Quotes about Story

One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.

myth" in this strict sense is a story that purports to be in some sense "historical" and that encapsulates and reinforces the strongly held beliefs of the community that tells it.

Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.

When Matthew has the angel tell Joseph that the child to be born will be "Emmanuel," "God with us," and then finishes his gospel with Jesus himself telling his followers that he will be "with them always," alert readers know that the entire story ought to be read with this in mind.

The second speaker contributing to what we hear the gospels saying is the one that enables us to hear the story of Jesus as the story of Israel's God coming back to his people as he had always promised.

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.

what we notice in Mark 10 is something which seems to operate in a different dimension. For a start, it is a call, not to specific acts of behavior, but to a type of character. For another thing, it is a call to see oneself as having a role to play within a story—and a story where, to join up with the

The gospels] are not merely antiquarian documents telling a strange story about a powerful but now long-gone moment of history. They are the moment of sunrise on a new morning, casting a strange glory over the landscape and inviting all readers to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, and come out to enjoy the fully dawned day and give themselves to its tasks.

When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.

But the fact is that the Bible itself is the grandest of grand stories, yet it prizes truth and reason without being modernist, and it prizes countless stories within its overall story without being postmodern either. In short, the Bible is both rational and experiential, propositional as well as relational, so that genuinely biblical arguments work in any age and with any person.