The Stories We Tell E-Book

Mike Cosper

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Cultural Renewal
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 329

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The average American watches 5 hours of TV every day. Collectively, we spend roughly $30 billion on movies each year. Simply put, we're entertainment junkies. But can we learn something from our insatiable addiction to stories? Mike Cosper thinks so. From horror flicks to rom-coms, the tales we tell and the myths we weave inevitably echo the narrative underlying all of history: the story of humanity's tragic sin and God's triumphant salvation. This entertaining book connects the dots between the stories we tell and the one, great Story—helping us better understand the longings of the human heart and thoughtfully engage with the movies and TV shows that capture our imaginations.

Leseprobe

“Mike Cosper helps us make sense of what is true and good in the stories our culture consumes, and he does it without leading us toward syncretism. With the amount of TV and movies our culture devours, this book is a must-read.”

Matt Chandler, Lead Pastor, The Village Church, Dallas, Texas; President, Acts 29 Church Planting Network

“Like Paul at the Areopagus, Mike Cosper walks through the cultural artifacts of our entertainment industry and effectively says, ‘I can tell by your sitcoms and dramas and even your romantic comedies that you are a storytelling people who long for more. Let me introduce you to the Storyteller you don’t even realize you long to know.’ The result is a book that will change how you watch TV and movies. But more importantly, this might change the conversations you have with your neighbors.”

James K. A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College; author, Imagining the Kingdom and You Are What You Love

“Cultural engagement is a delicate but necessary balance for all who claim Christ. Mike Cosper insightfully examines narratives in pop culture to reveal the larger story of God at work in the human heart. This book is a must read for pastors and all those who seek to engage the culture with the powerful story of the gospel.”

Ed Stetzer, Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism, Wheaton College; author, Subversive Kingdom;

“Drawing upon a dazzling breadth of stories told through film, television, and literature, Mike Cosper examines—critically and charitably, wisely and generously—the culture-shaping power of stories and how all reflect in some way the grand story of creation, fall, and redemption. Skillfully and compellingly written, The Stories We Tell is essential reading for anyone consuming, engaging, or shaping the culture.”

Karen Swallow Prior, author, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and On Reading Well

“There is no one I would rather read on issues of popular culture than Mike Cosper. This book is not another ‘here’s how you find the gospel in Superman’ project. Cosper analyzes popular culture with depth and with wisdom, seeing both the common grace of conscience all around us and the depths of human sin. As Cosper interacts with popular culture, he models for us how to listen to the voices around us in order that we might engage them with the mission of Christ. This book is about more than the media he analyzes. It is also a training ground for how to pay attention to our neighbors.”

Russell D. Moore, President, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; author, Tempted and Tried

“The stories we tell rattle around in our minds, capture our imaginations, and give shape to our living as they echo the themes of God’s grand redemptive story—creation, fall, and redemption. These are not only the themes of film, literature, and television, but are also the inescapable passages of every person’s life. Cosper gives us new eyes to see and new ears to hear the stories we tell and in so doing invites us to celebrate our inclusion in the one story with a happy ending that actually never ever ends. I love this book and I think you will too.”

Paul David Tripp, President, Paul Tripp Ministries; author, What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage

“Evangelicals are notorious for consuming mass quantities of pop culture behind closed doors and sanctimoniously railing against the culture in public. It’s time to stop the hypocrisy and get serious about thinking theologically about the TV shows and films that stir our imaginations. In The Stories We Tell, Mike Cosper plays the role of the Interpreter in The Pilgrim’s Progress by clarifying our favorite episodes and movies in light of both law and gospel, and urges us, ‘Stay until I have showed thee a little more!’”

Gregory Alan Thornbury, Vice President of Development, New York Academy of Art; author, Recovering Classic Evangelicalism

“Cosper presents a thoughtful, gospel-centered analysis of culture that will resonate with the current generation. Whether you love TV and movies or hate them, they are indeed the central sounds and images of our culture, and they call for discerning theological critique. And this book delivers. Mike Cosper tells us the story about the stories we tell, and does so wisely and well.”

Grant Horner, Associate Professor of Renaissance and Reformation Studies, The Master’s University; author, Meaning at the Movies

CULTURAL RENEWAL

Edited by Timothy J. Keller and Collin Hansen

Joy for the World, Greg Forster

The Stories We Tell, Mike Cosper

The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth

Copyright © 2014 by Mike Cosper

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Bryan Patrick Todd

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3708-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3711-0 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3709-7 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3710-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cosper, Mike, 1980–

   The stories we tell : how TV and movies long for and echo the truth / Mike Cosper ; edited by Timothy J. Keller and Collin Hansen ; foreword by Timothy J. Keller.

      1 online resource. — (Cultural renewal)

   Includes index.

   Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

    ISBN 978-1-4335-3709-7 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3710-3 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3711-0 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-3708-0 (tp)

   1. Storytelling—Religious aspects—Christianity.

2. Popular culture—Religious aspects—Christianity.

I. Title.

BT83.78

261.5'7—dc23                                              2014020600

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

For my Dad: Thanks for buying the big TV.

And

For Sarah, who has endured my television addiction for all these years. Thanks for watching with me.

CONTENTS

Cover

Newsletter Sign Up

Title Page

Endorsements

Series Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Foreword by Timothy J. Keller

An Important Word before We Begin

Introduction: A World Full of Stories

1 The Stories We Tell

2 How Far Is Too Far?

3 The Ghosts of Eden

4 The Search for Love

5 O, How the Mighty Have Fallen

6 Frustration

7 Shadows and Darkness

8 Redemptive Violence

9 Heroes and Messiahs

10 Honey Boo Boo and the Weight of Glory

Epilogue (And a Word to Christian Filmmakers)

Works Cited

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Also Available from Mike Cosper

Back Cover

FOREWORD

Timothy J. Keller

When I was a new Christian, I came across a book by Stuart Barton Babbage entitled The Mark of Cain: Studies in Literature and Theology. The thesis of the book was that human beings have an awareness of their own evil and sin—and of their need for forgiveness and grace. He ranged over the range of modern literature—from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to Kafka’s The Trial, George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara and St. Joan, Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Camus’s The Fall, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit. He showed how these authors’ stories and fiction bore witness to important aspects of the Bible’s account of the human condition. In successive chapters he showed modern literature’s witness to the inveteracy of evil, the impotence of the human will, the horror of alienation, the indelibility of guilt, the gift of pardon, the longing for immortality, the joy of grace, and the mystery of love. In short, he showed the fragments of the Christian story even in the stories told by the great artists of the modern era. Or, put another way, Babbage showed how the Christian master narrative made sense of all these other dark, gripping, and moving narratives.

Babbage’s book had a profound influence on me. It was revolutionary for me to see how the biblical gospel’s power was not confined to my inward transformation and life within the Christian community. It also helped me make sense of everything, even the works of literature written by often passionately anti-Christian authors. It helped me see that human beings may hold down the knowledge of God’s reality (Rom. 1:18ff.), but in order to suppress and hold it down, they must actually possess it at some level. They know the truth, but they don’t know it. And that is why parts of biblical truth can often be found—sometimes expressed beautifully and clearly—right alongside of the trivial or the false in the cultural products of the world.

Mike Cosper, like Babbage two generations ago, turns to the main storytellers of our time—but in the case of late modern culture, they are more often filmmakers than writers. Mike also rightly assumes that human beings cannot escape being in the image of God. He quotes postmodern writer David Foster Wallace saying, “We’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something.” Indeed we are, and in the cinema of our time, we also see the filmmakers bearing witness to the inveteracy of evil, the impotence of human nature, the need for pardon and love—and redemption. God will not leave himself without a witness, and he makes even the wrath of man to praise him (Ps. 76:10).

Mike’s book will help readers learn to put the gospel on like a pair of glasses in order to see the good, the bad, and the ugly in our culture more clearly. This book will be especially helpful, I think, for Christians who preach, teach, and communicate the gospel. And, in the end, learning this discipline—of seeing God’s story in the stories we tell today—will be a way for us to deepen our own understanding of and joy in the gospel we believe.

AN IMPORTANT WORD BEFORE WE BEGIN

This is a book about TV and movies. My goal here is to trace out the ways these stories intersect with the truth. I believe the Big Story of the Bible—creation, fall, redemption, and consummation—is so pervasive, so all-encompassing of our world, that we can’t help but echo it (or movements within it) when we’re telling other stories.

With that in mind, understand that I chose to discuss the particular stories in this book because they help make my point and/or I happen to like them.

Some are rated R. Some aren’t, but should be. Some I found encouraging and redemptive. Some are downright devotional. Some I wouldn’t recommend. Others I never want to see again.

I mention this up front because I want to be clear that the inclusion of a film or story is not necessarily a commendation. The issues about what we should and shouldn’t watch are multilayered and complex. (See chap. 2 for more detailed discussion of this issue.) Use wisdom in exploring movies and TV shows that you’re unfamiliar with.

I should also say that my tastes and preferences are eclectic, and this book contains references to content old, new, and occasionally obscure. You may not like anything I discuss here, and for that, I apologize. Who can account for individual taste—particularly the sometimes-low-brow taste of this author?

Similarly, you may have very different interpretations of the stories I explore. That’s a good thing. Stories have a three-dimensional quality, and your perspective might be different than mine, enabling you to see angles I don’t.

You also might think it ridiculous that I didn’t mention your favorite show or film. You might think my examples could be better. I will say you’re probably right, but I’m glad you’ve read enough of the book to discover my error.

Regardless, I will say this: the method I use to examine these particular stories and connect them to the bigger story is easily applied to different films, TV shows, and books, and you’ll hopefully find something to take away with you.

Finally, and very importantly, consider this your spoiler alert. I discuss a lot of plots in this book, and will ruin the endings to most of them. You have been warned.

Introduction

A WORLD FULL OF STORIES

Kenneth: “Mr. Jordan, do you know why I love television so much?” Tracy Jordan: “Because despite cell phones, iPads, and computers, it’s still the most effective portal for poltergeists?” Kenneth: “On TV shows, nothing ever really changes, the people you care about never leave, and the bad guy always gets what she deserves.”

30 Rock, “My Whole Life Is Thunder”

Summer is a sacred time when you’re a kid. The break from school feels like liberation, and even years later, we can look back with warm, hazy summer memories. Days spent on a sandlot or exploring creeks and woods. Family vacations, packed in a minivan, going to the beach or seeing Yellowstone, The Badlands, or Mount Rushmore.

My summer memories steer in a different direction entirely. The most vivid comes from 1992: the year we got the big TV. While my brother and sister were sweating away in brutal humidity at band camp, I was sitting in the comfort of air conditioning, two-fisting bowl after bowl of popcorn, watching hours and hours of television.

It was a perfect storm, really. My father had always been kind of a technology hound, and for many years we’d had a LaserDisc player and surround sound.1 Today, they are dinosaurs. That summer, the home theater went to a whole new level. We added both a forty-eight-inch rear-projection television (big at that time) and a satellite dish.

It was my job to accept delivery of the TV at our house. I remember a big box truck backing into our driveway and a pair of men moving the TV into our living room, unwrapping the layers of moving blankets and plastic wrap from its exterior while I signed for it, and leaving it to me to connect its various components to the rest of the home theater system.

I spent the whole summer under that TV’s otherworldly glow. I was a well-established movie junkie by then, but the addition of the satellite stations opened unknown worlds to me. My parents had raised me on Hitchcock and TheTwilight Zone, and in the coming weeks and months, the satellite would introduce me to Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese.

I remember when I stumbled onto Kafka, an early Stephen Soderbergh film starring Jeremy Irons, and it blew my mind. Its dark surrealism was a gateway drug into the movies of Terry Gilliam and Sam Raimi—and if you wonder what the connection is between those three, watch Kafka—you’ll see it.2

Even as I learned to appreciate the quirky corners of filmmaking, I never lost an appreciation for more mainstream stuff. A favorite saying of my parents was that “an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure”—a line taken from the über-chick-flick, Steel Magnolias. Elitism was forbidden in my house, so no matter how much I appreciated films by David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, I was still able to appreciate the movies of John Hughes, Savage Steve Holland, and Nora Ephron. I can even appreciate a Michael Bay movie, so long as there are enough good one-liners and explosions.

It was a great time to be into television, too. I remember watching the pilot episodes of shows like The X-Files, Friends, and Just Shoot Me. NBC Thursday nights were still “Must See TV,” and Seinfeld was the king of prime-time comedy.

For better or worse, this was my formative education. Don’t get me wrong; I also read books (as I still do) and played guitar in rock bands, but those untold hours in front of that heavenly electronic glow filled my mind with a love of comedy, a love of movies and TV, and most of all, a love of stories.

Like most Americans, TV had me hooked.

ADDICTED TO TELEVISION

The profound and dangerous power of TV and movies is that they have ways of getting inside us, shaping the way we see the world by captivating our imaginations. And this explains much of the dissonance between what Christians think about TV and movies and what they actually watch.

Many Christians were raised to be suspicious of Hollywood entertainment, but all of the warnings seem to have done little to curb what people watch, except, perhaps, to add a patina of shame to any admission of viewing. (Think of the way people cringe when they admit they watch The Bachelor or Real Housewives.) We experience a cognitive dissonance—a conflict between what we think about TV and what we actually tune in to watch. Many of us hate the mindless entertainment of the “boob tube,” but we watch anyway, confounding even ourselves.

Why?

I believe that dissonance exists largely because our behavior isn’t primarily dependent upon what we think about entertainment, just as an addict’s behavior isn’t primarily connected to what he or she thinks about their addiction. As philosopher James K. A. Smith puts it, “Our action emerges from how we imagine the world. What we do is driven by who we are, by the kind of person we have become. And that shaping of our character is, to a great extent, the effect of stories that have captivated us, that have sunk into our bones—stories that ‘picture’ what we think life is about, what constitutes ‘the good life.’ We live into the stories we’ve absorbed; we become characters in the drama that has captivated us.”3

CHANNEL SURFINGEntertaining Ourselves to Death

Infinite Jest, a massive novel by David Foster Wallace (himself a voracious TV addict), asks a lot of questions about entertainment and addiction. The novel largely focuses on the Incandenza family. James Incandenza, the father of the family, was a brilliant and restless mind. He founded a tennis academy and became a filmmaker. He also was a hopeless alcoholic.

A few years before the bulk of the novel’s action, James made a film that is so spectacularly entertaining, it’s lethal. Viewers insist on watching it over and over again, rendering themselves catatonic and losing the will to do anything else that keeps them alive. In the book, terrorists want to use the film to attack the United States, incapacitating its population.4

Throughout the book, Wallace explores the parallels between entertainment, addiction, and human nature. One character, a critic of our entertainment-addicted culture, says, “Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, ‘fanatic,’ do they teach you it comes from the Latin for ‘temple’? It is meaning, literally, ‘worshipper at the temple.’ . . . Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.”5

In other words, our fanatical attachment to entertainment—our hours-a-day habit of watching sports or action films or Project Runway—is an expression of worship. “We’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something,” Wallace said in an interview. “If [Infinite Jest is] about anything, it’s about the question of why am I watching so much [@#$%]. It’s not about the [@#$%]; it’s about me. Why am I doing it?”6

Infinite Jest challenges our mindless entertaining, asking us why the screen has a hook in us, and warning about the potentially dire consequences. Against the backdrop of addiction, Wallace shows characters who are deeply lonely, longing for human connection and struggling to find it in the modern world.

Storytelling—be it literature, theater, opera, film, or reality TV—doesn’t aim at our rational mind, where cultural Christian convictions like “we shouldn’t watch Sex and the City” exist. It aims at the imagination, a much more mysterious and sneaky part of us, ruled by love, desire, and hope. When people, against their better judgment, find themselves hooked on a show, we can trace the line back to find the hook in their imagination. And as Smith says, “When our imagination is hooked, we’re hooked.”7

“Stories seep into us,” Smith says, “and stay there and haunt us—more than a report on the facts. A film like Crash gets hold of our hearts and minds and moves us in ways that textbooks on racism never could. This is because it is a medium that traffics in affective [emotional] images and such affective articulations are received by us on a wavelength, as it were, that is closer to the core of our being. Such compelling visions, over time, seep into and shape our desire and thus fuel dispositions toward them.”8

The mistake is to think that we’re rational enough to overcome the power of these images and stories. Consider, for example, advertising. Our inner rationalist knows that the cheap smell of Axe body spray is more likely to work as a sexual repellant than as an attractant, but the product sells because the advertising doesn’t even attempt to be rational; it targets the imagination. The ads appeal to the hopes and desires of young men—namely, their own desirability—and the effect is more powerful than any rational appeal ever could be. Wouldn’t it be great, says the ad, if you could just spray this and find yourself wanted? Such dreamy, wouldn’t-it-be-great thoughts are at the heart of much of our marketing world, and they work because our imagination can take us into the world the advertisers promise, even if the products themselves cannot.

Our imaginations are like resident storytellers, playing images on the silver screen of our minds, and these visions are often hopelessly irrational. In fact, our fantasy worlds probably have more in common with an Axe commercial than with reality. Consider your own daydreams of lust, revenge, and success. They don’t play out along rational lines, but are ruled by emotions—and are nonetheless powerful. That’s why advertising works, and it’s why we remain hooked to TV.

A show like Keeping Up with the Kardashians is successful, despite the general consensus that it’s shallow and many of the characters are vain and unlikeable, because it connects with our emotional core. Our resident storyteller (our imagination) sees the glamour, wealth, and paraded sexuality through the lenses of hope and desire (women want to be the Kardashians, with their pampering, shopping, and sex appeal, and men want to sleep with them), and the inner rationalist—the voice in us that keeps bringing up how shallow, vain, and unlikeable the show is—gets confined grumpily to a chair in the back. He’ll make a snarky comment or elicit an eye roll or two, but the storyteller keeps the remote control.

It’s an uncomfortable tension, and it’s not exclusive to Christians. Many people are quick to acknowledge embarrassment about TV consumption. In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld wants to deny to his girlfriend that he watches Melrose Place, going so far as to take a polygraph test in order to maintain his denial. (He, of course, fails the test and she dumps him.)

Author David Foster Wallace, commenting on this phenomenon, said, “It’s undeniable, nevertheless, that watching television is pleasurable, and it may seem odd that so much of the pleasure my generation takes from television lies in making fun of it.”9 We love to hate TV, even as we consume many hours of it. Like Seinfeld, many of us want to be thought of as people who don’t watch TV. We know it isn’t good for us, and TV itself doesn’t pretend to be healthy, either. Instead, it recruits us into a kind of conspiracy of cynicism and irony, winking at us through the screen, even as it demands that we keep watching.

Consider how many TV shows are about TV shows (The Newsroom, 30 Rock, and Episodes, to name a few), creating an Inception-like reality twist: we find ourselves watching a show within a show, giving us a sense that we’re behind the scenes and in on a joke. We’re not just another idiot in front of the boob tube: we’ve got a backstage seat, and with it, permission to laugh at TV’s frivolousness.

30 Rock made the silliness of television a major theme. It’s a sitcom about a sketch comedy show on a network owned by a multinational corporation and run by ruthless executives, and it mercilessly mocks them all. The sketches on TGS (the show that exists inside 30 Rock) are eighth-grade humor (featuring fart machines and animal genitals), the stars are studies in Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and the main characters—Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) are deeply unsatisfied with their lives. The whole thing could be seen as a sophisticated critique of television, if the show itself weren’t everything it’s mocking. 30 Rock simultaneously mocks the immaturity of fart jokes while making fart jokes. It mocks the objectification of women while frequently objectifying their female characters.

TV shows often acknowledge that there are much better things to do than sit around watching TV. They present a world, as Wallace points out, that is much more exciting than a world in which we sit around watching hours of television, a world of beautiful and interesting people, playing out our cultural fantasies of heroism and justice in criminal dramas, belonging and friendship in sitcoms, varying themes of envy, judgment, and escape in reality TV, and love and lust in just about every genre. Wallace says,

Since television must seek to attract viewers by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV’s whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory (“Joe, Joe, there’s a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture”) while reinforcing television-watching in practice (“Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV”).10

In the early 1990s, when Wallace wrote his essay, the average American watched TV for six hours a day. “Six hours a day is more time than most people (consciously) do any other one thing. How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious.”11 Today, those numbers have shifted down slightly, but only because we also spend much more time in front of computers, tablets, and smartphones. That time, too, is often spent being “spectatorial” and “self-conscious,” busily broadcasting ourselves in social media and observing the lives of others.

A LOOK AHEAD

In what follows, I intend to explore our addiction to these stories. In particular, I want to look at their common threads, and I want to explore why we keep telling them, over and over again. I believe we’re watching because TV and movies are both echoing and forming our desires, and I want to delve into what those desires really are.

I believe the gospel has given us a framework for the whole story of history. I want to explore the way our ordinary, everyday stories intersect with the bigger story that God is telling, and I want investigate what these stories reveal about being human, being fallen, and longing for redemption.

Chapters 1 and 2 will lay a foundation for the conversation, starting with an exploration of stories themselves in chapter 1, and looking at how Christians can engage with the storytelling world in chapter 2.

Chapters 3 and 4 will look at creation stories, first the idea of creation and paradise in chapter 3, and then the search for love in chapter 4.

Chapter 5 will look at fall stories, examining how storytellers wrestle with the fall and human brokenness. Chapter 6, “Frustration,” will explore stories that illustrate the kind of fruitlessness and frustration we experience in a fallen world.

Chapter 7, “Shadows and Darkness,” deals with our fear of the unknown and our unspoken knowledge of darkness and evil, especially as we see it in horror and science fiction.

Chapter 8 looks at redemptive violence and how many of our stories anticipate bloody, sacrificial action to redeem humanity.

Chapter 9 looks at traditional heroes and messiahs, and chapter 10 looks at glorification—how our longing for fame is rooted in a much deeper, more ultimate longing.

Throughout this book, you’ll find “Channel Surfing” sidebar discussions. These are brief moments where we change the channel and look at a different aspect of a given chapter’s main idea.

THE GOAL OF THIS BOOK

It’s important to know a few things before going forward. First, I’m not a film snob. I’m as happy to watch a Mel Brooks screwball comedy as I am a Terrence Malick film. I blame my upbringing, which taught me to appreciate even the cheesiest of comedies. I don’t have a top-ten list of favorite film editors or cinematographers. I’m just someone who loves TV and movies, and who loves Jesus and thinks that these two passions aren’t mutually exclusive.

I’m also not out to do any takedowns. After chapter 2, I won’t focus much on the moral aspects of watching TV and movies. We can and should debate the issues that exist around violence, language, and sexuality in film, but that could easily take over this entire book if I let it. Here, I’m less interested in debating the merits of watching content than I am in understanding what drives it. I want to get to the heart of these stories. Why do we tell them? What motivates them?

I believe that the motivation for our stories is deeply connected with the gospel, and by thinking about that connection, we can more deeply appreciate both.

Finally, you should know that above all else, I’m a pastor who has had the joy of serving in a church full of creative people and movie buffs (and even a few film snobs). I’m primarily motivated to write for people like them. As I pastor, I grow most concerned over people who thoughtlessly consume media—be it literary classics or trash TV—and I include myself in that group. Our relationships to TV and movies have powerful, soul-shaping effects, and what we carry into our “dialogue” with TV and movies is just as important as what we take away. If we’re thoughtfully engaged, our watching can be educational, edifying, and even a cause for worship.

Story is a great gift from a great storytelling God. There is much joy to be had in enjoying that gift as it pops up in the world around us. So with thankful hearts, let’s begin to explore the stories we tell.

1

THE STORIES WE TELL

We live in the stories we tell ourselves.

Grant Morrison, Supergods

It’s often said that we tell stories to know who we are—to understand ourselves and our place in the world. It’s as though all of our stories are a way for the imagination to poke at the human condition, testing its borders and depths, looking for ways to understand the why behind the what of our lives. In his memoir, author Salman Rushdie describes how his father told him old folk tales and legends, teaching him that “man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told stories to understand what kind of creature it was.”1

Stories help give us a sense of place. They stir our imaginations and help us to experience love, betrayal, hatred, and compassion that might be otherwise foreign. They prepare us for experiences like love, or help us process things like sorrow and suffering.

The way that we understand our lives, our relationships, our past and future is all tied up in story. Your past is not only a set of facts. It’s also a story you tell. “I was born here, I grew up here, I married there, we had our children then, and we watched them grow up.”

Your future, too, is a story, but it isn’t built upon memory. It’s a story of anticipation—hopes or fears that seem imminent and likely. “I’ll go here, I’ll do this, I’ll try that.”

Even your fantasy life, the daydreams into which you wander, is a story you tell. We drift off, playing out visions of winning the lottery, telling off our boss, fulfilling our loves or lusts, making things right with broken relationships, or escaping from the circumstances of the much less glamorous reality in which we live.

Stories both entertain and educate, occupying the mind and forming it at the same time. Uncle Tom’s Cabin stirred the compassion of a populace, turning its conscience against the institution of slavery. It was also a gripping narrative, pulling the reader along in a story that one felt desperate to resolve.

Evolutionary theorists have tried to make sense of the brain’s capacity for (and gravity toward) storytelling and fiction. Possessing a worldview that understands life through the lenses of natural selection and biological purpose, they wonder why so much human energy goes toward making up and retelling stories. Why imagination? Why fiction? Why daydreams and oral traditions? Why is so much biological energy dedicated to the storytelling organ in our heads?

Some theorize that we evolved a capacity to imagine in order to plan for feeding, hunting, and mating, and that once the capacity evolved, we started using imagination for stories as a side effect. Others theorize that storytelling is like the feathers of a peacock—something developed to help attract mates.

It seems to me that the answer is much more simple: we were made in the image of a storytelling God.

THE BIG STORY IN A WORLD OF STORIES

Christians believe an audacious fact. At the heart of our faith is the bold claim that in a world full of stories, with a world’s worth of heroes, villains, comedies, tragedies, twists of fate, and surprise endings, there is really only one story. One grand narrative subsumes and encompasses all the other comings and goings of every creature—real or fictitious—on the earth. Theologians call it “redemption history”; my grandfather called it the “old, old story.”

Jesus affirmed this one grand narrative in a moment of frustration with the Pharisees, bursting, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). He wanted these men, whose lives were devoted to the Scriptures and to the narratives and history of the people of God, to see that it was all meant to point to him.

The apostle Paul got it, too. He stood in the courts of the pantheistic Romans, on their own sort of “holy ground” where ideas were exchanged and religions were compared, contrasted, and nitpicked. He heard their stories and their poetry, and he knew that ultimately the thing they were looking for was Jesus. “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).

We can see it, too. If the Bible is true, then it has a way of encompassing and overarching every story ever told. Our personal stories, our fiction, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are all accounted for in a sovereign God’s design for the world. The stories we tell are all a part of the story he’s telling. We tell stories because we’re broken creatures hungering for redemption, and our storytelling is a glimmer of hope, a spark of eternity still simmering in our hearts (Eccles. 3:15).

The story told in the Bible encompasses past, present, and future. It tells a story that begins long before us and ends long after us, and it calls us to find our place in its pages. It shows God’s people on a journey toward a wonderful and hope-filled climax. It shows God as the master storyteller—the writer/director/star, if you will—rescuing Israel from Egypt and guiding them home to the Promised Land, weaving a surprising and gritty narrative that led from garden to wilderness, from Abraham to Moses to Joshua, from wandering to Promised Land to exile and back.

JESUS AND THE STORY OF GOD

God’s story took a shocking turn when the King of the universe was born in a barn and walked among us. And God-in-Flesh didn’t walk around dishing out moral advice and high-minded philosophical rhetoric; he told stories. Lots of them. People would ask him a theological or spiritual question, and Jesus’s answer would begin, “Once upon a time, there was a shepherd,” or, “There were seven brides . . .” As N. T. Wright once said of Jesus’s ministry, “Stories change the world.”2

After dying and rising again, Jesus commissioned an army of storytellers to carry on his mission. Look at the sermons in the book of Acts; they’re stories. The entire New Testament was written by men who knew that they were living in the tension of a great story. Having witnessed the life of Jesus, they were now carriers of his story, knowing that it wasn’t over. They knew that it would one day come to a rousing, glorious climax when he returned. Like the prophets before them, the apostles told a story whose ending had yet to be carried out, an ending foreshadowed with promises of final justice and restoration.

The Bible as a whole manages to simultaneously tell one big story and many smaller ones. Like Russian dolls, one can unpack them layer-by-layer. There’s the whole narrative of redemption history, which contains the story of Israel, which contains the story of the exile and return, which contains the story of Joshua, Ruth, David, Hosea, and all the others. Each subsequent layer alludes to the whole, providing a new way of thinking about the whole. The story of Israel can be understood as a microcosm redemption history: it is a miniature of the whole. So can the exile. So can Esther. Within the Bible, stories shadow, reference, and echo one another. And Jesus gave us the key to uniting them: “they . . . bear witness about me” (John 5:39).

FINDING OUR PLACE IN THE STORY

The Bible also invites a kind of personalization and allegorization (like all stories do). Kids learn songs in Sunday school like “Dare to Be a Daniel,” and preachers invite us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of Joseph, David, Paul, or Peter. Jesus told parables because he knew they were the way that we understand the world and our place in it. When telling the story of the prodigal son, he knew that we might see ourselves as the runaway prodigal, or the “obedient” and indignant older brother.

By identifying with these characters, we learn something about God, ourselves, the advancing kingdom, and the darkness around us. If we believe that the Bible is what it says it is—God’s Word, perfectly crafted for revealing the truth and leading us to real, everlasting life—then we must believe there is something powerful and soul-shaping about stories. Why else would God use such a vehicle for revealing himself?