Stories are the most powerful thing that humans do. Not nuclear weapons or AI or empires. Stories. Because stories are the reason we develop weapons and computers and states and brands and art and gods and . . .
The stories that we tell shape the world. Whether they shape nations or individuals, policies or personal decisions about jobs or who we pursue romantically, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, the stories that we tell everyone, shape what the world becomes.
We have such a strange relationship with stories. On the one hand, stories are everywhere. We want to know what celebrities and our coworkers are up to: “what’s her story?” Older folks want our privacy, younger ones are afraid that they will not be seen or known. And our stories are ever-present. On the other hand, we seem to believe that stories are for children. Made up things that we need to grow out of. That the real world is the world of data. Data stacked and scraped, tracked and bought and sold from phones and purchases and every internet search that we have ever done. Data that allows Target to know a man’s teenage daughter is pregnant before he does, as the well-known story goes.
And therein lies the rub. All the data in the world doesn’t matter without the story that makes sense of it. Lives are more than data points. The way that the world works is more than just data points. Data gets tracked bought and sold because of what it means and meaning is a far more complicated thing than an accumulation of data. Why was the father so furious with Target? Because of what the story would—and ultimately did—say about his daughter, about him.
The reality is that databases and spreadsheets are not somehow wildly opposed to the stories we tell. They are of a piece. When we tell stories that are mostly data and little connective tissue, little in the way of meaning, they fall flat. We develop those tools because of and for a motivating story: in the case of large retailers, the story is ultimately a story of money. The story of buying and selling. Of consumption. To be sure, there are lots of other, smaller, stories along the way. Stories of the people and the companies that interact with that retailer. Stories of the communities they impact. Good stories and bad stories. Stories that eddy and swirl for a moment and then die. Stories whose ripples continue to move out and affect people who will never know the origins of the wave that just hit their boat.
But what happens when we get the stories wrong? When we miss the opening act or focus so intently on a small detail that we miss the sweep of the thing? When a powerful story goes wrong it can go really wrong. Hitler told a powerful story and the entire world was engulfed in war, over 50 million civilians and combatants died, and the world experienced a taste of nuclear war for the first time. As horrible as the Holocaust itself was, 6 million (6 million!) Jews not to mention Poles, Roma, the disabled, are dwarfed by the 10s of millions of deaths caused by Stain or Mao. To say nothing of smaller atrocities both nearer and farther in time. When the stories we tell lead otherwise ordinary people to torture and rape and murder, we have to face up to the facts: a story gone wrong is a terribly dangerous thing, even in the hands of the well-intentioned.
Because stories do go wrong. And sometimes it’s our fault.
Depending on the circumstances, the people involved, the time we have, and a host of other factors large and small, we may tell the same story in very different ways. The short version, the long version, the dramatic version, the understated version, maybe even the real version somewhere in there. In each version, we make split-second decisions: what elements do I have to include, what can I omit, and how do I phrase this for maximum effect? It can be a tricky process because we know instinctively that there is a difference between a short version and a truncated version even if we don’t know exactly where that line is or can’t articulate it.
A truncated story leaves out important elements. It skips things that would help everything to click into place for the audience. We have probably all seen movies in which the theatrical release cut important elements and when we see the extended cut on DVD or streaming, suddenly things make much more sense (Justice League and X-Men Days of Future Past come to mind). In the worst cases, a truncated story completely changes where the story goes.
This is doubly true when it comes to our faith, and to the story Christianity tells about the world. If we truncate the story, if we reduce it merely to a collection of data points, we not only don’t compellingly tell the story, we twist it into something that it is not. Well-intentioned, we nevertheless lead people astray. We tell them less than the truth. Too often we are guilty of telling a story of a truncated Gospel and then we wonder why people live truncated lives and have a truncated faith.
Christopher J.H. Wright gives a clear statement of what is at stake:
…the Bible clearly reveals the God who drives the whole story of the universe forward with a sense of divine purpose and ultimate destiny, who also calls into existence a people who share in that divine mission, a people with an identity and role within the plan of God.1
The story that Christianity tells is not just another story that we humans make up to make sense of our small and broken lives. It is the story that makes sense of every other story. And if we get that wrong, we get everything wrong. Or at least skewed. The amazing thing is that for all of the ways that we get it wrong, God is still working in and through our wrong turns and wrong tellings of the story. God still moves, still reveals, still redeems. It’s written into the story. His story.
Because, as Wright reminds us in his conversation with Apollos Watered, God’s story doesn’t start in Genesis 3 with our problem, but in Genesis 1 with God. A God who has a plan. Who creates us and gives us a place in his story. Not just any place. We are not throwaway characters. We are a reflection of the main character, made to shine the light of his glory out into the universe. So when we get our part wrong when we truncate the story, we don’t reduce him, but we do reduce our part, our ability to make him known, to draw others to their parts. Which makes a tragedy of the greatest story ever told.
- Christopher J.H. Wright, The Great Story and the Great Commission, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023), xi. ↩︎
