, focus on our students gaining information in a manner that is devoid of formation, as philosopher James K. A. Smith of Calvin University points out, we are operating with an Enlightenment-based Cartesian anthropology that essentially imagines that our students are “brains on sticks.” If the “core of our identity is located more in the body than the mind,”[23] and if “our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral,”[24] then we need to engage students more holistically than providing them with mere information. Indeed, in contemporary philosophy of mind, the notion of “the extended mind” demonstrates that even our cognition itself is embodied and that we carry knowledge tacitly in our bodies.[25] Thus, our educational design should strive to reach the heart, and not least the gut. Without the incisive tools of stories in our arsenals, we may end up crafting our students into “empty kettles” like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz (1939).[26]
Up Where They Stay All Day in the Sun
Stories have a unique ability to grip us to our core and impact us in ways that go beyond the cognitive. Even as Aristotle recognized millennia ago, our emotional responses to stories are immensely valuable to us. In one well-known passage, Aristotle articulates that the emotional responses that Greek tragedies evoke in audiences provide catharsis—“through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions” (Poetics IV.26–28).[27] As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains, Aristotle’s notion of catharsis here speaks to the way that the Greek tragedies provide clarification about emotional responses to pitiful and fearful events.[28] Yet such clarification ought not to be understood in a strictly intellectual sense, which would more accurately reflect the perspective of Plato, who was highly suspicious of the value of emotions in relation to our ability to reason well.[29] The experience of cathartic emotions is just one aspect of the many benefits of engaging stories.
Our ability to connect emotionally to fictional characters, for example, helps us to develop important life skills and emotions for interacting with people, such as empathizing with others.[30] Stories can even help us to identify with characters who are vastly different from us, such as vampires and wizards, as psychologists Shira Gabriel and Ariana F. Young demonstrate in their case for what they call “Narrative Collective-Assimilation.”[31] But the value of that identification with others does not stop with fictional characters, since it transfers over to our interactions with people in real life. A group of Italian social psychologists, for example, demonstrated that groups of children who read the Harry Potter books showed a reduction in prejudicial attitudes towards commonly marginalized groups.[32] Indeed, journalist and fiction author Will Storr highlights how the rise of novels helped to bring about the notion of human rights, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) incited the American Civil War since people were beginning to see the world from other people’s perspectives; to walk around, in effect, in someone else’s skin, as Atticus Finch says in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960).[33] Literary expert Karen Swallow Prior explains that personal growth in this way is possible because literature models behavior to us, and gives us an opportunity to “practice” virtuous responses to particular situations vicariously so that “habits of mind, ways of thinking and perceiving, accrue.”[34] Indeed, ethicists and philosophers have highlighted the value of stories for the development of ethics.[35] Evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Gottschall even argues that the way that storytelling gives us space to “practice” has aided our survival together as a species; “Fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.”[36]
The power of stories is even seen in the way that they have the effect of rewiring our brains because of the firing of mirror neurons while we read or watch certain activities. Corresponding activity occurs in the brain as if we ourselves were doing those very same things. This means that our brains are shaped by stories such that we are impacted by vicarious actions before we even experience the same thing ourselves, and so we will approach those situations differently than we would have if we never engaged those stories.[37]
Engaging stories is all the more pertinent for the task of faith-learning integration among theological educators in our present situation, since there has been a decrease in people’s capacity for empathy within broader society that is correlated with, if not caused by, the rise of digital technologies and social media.[38] In the highly polarized climate in which we find ourselves, stories can help us break out of narrow group-think. As Storr contends, we approach storytelling with Stone Age tribalistic ways of thinking,[39] and stories have the power to both reinforce old patterns and to break us out of them.[40] As he says so succinctly, “If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer.”[41] And so, in more ways than one, theological educators should aim for their students to become “prayer warriors.” Just as stories can jostle us out of narrow ways of thinking, they also have the capacity to reinscribe those habits. As theological educators, we ought to instill a desire to engage stories critically, to find in them not a form of self-validation, but rather a space to change and evolve in the light of honest self-reflection. In this way, stories can help us to become more empathetic, courageous, and self-aware because they are tools that work for transformation, disrupting our prejudices, biases, and ignorance. Stories are already at work on our students, whether we engage them or not, and as theological educators, we can deploy them for useful and productive work in the classroom too. Just as all productive forms of work involve change as things are accomplished, so too stories change their audience, which can have an even greater effect through integrative reflection. Stories inevitably shape us, and so it matters that we practice discernment with respect to the stories that we engage, recognizing that the stories that are worthwhile are the ones that open us up more to the true, the good, and the beautiful, and those that help us to love our neighbors as ourselves—indeed, those that provide us with a more capacious understanding of who our neighbors are, as Jesus taught us, through a story, in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). For those of us training students at seminaries, where most of our students will go on to serve diverse groups of people as pastors, we should be promoting stories for the sake of our students’ development as people of faith,[42] and also for the sake of their ministries,[43] by incorporating stories into our curricula, our lectures, and our class discussions.
The developmental value of story-telling seems to be particularly salient for those who read fiction, and who do so closely, as opposed to engaging other media of storytelling.[44] Part of the reason for the added value of reading stories specifically, or hearing them read, is because of the increased psychological activity of co-creating the world of the story mentally along with the author.[45] Yet, while there is a greater benefit for reading stories, these developmental values can still be found in stories told through film, television, theatre, and oral performance, with the difference primarily being a matter of degree or quality.[46] In our current technological landscape, it seems to be the case increasingly that the broader public’s preferred mode of storytelling is cinematic in nature, which both suggests that we as educators should promote that our students engage fictional books, but also that we need to meet students where they are at, even as we highlight how films and television shows can be processed and discussed just like a good book.
Since we are “desiring animals rather than merely thinking things,”[47] Smith likewise argues that stories from popular culture are worth engaging seriously as part of our theological education because, as we have seen, they can connect directly to that affective part of us. For that reason, he contends, popular culture can be more influential than something didactic and heady.[48] Smith suggests that film “is a medium that traffics in affective images” that we take in “to the core of our being,”[49] and that literature has “more commensurability” with “the social imaginary of Christian worship” than with “the staid, buttoned-down discourse of philosophy and theology.”[50]
Indeed, I would insist that Smith is not overstating the significance of popular culture here as we consider the task of faith-learning integration. On the one hand, his insights can be detected in the way that Christian popular culture has distinctively shaped American evangelicalism. Certain fictional stories, such as Left Behind, This Present Darkness, and The Shack, for example, had greater impacts on the development of evangelicalism in the United States than the sermons and theology books of many prominent pastors and professors, former senior news editor at Christianity Today, Daniel Silliman, has recently demonstrated.[51] Furthermore, Smith’s point about literature’s commensurability with worship is particularly poignant because scholars of religion have argued that particularly notable franchises within popular culture have had a significance for people that is best described in many cases as religious.[52] One of the clearest examples is the best-selling book series of all time—Harry Potter. These novels have functioned akin to a religious text to their many fans, as is explored in the widely-popular podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.[53] Indeed, the sheer influence of the novels on such a global scale—over 600 million copies sold internationally, and potentially more than a billion readers once family copies, library copies, and audiobooks are factored in (to say nothing of the impact of the film adaptations as a global phenomenon)—is comparable to the influence of religious texts themselves. As a more contemporary example from the realm of television, one can point to the global influence of the streaming show, The Chosen (2017–present), about Jesus and the disciples.[54] Despite the filmmaker’s caution in the opening caption of the first episode that the show is fictitious, and that viewers should read their Bibles,[55] The Chosen will functionally replace reading the Gospels for many viewers or at least shape subsequent readings of it.
For these reasons and more, film and literature are not “just entertainment,” nor are they best described as a means of “escape” from the troubles of our lives.[56] Rather, they are cultural artifacts and barometers, artistic expressions, arguments, and both shapers and revealers of our affections. Thus, they have a key role in culture—the culture within which our students are enmeshed and embedded. Rather than try to mitigate the effects of popular culture, as some Christians may be inclined to do, such cultural influence provides a rich opportunity for faith-learning integration, and fostering it is akin to practicing what artist, painter, and author Makoto Fujimura calls “culture care.” As he sees it, “Culture is not a territory to be won or lost but a resource we are called to steward with care. Culture is a garden to be cultivated.”[57] Fujimura’s vision of cultivating culture is a different approach to transformation than is often conceived, but in my view, it supplements the great theologian H. Richard Niebuhr’s fifth solution to how Christ relates to culture—“Christ transforming Culture.”[58]
If it is the case, as theologian Kevin Vanhoozer has argued, that “theological literacy requires biblical and cultural literacy,”[59] then the path forward for faith-learning integration is abundantly clear. Doing this type of integrative work can take on as many forms as there are aspects of culture, but for me the task starts with the recognition that popular culture functions as the lingua franca of the people, as theologian and film critic Kutter Callaway of Fuller Seminary says about film.[60] Extending the linguistic metaphor further, we would be better suited to speak into culture if we were fluent in popular culture. We might think to ask upon hearing this, “What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem?” paraphrasing Tertullian—that famous early Christian rejecter of culture.[61] But if we have any interest in mission and the transformation of culture—to be where the people are, “up where they stay all day in the sun,” as Ariel desired in The Little Mermaid (1989)—the answer to that question must be “everything.”[62]
There are precedents in the biblical literature itself that demonstrate how the biblical authors utilized affective modes of communication and other contemporary stories to reach their original audiences, and I will highlight a few noteworthy examples here. Of course, the most common type of literature in the Bible, broadly conceived, is narrative in form, which suggests the value of story as a medium for religious and spiritual purposes. The Old Testament even displays evidence of repurposing the tropes and themes from other stories familiar in Ancient Near Eastern contexts, such as creation narratives, flood stories, accounts of law-giving, and other examples.[63] In fact, some Old Testament texts, such as wisdom texts like Proverbs and Job, underscore that much can be gleaned from observing the world around us. This is just one kind of wisdom that humans can access in addition to God’s special revelation, and this itself can help to provide a biblical model for faith-learning integration, as longtime Old Testament professor at Biola University, Edward Curtis, has argued.[64] The prophets of Israel extended their communicative efforts to a theatrical level to make them felt even more powerful, sometimes spreading their messages through “sign acts.” This is when prophetic figures performatively act out their message, such as Hosea taking the sex worker Gomer as a wife (Hosea 1:2–3; 3:1–5), Jeremiah wearing a yoke (Jeremiah 27:1–3), Isaiah wandering naked for three years (Isaiah 20:1–4), Ezekiel laying on his side in front of a makeshift replica of the city (Ezekiel 4:1–6), cooking awful bread over dung (Ezekiel 4:7–17), and then cutting his hair and throwing it into the fire (Ezekiel 5:1–4). In the Gospels, Jesus communicated at times through similar prophetic “sign acts,” such as when he cursed the fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25) and cleansed the temple (Mark 11:15–19). Furthermore, he communicated by storytelling through many parables. These examples speak to the explicit design of the biblical literature to communicate through stories and other affective means, which explains why so many films since the dawn of cinema in the late 19th century have retold biblical stories from the Old and New Testaments, with films centering on Jesus and the Gospels comprising the bulk of them.[65]
This preference for story is so widespread that it impacts how biblical scholars engage the discipline more broadly. Biblical scholars, such as New Testament theologians N. T. Wright and Richard Hays, have made contributions to our understanding of how narratival subtexts inform even some of Paul’s most dense didactic material, such as Wright identifying a substructure of the story of the exodus and entrance into the land in Romans 3–8,[66] and Hays finding the story of Israel in miniature in Galatians 3–4.[67] In other words, as these two examples highlight, one can often discern a story-shaped logic to Paul’s arguments.[68] This shape can also be discerned in early Christian worship, poetry, and other traditions, as they often comprise miniature narratives of the Son of God’s pre-existence, incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension (e.g. Philippians 2:5–11; Colossians 1:15–20; 1 Timothy 3:16),[69] and New Testament scholar Michael Gorman has even argued that Paul’s spiritually of the Christian life has a story-based structure to it insofar as the Christian life in its various facets ought to be characterized by a conformity to the pattern of Christ’s death and resurrection.[70] We can see how stories infuse the biblical material, even implicitly, and as a biblical scholar it reinforces the value that I should be placing on the stories that similarly shape my students when I approach the task of faith-learning integration. It is the biblical story, and especially the story of Christ within the larger biblical storyline, that has the power to shape our own personal stories and to make us wise to the counter-narratives that confront us every day.
A Whole New World
The affective qualities of stories, for Smith, lead him to conclude that the worldview model of faith-learning integration, perhaps among the most common approaches by Christian educators, is limited and wanting.[71] For Smith, the key problem with the worldview approach is that it fails to recognize how broader culture shapes us with its habit-forming practices, which he calls “cultural liturgies.” He provides a brilliant illustration of this by describing phenomenologically what it is like to shop at a mall, without revealing that that is what he is describing until the very end of the description.[72] Smith’s illustration highlights the large “pilgrimage” of people entering into the “sacred site,” where the tall ceilings and capacious interior communicate transcendence, and acolytes invite you in to “worship” in their “chapels” where you meet with a “priest” who oversees a ritual transaction with you. His phenomenological account of shopping at a mall highlights how our loves and desires can be shaped there, “even though we might be thinking ‘from a Christian perspective.’ ”[73] It is not just malls that are capable of this, he contends, but also movies and literature as well, among other things.[74] Thus, Smith argues that the purpose of Christian education should not be to provide a Christian worldview,[75] but to incorporate faith practices within the learning process as a counter-formation to these “cultural liturgies.”[76] In other words, he is calling for nothing less than Christian worship.
Smith’s proposals are unique and might seem to some as more germane to the church than the academy (though his aim is to rebrand Christian colleges as ecclesial colleges). At its core, Smith stresses these practices in the educational context in order to reinforce the affective, formational, and personal role of Christian education. Broadly-speaking, this aligns with the evidence from student-oriented studies on faith-learning integration that suggest that, for them, integration is not about content. One study that serves as an exception to this shows that religion and philosophy professors scored highest on faith-learning integration,[77] which suggests that students tend to perceive integration to be more naturally connected with certain subjects. But on the whole, students regard personal faith as one of the key expressions of integration.[78]
My interests at this point are neither to critique nor defend Smith’s call for incorporating explicit Christian practices into education, but rather to suggest that this still fits within a worldview approach to faith and learning. I do not think that Smith has identified limits with the worldview approach so much as he has identified that we tend to operate with a limited understanding of worldviews. A worldview can encapsulate stories and practices, like the ones that Smith holds up in order to combat the overly-cognitive approach to education. In my view this only shows that the worldview models that he is critiquing are too shallow. Indeed, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright offers a broader perspective on worldview, just as Aladdin offered Jasmine “a whole new world” in Aladdin (1992),[79] which, I contend, meets the need that Smith identifies.[80]
In Wright’s articulation, “Worldviews have to do with the presuppositional, pre-cognitive stage of a culture or society. Wherever we find the ultimate concerns of human beings, we find worldviews.”[81] For Wright, worldviews are far more robust than Smith’s cognitive rendering. Wright’s contention that worldviews relate to matters of “ultimate concern” touches on Smith’s plea that educators should focus on what students love and desire. Further, for Wright, worldviews are comprised of stories, symbols, and praxis. Wright argues that the praxis that shapes Israel’s worldview, for example, includes their worship, festivals, learning, and practice of the Torah.[82] These are not separate from their worldview, as Smith’s account might suggest, but are constitutive of it. Further, as it pertains to stories in particular, Wright notes that they “can embody or reinforce, or perhaps modify, the worldviews to which they relate.”[83] When stories are brought to bear against alternatives, Wright explains that they are “peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews.”[84] Worldviews, therefore, “provide the stories through which human beings view reality.” Those stories then provide answers to life’s crucial questions, which get expressed through cultural symbols, and are exercised in particular practices.[85] Thus, Smith’s example of the mall functions at that level of cultural symbol, and Wright’s explanation that symbols give way to practices matches the cultural liturgies that Smith warns about. Indeed, Wright highlights how practices uniquely showcase a worldview: “What someone habitually does, and the symbols around which they order their lives, are at least as reliable an index to their worldview as the stories they ‘officially’ tell.”[86] Praxis and symbol together, in fact, are what Wright calls “culture.”[87] To be clear, Smith is right to point out that worldview-talk tends to be too rational and cerebral, and he has helpfully drawn our attention to the liturgies of culture.[88] But instead of disclosing the limitations of worldviews, he has pulled apart what ought to be kept together, which once more highlights the need for holistic education.
The Curtain Call: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?
Faith-learning integration for me as a biblical scholar, therefore, entails a broad sense of worldview that integrates all the stories at work in the classroom. Despite the contentious disputes about the meaning of each element of faith-learning integration on the one hand and the lack of guidance for biblical scholars specifically on the other, stories offer a uniquely suitable way forward. Not, once more, for self-validation, but for honest self-reflection, which only works if we engage stories critically, both the stories of popular culture and the stories of our own lives. As the shape of integration for biblical scholars sends them outward beyond biblical studies into the world of our students, we move out to the stories already engaging them, their own personal faith stories, and the other academic disciplines like philosophy, literature, ethics, biology, psychology, neurology, and more that teach us further about the holistic value of stories. While doing so, we relate all these stories back to the grand narrative of Scripture. The biblical story, we could say, is yet another story among many; indeed, another story alongside our own personal stories and the various stories we meet in popular culture. But from the vantage point of faith, the biblical story is an overarching narrative within which all other stories fit.
Of course, my primary role as a biblical educator is to teach students the story—the story par excellence that is a “capital S” story, we might say, because it is one that we ourselves play a part in. Retelling the story reinforces the shared worldview between me and my students. As Smith helpfully states, “Because we are story-telling animals, imbibing the story of Scripture is the primary way that our desire gets aimed at the kingdom.”[89] Indeed, we imbibe the story so that we know it, and we strive to know it so that we can inhabit it. Along these lines, Wright helpfully proposes a Five-Act model for conceiving of Scripture as a story that we indwell. The five acts include Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, and the Church.[90] The idea is that we find ourselves in that fifth and final act, and we await its conclusion. Our lives therefore, are structured by the drama of Scripture: we must live in light of where the story has been and in light of where it is going. This provides helpful assistance while discerning tricky ethical matters that the biblical authors neither addressed nor anticipated. Integrating faith and learning for biblical scholars, therefore, can appropriately look like engaging the stories that have already engaged students, and reminding them that their own personal stories, including their stories of faith, are caught up in a larger narrative. And so, a worldview shaped by the story of Scripture spills out into our praxis and informs the lives we live, since it is not fundamentally about information but holistic formation.
Integrating our own stories, in their particulars, is crucial to this worldview approach of faith-learning integration. Without this element we could run the risk of formation by assimilation and homogeneity, as theologian Willie James Jennings of Yale Divinity School warns,[91] shaping our students into “white self-sufficient men,”[92] instead of a people who form communion by working out the fragments of our lives and our stories together.[93]
Stories are also brought into the classroom as well because telling them and talking about them helps to foster a tighter community of learning. This occurs not only because sharing our own stories helps us open up to others and make greater points of connection with each other, but also because fictional stories have always had a community-building function to them. As Gottschall describes, historically this would occur as people gathered around beloved storytellers in the local village,[94] but it still happens today as we engage stories in our own timelines, even if we watch or read all by ourselves, because those stories become the basis of conversations, debates, and common points of reference. As Gottschall says, “We are still having a communal experience; it’s just spread out over space and time.”[95] Thus, discussing stories in class and relating them to the material can benefit the ethos and cohesion of the classroom community, especially as our connectedness to the larger story of Scripture is reinforced, since it encompasses them all and holds them all together. Our individual stories then shape the identity of the community and are retold as one of “our” group’s stories. As the finale to Hamilton (2015) powerfully reminds us, it matters “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”[96]
This also means that faith-learning integration requires us as theological educators to bring our full selves, our own stories, into our teaching. Our personal faith is part of our own story and students want to learn from us. As instructors, we are not just conduits of information. Students learning from us as they learn about us should be an indispensable part of the education process. With the internet, ChatGPT, and TikTok, students are overwhelmed with the ubiquity of information. But they can only get us if they show up in class. Thus, in our information ecosystem, it is important that instructors are relatable and build relationships with their students—something that the ubiquity of information will not offer them. This is facilitated through making ourselves and our stories known, whether this is through tangents, anecdotes, illustrations, or conversations outside of class time. As our personal stories are integrated into our teaching, we imbue our teaching with story-shaped content and so further connect with students.
As one example of what bringing this all together looks like in my courses, I teach a class on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. My contention is that our understandings of these virtues so often owe more to Western cultural influence, and specifically popular culture, than to the Christian theological tradition. To demonstrate this in my lectures, I analyze literature, comics, films, television shows, cartoons, and song lyrics to gain a sense for what people tend to mean by faith, hope, and love in contemporary society. The pop cultural examples that I analyze are specifically expressions of faith, hope, and love that I acknowledge have inevitably shaped how I view these virtues and thus how I choose to express them in my daily life. I then bring those cultural expressions of faith, hope, and love into conversation with biblical scholarship and theological reflection from church history and reflect on areas of overlap and disconnect with respect to my thinking and habits. Students are then instructed to go and do likewise, in miniature, as they write six “integrative book reviews” in which they are meant to read and review a book focusing on one of the theological virtues (two books per virtue). Along with each textbook, I give students a curated list of roughly twenty to thirty different films, television show episodes, popular documentaries, and short fictional writings tailored to the nuances of that textbook for them to choose and engage as part of the book review. In the first two sections of the paper, students are tasked with summarizing both the textbook and the pop-cultural piece that they selected with respect to the theological virtue under consideration. Then, in the third section, students bring the two pieces into conversation and so highlight points of alignment and misalignment between them. In the fourth and final section, students then reflect on the juxtaposition in the light of their own preconceptions about the theological virtues, and their own expressions of these virtues in their lives. The aim is for students to become more perceptive in their consumption of popular culture, to recognize how their own theological perspectives are culturally conditioned, and to live out the virtues with intentionality within the unfolding story of the Spirit’s work in God’s people. Anecdotally, and in anonymous evaluations, students express their appreciation for completing explicitly integrative assignments, such as the one outlined here.
In sum, as a Bible scholar, I am concerned to make sure that my students understand the context of the biblical texts—the history, culture, politics, language, religions, etc., that inform them. But both me and my students are likewise contextualized, and so integration means that our respective contexts need to be understood so that I can best meet the students where they are with the messages of the text. This means integrating the three sets of stories at work in the classroom: our own individual stories, the stories that shape us in popular culture, and the grand story of the biblical narrative. As a biblical scholar, I am concerned with the world from which the text emerged; but as a biblical scholar in the twenty-first century, I am also concerned with the world into which the text is going—a world full of stories that intersect with the story.
[1]. Arthur F. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, rev. ed. (Eerdmans, 1987), 55.
[2]. Eric Miller, “Anti-Intellectualism and the Integration of Faith and Learning,” Christian Scholar’s Review 47, no. 4 (2018): 329–33.
[3]. Paul Kaak, “Academic Faith Integration: Introduction to a New Section Within Christian Higher Education,” Christian Higher Education 15, no. 4 (2016): 194 (189–99).
[4]. Tom Hopper, dir., Les Misérables (Universal Pictures, 2012).
[5]. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, 45–60.
[6]. Cosgrove has helpfully provided a metasynthesis of the various labels and understandings of faith-learning integration to help scholars wade through the possibilities. See Preston B. Cosgrove, “Variations on a Theme: Convergent Thinking and the Integration of Faith and Learning,” Christian Higher Education 14, no. 4 (2015): 229–43.
[7]. Kenneth Badley, “The Faith/Learning Integration Movement in Christian Higher Education: Slogan or Substance?” Journal of Research on Christian Education 3, no. 1 (1994): 13–33.
[8]. Badley, “Faith/Learning Integration Movement in Christian Higher Education,” 28.
[9]. Kenneth Badley, “Clarifying ‘Faith-Learning Integration’: Essentially Contested Concepts and the Concept-Conception Distinction,” Journal of Education & Christian Belief 13, no. 1 (2009): 10 (7–17).
[10]. Badley here draws upon the work of the philosopher Walter Gallie.
[11]. Badley, “Clarifying ‘Faith-Learning Integration,’ ” 13.
[12]. Note Badley’s open-ended and dichotomist questions in “Faith/Learning Integration Movement in Christian Higher Education,” 26–27, and “Clarifying ‘Faith-Learning Integration,’ ” 15.
[13]. For a helpful introduction to speech-act theory as applied to biblical hermeneutics, see Jeannine K. Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2021), 20–22.
[14]. Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology (Cascade, 2011).
[15]. Meek, Loving to Know.
[16]. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Penguin Random House, 2018), 266.
[17]. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage Books, 1993), 70.
[18]. Postman, Technopoly, 83.
[19]. Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, 267.
[20]. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, 58.
[21]. As argued strongly by Duane Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College (Eerdmans, 2004), 34–84.
[22]. E.g., see especially the recent studies on faith by Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford University Press, 2017); Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker Academic, 2017); Jeanette Hagen Pifer, Faith as Participation: An Exegetical Study of Some Key Pauline Texts, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2.486 (Mohr Siebeck, 2019).
[23]. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies, vol. 1 (Baker, 2009), 32.
[24]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 60.
[25]. See especially Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19; Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2011); Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).
[26]. Victor Fleming, dir., The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939).
[27]. Aristotle, Poetics in Aristotle XXIII, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library 199 (Harvard University Press, 1999), 47, 49.
[28]. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 388–89.
[29]. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 390–91.
[30]. E.g., see Mary W. McCampbell, Imagining our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy (Fortress, 2022).
[31]. Shira Gabriel and Ariana F. Young, “Becoming a Vampire Without Being Bitten: The Narrative Collective-Assimilation Hypothesis,” Psychological Science 22.8 (2011): 990–94.
[32]. Loris Vezzali, Sofia Stathi, Dino Giovannini, Dora Capozza, and Elena Trifiletti, “The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 45, no. 2 (2015): 105–21.
[33]. Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better (William Collins, 2019), 207–208, 210.
[34]. Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos, 2018), 15.
[35]. Stanley Hauerwas, “A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down (1981),” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. Michael Cartwright and John Berkman (Duke University Press, 2001), 171–99. Also cf. Martha C. Nussbaum, “ ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990), 148–67; Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (Yale University Press, 1996), 294–95.
[36]. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Boston: Mariner, 2012), 67, cf. 56–59.
[37]. Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 20, 34, 77; Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 59–67, 148, 151.
[38]. See Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, rev. ed (Basic Books, 2017).
[39]. Storr, The Science of Storytelling, 136–79.
[40]. Storr, The Science of Storytelling, 210.
[41]. Storr, The Science of Storytelling, 211.
[42]. Jennifer L. Holberg, Nourishing Narratives: The Power of Story to Shape Our Faith (IVP, 2023).
[43]. So too, e.g., Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists (Eerdmans, 2013); Austin Carty, The Pastor’s Bookshelf: Why Reading Matters for Ministry, foreword by Thomas G. Long (Eerdmans, 2022).
[44]. Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper Perennial, 2008), 70; Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper, 2019), 8, 52.
[45]. As addressed by, e.g., Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams, 155–75.
[46]. Wolf, Reader, Come Home, 47.
[47]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 26.
[48]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 29.
[49]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 58.
[50]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 144.
[51]. Daniel Silliman, Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith (Eerdmans, 2021).
[52]. Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, and Mark G. Toulouse, eds., The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture (Westminster John Knox, 2016).
[53]. Cara Curtis, “Practicing Re-Imagination: An Interview with Vanessa Zoltan of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” Practical Matters 12 (2019): 113–20.
[54]. Dallas Jenkins, dir., The Chosen (Angel Studios, 2019). See especially the essays on the emotional and affective power of the show in Robert K. Gracia, Paul Gondreau, Patrick Gray, and Douglas S. Huffman, eds., Watching the Chosen: History, Faith, and Interpretation (Eerdmans, 2025).
[55]. “I Have Called You by Name,” Dallas Jenkins, dir., The Chosen (Angel Studios, 2019), streaming.
[56]. See Joe Fassler’s interview with fictional author Lev Grossman in The Atlantic, entitled, “Confronting Reality by Reading Fantasy,” August 5, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/08/going-home-with-cs-lewis/375560/.
[57]. Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life, foreword by Mark Labberton (IVP, 2017), 40, emphasis original.
[58]. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ & Culture, rev. ed. (HarperOne, 2001). For a biblical-theological critique of Niebuhr’s five categories, see D. A. Carson, Christ & Culture Revisited (Eerdmans, 2008).
[59]. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Cultural Hermeneutics: What Is Theological Education For? (Part 2 of 4),” Didaktikos: Journal of Theological Education 6, no. 2 (2022): 16.
[60]. Kutter Callaway, Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (Baylor University Press, 2013).
[61]. Niebuhr, Christ & Culture, 51–55.
[62]. Ron Clements and John Musker, dirs., The Little Mermaid (Walt Disney Pictures, 1989).
[63]. For a helpful introduction to some of these instances, see, e.g., Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East, rev. ed. (Paulist Press, 2006).
[64]. Edward M. Curtis, “Old Testament Wisdom: A Model for Faith-Learning Integration,” Christian Scholar’s Review 15, no. 3 (1986): 213–27.
[65]. Cf., Matthew Page, 100 Bible Films, BFI Screen Guides (Bloomsbury, 2022); John Anthony Dunne and Jeannine K. Brown, The Greatest Story Ever Retold: Envisioning Jesus Narratives from Gospels to Film (Baker Academic, forthcoming 2026).
[66]. N. T. Wright, “New Exodus, New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3–8 (1999),” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (SPCK / Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 160–68.
[67]. Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, 2nd ed., foreword by Luke Timothy Johnson (Eerdmans, 2002).
[68]. This idea has recently been modified and developed further by Christoph Heilig, Paulus als Erzähler? Eine narratologische Perspektive auf die Paulusbriefe, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 237 (de Gruyer, 2020); Christoph Heilig, Paul the Storyteller: A Narratological Approach (Eerdmans, 2024).
[69]. See the relevant discussions in, e.g., Jerry L. Sumney, Steward of God’s Mysteries: Paul and Early Church Tradition, foreword by Patrick Gray (Eerdmans, 2017).
[70]. Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, foreword by Nijay K. Gupta, 20th anniversary edition (Eerdmans, 2021).
[71]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 24, 31, 41–43.
[72]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 19–24.
[73]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 220.
[74]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 110.
[75]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 27.
[76]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 18–19, 25; cf. David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith, eds., Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning, foreword by Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass (Eerdmans, 2011).
[77]. Corina R. Kaul, Kimberly A. Hardin, and A. Alexander Beaujean, “Predicting Faculty Integration of Faith and Learning,” Christian Higher Education 16, no. 3 (2017): 172–87.
[78]. See especially, Randall Lehmann Sorenson, “Doctoral Students’ Integration of Psychology and Christianity: Perspectives Via Attachment Theory and Multidimensional Scaling,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 4 (1997): 530–48; Jennifer S. Ripley, Fernando L. Garzon, M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Michael W. Mangis, and Christopher J. Murphy, “Pilgrim’s Progress: Faculty and University Factors in Graduate Student Integration of Faith and Profession,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 37, no. 1 (2009): 5–14; Elizabeth C. Sites, Fernando L. Garzon, Frederick A. Milacci, and Barbara Boothe, “A Phenomenology of the Integration of Faith and Learning,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 37, no. 1 (2009): 28–38; Octavio Ramirez, Pauline Sayers, Derek Wood, and Finbar Benjamin, “Integration of Faith and Learning at a Faith-Based Historically Black University: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Research on Christian Education 29, no. 2 (2020): 126–36.
[79]. Ron Clements and John Musker, dirs., Aladdin (Walt Disney Pictures, 1992).
[80]. Wright’s creative proposal has been modified further in a few interesting ways by, e.g., Samuel Wells and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, but Wright’s articulation of the role of stories within worldviews still stands. See Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Brazos, 2004); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (WJK, 2005).
[81]. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1 (Fortress, 1992), 122.
[82]. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 233–41.
[83]. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 40.
[84]. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 40.
[85]. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 123–24.
[86]. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 41.
[87]. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 124.
[88]. This he continues to develop admirably in the other two volumes in that series: James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, Cultural Liturgies vol. 2 (Baker, 2013); James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, Cultural Liturgies vol. 3 (Baker, 2017).
[89]. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 196.
[90]. N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7–32; N. T. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 140–43; N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (HarperOne, 2011), 121–27.
[91]. Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, Theological Education Between the Times (Eerdmans, 2020), 110–11.
[92]. Jennings, After Whiteness, 7.
[93]. Jennings, After Whiteness, 10, 32, 39, 44, 112.
[94]. Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 18–20, 136–38.
[95]. Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, 137.
[96]. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, dir. Thomas Kall (New York, 2015).
