Quotes about Narrative

The political agency of YHWH comes, in Israelite tradition, to be a stable, orderly cultic presence, but without surrendering any of the force of agency known in the exodus narrative itself. Thus "glory" becomes a cover term that holds together forceful agency and abiding presence

The narrative knows the way in which hungry peasants, in need of food from the monopoly, will pay their money, then forfeit their cattle, and then finally give up their land, because Pharaoh leverages food in order to enhance his power. In the end, the peasants are so "happy" that they asked to be "owned":

From beginning to end the narrative shows, with no rush to conclude, how the religious claims of Egyptian gods are nullified by this Lord of freedom. The narrative shows, with delighted lingering, how the politics of oppression is overcome by the practice of justice and compassion.

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.

False Narrative: The Kingdom of God is Future No serious biblical scholar would deny that Jesus' proclaimed the kingdom of God. However, many scholars conclude that Jesus was not talking about our present world but rather an epoch in history that has not yet begun.

At the end of life, each of us must answer the question, Whose story captured my soul?

We must rip the foundations out from under all the bastions of human reasoning that say, "I don't need God!" We must demolish every non-God story of life. We must pulverize every God-is-not-good life narrative.

All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story.

If we are to use the Bible effectively, then we must use it the way God wrote it — in narrative form. Our team rejects the notion that the Bible is simply an encyclopedia of disconnected Bible verses. God's Word is less like a cookbook and more like a novel.

Augustine, the most famous convert of antiquity, was puzzled that he could have held so firmly to so many different falsehoods; he was not astounded that there are so many different truths. His conversion was not from explanation to narrative, but from one explanation to another. When he crossed the line from paganism to Christianity, he arrived in the territory of a truth beyond further challenge.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.