Cosper The Stories We Tell

How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3711-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Reihe: Cultural Renewal

The average American watches 5 hours of TV every day. Collectively, we spend roughly $30 billion on movies each year. Simply put, we're entertainment junkies. But can we learn something from our insatiable addiction to stories? Mike Cosper thinks so. From horror flicks to rom-coms, the tales we tell and the myths we weave inevitably echo the narrative underlying all of history: the story of humanity's tragic sin and God's triumphant salvation. This entertaining book connects the dots between the stories we tell and the one, great Story-helping us better understand the longings of the human heart and thoughtfully engage with the movies and TV shows that capture our imaginations.

Mike Cosper is the director of the Harbor Institute for Faith and Culture, where he works to create resources for Christians living in a post-Christian world. Prior to that, he was a founding pastor at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where he served for sixteen years as the pastor of worship and arts.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cosper, Mike

Leseproben

1

THE STORIES WE TELL

We live in the stories we tell ourselves.

Grant Morrison, Supergods

It’s often said that we tell stories to know who we are—to understand ourselves and our place in the world. It’s as though all of our stories are a way for the imagination to poke at the human condition, testing its borders and depths, looking for ways to understand the why behind the what of our lives. In his memoir, author Salman Rushdie describes how his father told him old folk tales and legends, teaching him that “man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told stories to understand what kind of creature it was.”1

Stories help give us a sense of place. They stir our imaginations and help us to experience love, betrayal, hatred, and compassion that might be otherwise foreign. They prepare us for experiences like love, or help us process things like sorrow and suffering.

The way that we understand our lives, our relationships, our past and future is all tied up in story. Your past is not only a set of facts. It’s also a story you tell. “I was born here, I grew up here, I married there, we had our children then, and we watched them grow up.”

Your future, too, is a story, but it isn’t built upon memory. It’s a story of anticipation—hopes or fears that seem imminent and likely. “I’ll go here, I’ll do this, I’ll try that.”

Even your fantasy life, the daydreams into which you wander, is a story you tell. We drift off, playing out visions of winning the lottery, telling off our boss, fulfilling our loves or lusts, making things right with broken relationships, or escaping from the circumstances of the much less glamorous reality in which we live.

Stories both entertain and educate, occupying the mind and forming it at the same time. Uncle Tom’s Cabin stirred the compassion of a populace, turning its conscience against the institution of slavery. It was also a gripping narrative, pulling the reader along in a story that one felt desperate to resolve.

Evolutionary theorists have tried to make sense of the brain’s capacity for (and gravity toward) storytelling and fiction. Possessing a worldview that understands life through the lenses of natural selection and biological purpose, they wonder why so much human energy goes toward making up and retelling stories. Why imagination? Why fiction? Why daydreams and oral traditions? Why is so much biological energy dedicated to the storytelling organ in our heads?

Some theorize that we evolved a capacity to imagine in order to plan for feeding, hunting, and mating, and that once the capacity evolved, we started using imagination for stories as a side effect. Others theorize that storytelling is like the feathers of a peacock—something developed to help attract mates.

It seems to me that the answer is much more simple: we were made in the image of a storytelling God.

THE BIG STORY IN A WORLD OF STORIES

Christians believe an audacious fact. At the heart of our faith is the bold claim that in a world full of stories, with a world’s worth of heroes, villains, comedies, tragedies, twists of fate, and surprise endings, there is really only one story. One grand narrative subsumes and encompasses all the other comings and goings of every creature—real or fictitious—on the earth. Theologians call it “redemption history”; my grandfather called it the “old, old story.”

Jesus affirmed this one grand narrative in a moment of frustration with the Pharisees, bursting, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). He wanted these men, whose lives were devoted to the Scriptures and to the narratives and history of the people of God, to see that it was all meant to point to him.

The apostle Paul got it, too. He stood in the courts of the pantheistic Romans, on their own sort of “holy ground” where ideas were exchanged and religions were compared, contrasted, and nitpicked. He heard their stories and their poetry, and he knew that ultimately the thing they were looking for was Jesus. “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).

We can see it, too. If the Bible is true, then it has a way of encompassing and overarching every story ever told. Our personal stories, our fiction, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are all accounted for in a sovereign God’s design for the world. The stories we tell are all a part of the story he’s telling. We tell stories because we’re broken creatures hungering for redemption, and our storytelling is a glimmer of hope, a spark of eternity still simmering in our hearts (Eccles. 3:15).

The story told in the Bible encompasses past, present, and future. It tells a story that begins long before us and ends long after us, and it calls us to find our place in its pages. It shows God’s people on a journey toward a wonderful and hope-filled climax. It shows God as the master storyteller—the writer/director/star, if you will—rescuing Israel from Egypt and guiding them home to the Promised Land, weaving a surprising and gritty narrative that led from garden to wilderness, from Abraham to Moses to Joshua, from wandering to Promised Land to exile and back.

JESUS AND THE STORY OF GOD

God’s story took a shocking turn when the King of the universe was born in a barn and walked among us. And God-in-Flesh didn’t walk around dishing out moral advice and high-minded philosophical rhetoric; he told stories. Lots of them. People would ask him a theological or spiritual question, and Jesus’s answer would begin, “Once upon a time, there was a shepherd,” or, “There were seven brides . . .” As N. T. Wright once said of Jesus’s ministry, “Stories change the world.”2

After dying and rising again, Jesus commissioned an army of storytellers to carry on his mission. Look at the sermons in the book of Acts; they’re stories. The entire New Testament was written by men who knew that they were living in the tension of a great story. Having witnessed the life of Jesus, they were now carriers of his story, knowing that it wasn’t over. They knew that it would one day come to a rousing, glorious climax when he returned. Like the prophets before them, the apostles told a story whose ending had yet to be carried out, an ending foreshadowed with promises of final justice and restoration.

The Bible as a whole manages to simultaneously tell one big story and many smaller ones. Like Russian dolls, one can unpack them layer-by-layer. There’s the whole narrative of redemption history, which contains the story of Israel, which contains the story of the exile and return, which contains the story of Joshua, Ruth, David, Hosea, and all the others. Each subsequent layer alludes to the whole, providing a new way of thinking about the whole. The story of Israel can be understood as a microcosm redemption history: it is a miniature of the whole. So can the exile. So can Esther. Within the Bible, stories shadow, reference, and echo one another. And Jesus gave us the key to uniting them: “they . . . bear witness about me” (John 5:39).

FINDING OUR PLACE IN THE STORY

The Bible also invites a kind of personalization and allegorization (like all stories do). Kids learn songs in Sunday school like “Dare to Be a Daniel,” and preachers invite us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of Joseph, David, Paul, or Peter. Jesus told parables because he knew they were the way that we understand the world and our place in it. When telling the story of the prodigal son, he knew that we might see ourselves as the runaway prodigal, or the “obedient” and indignant older brother.

By identifying with these characters, we learn something about God, ourselves, the advancing kingdom, and the darkness around us. If we believe that the Bible is what it says it is—God’s Word, perfectly crafted for revealing the truth and leading us to real, everlasting life—then we must believe there is something powerful and soul-shaping about stories. Why else would God use such a vehicle for revealing himself?

Not only that, we must believe that the story of the Bible—the story of salvation history—really is the greatest story ever told. It’s the story that interprets and measures all other stories. It’s been told in perfect order, in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4; Eph. 1:10). It’s a story that is both written into our DNA (Rom. 1:20) and impossible to believe apart from a miracle (1 Cor. 1:20–31). The world both longs to hear this story and hates its proclamation.

So what happens, then, in a world full of image-bearing storytellers who simultaneously long for redemption and hide from it? They tell other stories. Lots of them.

CHANNEL SURFING The Romcom Gospel

There’s no arguing with the fact that romantic comedies tend to have the same plots, but have you ever noticed that their form matches the form of the Big Story? Several years ago, I heard Martin Ban, pastor of Christ Church Santa Fe, refer to it as “The Gospel According to Chick Flicks.”

Romantic comedies usually begin with some kind of “spark”—a romantic possibility between two people. This is followed by an original sin—a problem that stands between the two people ever getting together. The couple then has to find their way to redemption, and the movie ends with the two drifting off into the sunset, happy ever after.

Consider a few examples.

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