Teaching the Story Arc of the Bible

Each of the Journey campuses has started teaching a gospel class - a class that answers basic questions about following Christ and being a member in our church. This class has attracted a large number of people who are "peaking over the fence" - checking this whole Christianity thing out. That is both exciting and challenging. It gives us the chance to share the Bible with people who don't necessarily come to it with faith - as well as challenge those who do trust the Bible to get on mission with us.

Our first lesson was on the story arc of the Bible - what is referred to as the diachronic view of scripture. Simply put, it is a way of looking at scripture as a complete story - with one major primary theme: God in Jesus reconciling the world to himself.

Teaching a diachronic view of scripture to postmodern culture, though, presents some unique challenges. In prepping to teach, I wrote out the following thoughts. I would be glad to get any thoughts you have on this topic.

In this week’s lesson, we are focusing on the “story arc” of the gospel story – the diachronic view of the story from beginning to end. Post-modern people tend to be mistrustful of stories that are too cleanly packaged in typical narrative structure (introduction of problem / rising action / crisis / falling action / denouement). We see this clearly in movies / books where the focus is on the changes that take place in crisis as opposed to the introduction of a problem and then a movement toward the total solution of that problem (think Crash or Mystic River vs. The Quiet Man or It’s a Wonderful Life). The outgrowth of this is seen in postmodern literary criticism – an assumption that the text of the story has no meaning in and of itself, the only meaning is what results from our interaction with the text. The focus, again, is on the change that results from crisis (in this case, the crisis of the self being confronted by the text of the story or the piece of art).

And here is the tension: Post-modernism is focused on a synchronic view of story – they are looking at Story from the perspective of a single point in time: theirs. And, as is true in any story, the only way to get a diachronic view is to step back and see how the individual, crazy moments of time string together to produce a larger story that makes sense in a narrative structure. The problem is made worse by the fact that every crisis we experience here simply leads to a new crisis (every story’s end is the start of another story…or, maybe even more typically, before a story can come to an end it is seemingly diverted into some other story and left unfinished and tangled).

We are in a traffic jam. We know our kids are screaming in the back seat. We can see the car next to us smoking because it has overheated. We know our own crisis and suffering – and a little about the suffering in the cars around us (by observation). It is real because it is what we know by experience.

The challenge for us in presenting a diachronic view of scripture is to argue that there is someone else who can see, both spatially and chronologically, the entire flow not just of the traffic jam, but of the individual lives of every person in that traffic jam (along with everyone who else who ever had or ever would be part of the flow of traffic over the earth). Someone in a helicopter can see the tapestry of traffic flow and can see the beginning of the problem, the crisis that moves it toward solution (or disaster), and the denouement of the situation.

This will be a leap of faith for some of our more ingrained post-modern thinkers – but it is also what every single of us craves. We want it to all make sense. We want it all to come together for a greater good – for the suffering to have a purpose.

Post-moderns are right in that what is real is the change that takes place in crisis. The synchronic perspective of story is real and true – but only partially. It is arrogant to say that my perspective is the only true or possible perspective – which is exactly what a limited synchronic view does.