The Stories We Tell and the Narratives That Shape Us: Embodied Theology

I was listening to an interview with author Cole Arthur Riley on her book This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us

In it she says that “the truest stories are rarely the ones that get told”. By this she means the stories we tell about ourselves, about others, and about the world in which we live.

She locates the primary reason for this in the fact that such stories are shaped primarily by external forces. We are, others are, the world is, the stories those external forces tell about us. And it is often the forces with the most power that determine which of those stories get told. This is as true for those of us who exist in a group like this, as it is for the ways the stories we can tell about the world shape how we see the world and act in the world. What makes this more problematic is that, be it in theology or in the world, we tend to take such stories and turn them into propositional truths which then bind one or the world or an idea to that proposition. The stories not only define us, but ones interpretation of that story defines us.

This had me thinking of another book that I recommend quite often- Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology by James William McClendon Jr.

In this book McClendon makes a case for biographical theology as the antidote for propositional theology, which has run rampant through much of the modern theological landscape. Biographical theology is really just a reconstitution of narrative theology given a personalized and relational twist. Such an approach dares to wonder about this- if an existent God tells a story about Himself, about us, and about this world, how would this reshape who we are, how we see the world, and who we see God to be, if we gave this story the same sort of defining power over our world and over our lives? Which of course begs the further observation- which story is in fact being told, and how do we genuinely hear the story of God without our own stories getting in the way?

We can, I believe, say this with confidence: the stories we tell, or the stories another tell about us, matter deeply, and perhaps matter most of all. Because they determine who God is, who we are, and how we see the world. The challenge of biographical theology then is to pay attention to the ways we find ourselves in those stories and who precisely has the power to place us in them in particular ways. If we can begin with that question, we can then begin to ask how it might look different to belong to a different story.

And then, as it just may be, we might also be confronted with the truth that we have the power to shape another’s story based on how we tell it. And we can begin to think about how our own words and actions place others in the stories we have determined to tell. Which of course, is something that matters greatly.