The Story Behind Each Story
From 1 Timothy 1 – 1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the commandment of God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope,
2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables…
In The Statesman and the Storyteller, Mark Zwonitzer parallels the lives of friends John Hay and Mark Twain. Zwonitzer compares that while Hay worked through the channels of the Establishment in positions up to Secretary of State, Twain's means were different. "He was shy to do the shaking himself, except in the guise of one of his fictional characters."
Twain was onto something biblical. As Paul's first epistle to Timothy continues to demonstrate the bond between the two, Paul is a man who understands the pull of the even an acknowledged to be untrue. Some interfering with Timothy's work in the Gospel of Jesus Christ will plainly teach another doctrine, says what comes down to us as the letter's third verse. Not every distraction from reliance on Christ and Christ alone will be so obvious, Paul is well aware. He warns Timothy that fables can worm their way into individual hearts and into the collective consciousness of a congregation.
The word he uses here, and in similar counsel to Timothy in 1 Timothy: 4:7 and 2 Timothy 4:4 and to another young protégé in a battle for the minds of his congregation in Titus 1:14 is the Greek word from which we get our word for myth and mythology. If we can't imagine worshiping or even giving much thought to Zeus, and Aphrodite, and Apollo, we may think we have outgrown this threat. Ursula K. Le Guin makes the connection for us, writing, “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
Our stories may involve a sophisticated, high-definition effort to woo our attention. They may involve the wager of millions of dollars from advertisers or recording executives, but we, like the Greeks, and the Romans, and societies before them are surrounded by stories. They will inevitably impact us. Should we fashion ourselves as stubborn against society's errors as Plato, then we must take into account his observation, "Those who tell stories rule society." They rule by the selection of what to leave out, what to tell, and how to tell it. "Dramas would be ruined," confesses Will Durant in The Age of Reason Begins, "if they impartially described reality."
If we admit with Paul and with Randall Wallace in Living the Braveheart Life, "It is the tales we tell ourselves that make us who we are," we will be aware of the ways in which the stories around us shape us. If we begin to slip away from being continually captivated by the real drama and magnetism of Christ, to search for or to teach some other doctrine, or just to leave an open space for the culture to fill in, we are ready to have our assumptions shaken.
Some, recognizing the power of the culture to shape our thoughts and our thoughts, says Marcus Aurelius, to dye our souls, would attempt to cross-examine joylessly and noisily every narrative not included in the pages of the Bible. These discount the mind's hunger as a narrative-making machine. Shut out everyone else's story out of suspicion of worldliness, and we will stitch together our own compelling story from the scant impressions we get from the people around us. Our brains, says pastor David Allen Brown, are drawn to drama.
By grace, then, God gives us drama. Yes, He gives us His Word as a constant rubric against which to check the assumptions behind the culture's entertainment. But, as when He walked the Earth, His heart to engage the culture and portray the Gospel goes beyond even a sacred written text. As surely as both the lives around us and those played out in our songs and on our screens hold tightly to some theological fallacies, the Holy Spirit can likewise use them to point to Christ.
"Do not," insists John Bunyan in A Few Sights from Hell, "slight the truth because it is discovered in a parable." Although Bunyan is referencing the infallible parable in Luke 16, I believe he would have us alive to the world around us with discerning hearts, aware of what pantomimes the true Gospel, and what shows the flaws in false gospels. We can benefit from Paul's instruction, originally to Timothy and be discerning about the cultural stories to which our attention is drawn.
2 Timothy, a true son in the faith: grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord.
3 As I urged you when I went into Macedonia – remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, 4 nor give heed to fables…
In The Statesman and the Storyteller, Mark Zwonitzer parallels the lives of friends John Hay and Mark Twain. Zwonitzer compares that while Hay worked through the channels of the Establishment in positions up to Secretary of State, Twain's means were different. "He was shy to do the shaking himself, except in the guise of one of his fictional characters."
Twain was onto something biblical. As Paul's first epistle to Timothy continues to demonstrate the bond between the two, Paul is a man who understands the pull of the even an acknowledged to be untrue. Some interfering with Timothy's work in the Gospel of Jesus Christ will plainly teach another doctrine, says what comes down to us as the letter's third verse. Not every distraction from reliance on Christ and Christ alone will be so obvious, Paul is well aware. He warns Timothy that fables can worm their way into individual hearts and into the collective consciousness of a congregation.
The word he uses here, and in similar counsel to Timothy in 1 Timothy: 4:7 and 2 Timothy 4:4 and to another young protégé in a battle for the minds of his congregation in Titus 1:14 is the Greek word from which we get our word for myth and mythology. If we can't imagine worshiping or even giving much thought to Zeus, and Aphrodite, and Apollo, we may think we have outgrown this threat. Ursula K. Le Guin makes the connection for us, writing, “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
Our stories may involve a sophisticated, high-definition effort to woo our attention. They may involve the wager of millions of dollars from advertisers or recording executives, but we, like the Greeks, and the Romans, and societies before them are surrounded by stories. They will inevitably impact us. Should we fashion ourselves as stubborn against society's errors as Plato, then we must take into account his observation, "Those who tell stories rule society." They rule by the selection of what to leave out, what to tell, and how to tell it. "Dramas would be ruined," confesses Will Durant in The Age of Reason Begins, "if they impartially described reality."
If we admit with Paul and with Randall Wallace in Living the Braveheart Life, "It is the tales we tell ourselves that make us who we are," we will be aware of the ways in which the stories around us shape us. If we begin to slip away from being continually captivated by the real drama and magnetism of Christ, to search for or to teach some other doctrine, or just to leave an open space for the culture to fill in, we are ready to have our assumptions shaken.
Some, recognizing the power of the culture to shape our thoughts and our thoughts, says Marcus Aurelius, to dye our souls, would attempt to cross-examine joylessly and noisily every narrative not included in the pages of the Bible. These discount the mind's hunger as a narrative-making machine. Shut out everyone else's story out of suspicion of worldliness, and we will stitch together our own compelling story from the scant impressions we get from the people around us. Our brains, says pastor David Allen Brown, are drawn to drama.
By grace, then, God gives us drama. Yes, He gives us His Word as a constant rubric against which to check the assumptions behind the culture's entertainment. But, as when He walked the Earth, His heart to engage the culture and portray the Gospel goes beyond even a sacred written text. As surely as both the lives around us and those played out in our songs and on our screens hold tightly to some theological fallacies, the Holy Spirit can likewise use them to point to Christ.
"Do not," insists John Bunyan in A Few Sights from Hell, "slight the truth because it is discovered in a parable." Although Bunyan is referencing the infallible parable in Luke 16, I believe he would have us alive to the world around us with discerning hearts, aware of what pantomimes the true Gospel, and what shows the flaws in false gospels. We can benefit from Paul's instruction, originally to Timothy and be discerning about the cultural stories to which our attention is drawn.
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