More Than Just A Story

“Some theologians feel that “the Christian thing” is either a story or it is nothing that can speak to contemporary sensibility. This is a counsel of despair. The New Testament faith is not just a story. It is also a strenuous effort to show how the import of the story must be made out: not only understood but, above all, appropriated. That requires theological work. Moreover, both as story and as theology the Christian faith has now, and has always had, to compete with other stories and other theologies. So I think it is a fundamental and far-reaching mistake to suppose that telling the story is the whole thing. What one makes of the world and of one’s own existence on the strength of the story: that is the payoff.”
Julian Hartt