The Significance of Story, of Poetry, and of You
"Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith..." - Hebrews 12:2, NIV
In my undergraduate studies of theology, I have spent copious amounts of time ingesting and regurgitating doctrinal information about God. I and my copy of Wayne Grudem’s “Systematic Theology” have spent many late nights together. Truthfully, I have my qualms with the text for more reasons than one, but for the purposes of this post, I will limit my discussion to one rather large conflict. This conflict would be that the way God communicates is primarily through story, not through revealing facts about Himself that we could take point-by-point notes from.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand and appreciate the value that doctrine and various forms of non-narrative forms of theology bring to our understanding of God. The phrasing and rephrasing of theological debates from ages past may be extremely interesting and ultimately helpful in how we might understand truths about God. But that’s just it: much of our discussion that surrounds God is an attempt to reduce Him to a doctrine through which we might understand God and how He works so we might be on the side of “the good guy”. So how could we evade falling into the trap of only knowing God through some sort of scientific process? A friend on our journey with God would be the concept of story.
Towards the end of his bout with atheism, the famed Christian author, C.S. Lewis, mentioned the importance of myth that shifted his understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In 2004, a scholar by the name of Bruce Young wrote about this particular shift in Lewis’ thought of ‘true myth’:
“He came to accept the Gospels as, in a sense, myth—but true myth, myth that had actually happened.”1
There is plenty of attention on the fact of Christ’s historical placement, and of course, one must recognize Jesus Christ’s historicity. Along with His historicity, however, one must recognize the shocking story of a God who died and the same God who came back to life. This is a story that is famously readapted in Lewis’ portrayal of Aslan, the Lion-patron of the mythical land of Narnia. But such a myth holds truth: through Aslan, Lewis presents an image of the Gospel of Christ.
However, there is more to this story. It is not a mere fairy tale that loses its relevance with time. There exists, now, the story of you. When sin was presented as a conflict all those years ago, the story of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice was for the resolution to the story of you. The writer of the book of Hebrews encourages us to look to Jesus: “the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2, ESV).
In place of “founder”, some translations choose to use the word “author” (see NKJV).
Moreover, the title of this online project is deliberately inspired by the Greek word, poiema. The word appears in a beloved verse in Scripture, Ephesians 2:10 when the writer, Paul, states that “we are his workmanship” (Eph. 2:10, ESV). Other biblical translations prefer to use “handiwork” (NIV), “masterpiece” (NLT), or — my personal favorite — “what he has made us” (NRSV). The word is an enigma. It carries such a diverse range of meanings. The particularity of the word speaks to its magnitude.
The magnitude of the word poiema is what our English word, poem, draws its meaning from. Poiema essentially means “something created”. As a poem, then, we can only recognize its characteristics by the fact that it is a creative force.
Now, Paul makes an abrasive claim. Despite our failings and foibles, Paul states that we as a human community hold the artistic hand of God. We are the poem of God, the “something created” that ventures into the land beyond language, the wordless atmosphere that God creates in His studio of majesty.
The Christian singer-songwriter, Andy Squyres, claims that “The language of God is closer to poetry than systematics.” This holds true in the fact that the majority of Scripture is poetry: a creative force that attempts to praise an infinitely glorious God using the artistic energy of words and thought.
And we as humans are the characteristic artistry of the One so boundless. We are God communicating His image to the world.
To close off this entry, I want to leave you with a few compelling questions:
What does it mean to author a story or poem?
Would it help you to view your own life as a story with a narrative rather than a randomized sequence of events?
What would it mean if we recognized the story of God in Scripture and in ourselves?
https://pillars.taylor.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=inklings_forever