In the beginning were stories, not texts

by Choan-Seng Song

The Christian Bible is fundamentally a story. Writers, painters, sculptors, artists, and indeed, people of all walks of life live by the telling of their stories. Stories are the most basic mode of human communication. Thus it is vital to ask why Christians and above all Christian theologians so often fail to express their faith in terms of story. The vast majority of the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, consists of stories. Jesus proclaimed and taught about the Reign of God through stories and parables. At the heart of the Christian faith are stories, not concepts, propositions, or ideas....