continued from part II…

This is why image and metaphor become so central to our experience of spirituality; it is why myth is so important to the Christian narrative, because these are the ways we have to communicate truth that is bigger than our experience.

True speech about God is narrative in form. Theology is history. A divorce between the ‘Christ of faith’ and the ‘Jesus of history’ only arises if faith and history have first been separated. Christian theology has been so much dominated by pagan Greek metaphysics that it has lost the narrative character. The theology of the Gospels is typically in the form of parable – stories of concrete mundane realities in which the nature of God’s rule may be grasped by faith. The main tradition of Western theology has seen this as something merely illustrative of truth which must be properly stated in abstract and timeless propositions.
_Leslie Newbigen

Proposition has been the holy grail of the modern worldview, the true or false statement that reduces truth down to a digestible sound bite. We have taken story and metaphor and pulled propositions out to help us understand what is being communicated. An example of this is when we read the parables of Jesus and the give sermons explaining what he meant to say. Pastors have created an art form of out the practise of pulling lessons out of stories. We have believed that metaphor points us towards proposition. That story is something less than true and its value is derived from our ability to interpret and apply the hidden lessons.

Because of this low view of narrative, proposition has gotten a bad wrap in emerging circles because it has been seen as a means to edit truth in order for it to fit our story. You need to look no further than the wealth and prosperity gospel of the western church to see that what we often understand as a universal truth can only work within out limited experience of the world. Of course, the reality is that proposition is important. It is the only way we have to talk about what is true. It is the only means we have to communicate our understanding or ideas. Instead of rejecting the concept of propositional truth we simply need to expand our horizons to understand that metaphor and story are valuable in their form not only as means toward proposition but also as a tool to communicate above the line of cultural bias. In the emerging worldview metaphor ca be a mediator between an absolute that cannot be contained within our limited experience of reality and our understanding which is a limited application of that truth in time and space. Metaphor, image, story and myth communicate something to us of the vast nature of absolute truth. As we interact with those stories we must develop propositional statements that apply our understanding of the truth story to our particular experience of life but we need to be wary of placing our perspective in plane with God’s.

It’s for this very reason that we are continually called to re-imagine the stories we tell about God. Have they ceased to describe God for us and become absolute definitions? Have we used them to make him relative to us instead of inviting us to relate to him. Have they stopped inviting us into the story of God and began to fit him into the story of us.