Quotes About Narrative

For far too long now Christians have told the story of Jesus as if it hooked up not with the story of Israel, but simply with the story of human sin as in Genesis 3, skipping over the story of Israel

They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I

As I have written elsewhere, the larger biblical narrative offers us a framework for developing and taking forward a holistic mission which refuses to split apart full-on evangelism, telling people about Jesus with a view to bringing them to faith, and full-on kingdom-of-God work, labouring alongside anyone and everyone with a heart for [154] the common good so that God's sovereign and saving rule may be glimpsed on earth as in heaven.

Here again the creeds leave an ominous gap. They don't mention Israel at all.

The Christian churches in general have always been subject to the temptation to use the Bible to annotate the story we want to tell for ourselves, rather than allow the Bible to tell its own story and invite us to join in.

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.

So it has proved in the long term, as the de-Judaized story had to find another narrative framework and eventually came up with the "works contract," in which the history of Israel was merely an example of people getting things wrong, even though it also contained a few detached promises pointing into the long-distant future.

We may only be reading from the New Testament one paragraph of Paul, but as we get close to that reading and look not only at it but through it we can see the entire sweep of Paul's vision, of the biblical narrative focused now on Jesus and his messianic death and resurrection.

The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible" and its own great narrative. We are not at liberty to replace this with narratives of our own.

Who is the "me" here? The "I" and "me" of Romans 7 is a literary device through which Paul is telling the life story of Israel under the Torah.

Theories of atonement do not need to be superimposed on an abstract narrative about Jesus, as has so often been attempted. They grow out of the real-life Jesus stories we already have. It is astonishing that the four gospels have been so underused in "atonement theology.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence:

It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one.

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

Literalism involves a fundamental misconception of the mental processes of biblical man and ignorance of his modes of self-expression. It thus misrepresents the purport of the narrative, obscures the meaningful and enduring in it and destroys its relevancy.

My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn't mentioned such an important plot point.

So there's a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn't about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story

This intriguing debut collection of short stories displays craft, discipline and narrative strength.

On my book, Fly on the Wall and Other Stories, This intriguing debut collection of short stories displays craft, discipline and narrative strength.

That was the best kind of story: when the teller was as much under its spell as the listener.

Well, I like him. There's a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?" She shrugged. "It's entirely up to him." "What do you mean?" He smiled quizzically at her. "Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices," she replied. "Choices," he echoed. "Of who they become.

Pero el relato -el hecho de relacionar acontecimientos y personas en una historia- es precisamente lo que da sentido a la existencia humana.