New Testament stories shape Christian character, Gregory says

ABILENE—Stories describe the essence of human life, and New Testament stories shape moral and spiritual character, Joel Gregory told participants at the annual T.B. Maston Lectures at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary.

Gregory discussed “The Power of Narrative and Character Formation” at this year’s lectures, which honor the memory of Maston, a pioneer in Christian ethics and longtime professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“Narratives … include a story and a storyteller, manifest movement through time, require cause-and-effect relationships in a plot and … define the very nature of human existence,” explained Gregory, professor of preaching at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary.

Every person’s life is shaped by two kinds of stories—the sacred and the mundane, Gregory reported.

Secular stories are not sacred because gods act in them, but because they provide people with a sense of self and their place in the world’s structure, he said. Mundane stories describe the ways of the world and the culture in which people live. And narrative is the way a person experiences both sets of stories and understands how they relate.

From a religious perspective, an individual’s spiritual conversion marks a significant change in that person’s story, he said, adding, “In conversion, we adopt a new script.”

Understanding that script from a theological perspective provides a profound insight into life, he said. It “appears to be part of the ‘imago dei,’ the very stamp of God on the consciousness of humanity,” he observed. And the stories of individuals and groups merge to “tell us who we are and where we are in the world: Stories give identity,” he noted, citing Vanderbilt University preaching professor David Buttrick.

Of the varieties of narrative or story, didactic fiction—stories composed to teach truths—is the most effective at forming character, “the most likely to change or reinforce attitudes and behavior,” he said. “In the tale of the tortoise and the hare, for example, you want to be the tortoise. Most such fables render some ethical agenda.”

Looking at the Bible in this light, Gregory focused specifically on Jesus’ parables. In contrast to the Hebrew Scriptures’ just-the-facts emphasis on outward action, the Christian Scriptures, and particularly the parables, insist on “the inwardness of Christian motivation, requir(ing) an account of the inwardness of the motivation of even fictional biblical characters,” such as the players in the parables.

“The form of the narrative directly relates to the ethical outcome of the narrative,” he said. “Only a narrative that presents inwardness can finally reach the inwardness of the hearer/reader and resonate at the depth of inwardness.”

To illustrate, he cited four parables in which a primary character talks to himself and evaluates moral outcomes.

• The rich fool’s discussion with himself comprises three verses of the five-verse parable (Luke 12:16-21). He tells himself, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink and be merry” before God tells him his time is up.

• The prodigal son practices to himself the speech he intends to make when he returns home to his father (Luke 15:18-19).

• The unjust steward also talks to himself, “describing how he will cook the books to save his skin” (Luke 16:3-4).

• And the unjust judge likewise “carries on an internal dialogue” as he decides to give a pestering widow what she wants so she will leave him alone (Luke 18:4-5).

Jesus’ insight into “the unseen forces residing deep within the mind” preceded a similar interest reflected in Western art by more than 1,800 years, Gregory reported.

That insight packs special power, he added, noting, “The nature of Christian biblical language is akin to someone who stands up in the middle of a riot and utters an authoritative word that calms things down.”

And Jesus’ stories miraculously transcend time and culture, he said. “No one can describe how it is that … (Christ) can address me in 2010 from the edge of the first century Roman Empire. His horizon merges with mine in a sense of direct, eye-to-eye, belly-to-belly address that even skeptics have admitted.”

Gregory quoted theologian Amos N. Wilder to illustrate how and why Jesus’ stories still pointedly apply to people who read and hear them 2,000 years later: “Perhaps the special character of the stories in the New Testament lies in the fact that they are not told for themselves, that they are not only about other people, but that they are always about us. They locate us in the very midst of the great story and plot of all time and space, and therefore relate us to the great dramatist and storyteller, God himself. …

“What is interesting here is the suggestion that it takes a good story to make people realize what the right thing to do is. The road to moral judgment is by way of the imagination.”

Jesus’ stories are so powerful because they are mirrors, he said.

“As often quoted, the text interprets me more than my interpreting the text,” he explained. “In the parable of the talents, I am right there burying my talent and preferring life without risk to edgy investments in the stuff of life. In the parable of the vineyard, I am right there with Peter, complaining that this Johnny-come-lately is getting into the kingdom while I have been around the kingdom since I was an 8-year-old. I was getting hit between the eyes with the fact that the last one in at sunset gets just as much of the grace of God as I get.”

Stories form Christian character better than commands do, Gregory suggested.

“It is only by resorting to the narrative that we put flesh, blood, bones, causality and depth to the concept,” he said. “Narrative draws us in. Law frustrates us by naming what is wrong but not giving us any power to change it. The Cross of Christ itself is a narrative.”