The walk from our back door to the school takes about 195 seconds. This means that our morning story must reach its narrative climax in about two minutes, leaving a good minute for the denouement, or a minute to set up the next installment in the escapades of George, the renegade street cat, and Mrs. CluckCluck, our neighbor’s hen.
Our micro-stories from the way to school, although they are hardly long enough for the worthy label Storyare the most anticipated part of our morning routine. My daughters are drawn to these turbulent episodes on the sidewalk, both because of their own nature as story-driven creatures and because of the nature of stories to delight and guide us. But the captivating power of stories is twofold: That we are drawn to stories should give us cause as parents to be careful about the role models we provide for our children.
Beings formed from stories
To get to the core of our love of stories, we could start with the comprehensive narrative model that teaches us who we are and that shapes our expectations of what is And What could be. Our love of stories may be rooted in what Kevin DeYoung has called the “greatest story” or archetypal story of Scripture.
What we call “redemptive history” is essentially a narrative arc from creation through the fall, through covenants, disobedience, and exile, to Christ’s incarnation, his atoning death and triumphant resurrection, his ascension, the founding of the early church and its growth with the spread of the gospel—all looking forward to the consummation of time in Christ’s return, his final judgment, and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Because the claims of redemptive history encompass all of reality—giving reality a beginning, middle, and eternal end—Scripture sets expectations for what it means for a story to be a story. It provides a framework for the plot itself by setting a scene, introducing a problem, and developing the rising tension to a climax from which all possible solutions follow.
While the redemptive arc of Scripture does not imply that all stories should end or unfold in the same way, the story-like nature of the redemptive story provides an explanation for what we might call “narrative hunger”—a deep distrust that nothing in this world is static, and a hopeful expectation that anything and everything might move along such an arc.
Because the Bible’s redemptive narrative encompasses all of human history, we know we find ourselves somewhere in its vast arc—somewhere deep in the growth of the worldwide church. And our place in that larger story teaches us, in part, who we are. But that larger narrative also resonates in every single experience of turning from sin to God in a gospel-transformed life. So while we encounter redemption as a big story, we also experience it as countless little stories of justification, sanctification, and glorification.
Do like our Creator
The form and meaning of the redemptive story is just one way of explaining how we are shaped by stories. We might also examine creationism to connect, for example, our status as creatures with our ability and desire to create stories. God is the creator of reality. In an analogous way, argues JRR Tolkien, we as sub-creators create worlds out of words. Although fictional worlds display tremendous creativity, they cannot free themselves from the ethical and even theological logic of the world God created, since they are at least written and read by people who live in God’s world. In other words, whether authors choose to embrace or disregard the moral basis of reality, that basis is always there like an open question in every work: How does this story relate to reality?
When stories are instead made by people, who in turn are made by God, who in turn shapes reality, authors can offer beauty, goodness, and truth in a variety of invented worlds—and readers, in turn, can recognize and be surprised by the familiar good, even when the encounter looks entirely different. Thomas Austin captures the profound moral transfer from the world God created to fictional worlds in his lyric, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” While places or characters may be “invented” and not “historical,” the meaning or sense of actions, motives, and events are not “invented” but are transferred from our world to another world.
Moral and theological truths are not merely politely present in fictional worlds; they often jump out at us and overwhelm us. In his recent newsletter, Rabbit Room, Andrew Peterson reminds us of the “great power of stories to express truth beautifully.” Perhaps not surprisingly, we tend to use violent verbs to describe the experience of reading such literature: “The last chapter really grabbed me.” “It held my attention.” “That scene grabbed me.” “Their sacrifice impressed me.” The violent language is not just hyperbole; metaphors recognize the great power of stories to compel our hearts and minds to recognize the truth.
Powerful models
But the great power of stories is not limited to making us feel deep within ourselves what is good, beautiful, right, pure, excellent, admirable, and praiseworthy. Stories tend to make everything they present compelling. Much of the power of stories comes from their ability to help us see things that have become small and mundane to us in a magnified form. Stories linger and extrapolate. And this act of taking time creates and enacts compelling models for us and trains our desires.
“Stories tend to make what they present compelling.”
I have argued before that stories, as creations of God’s creation (humans), cannot “break free” from God’s moral universe. However, stories (and the worlds they provide) can certainly struggle against God’s moral worldview or produce seductive alternatives, much as God’s creatures can rebel against him, suppress his truth in its injustice, and look for anything else that satisfies them.
So yes, Thomas Austin is happily right: “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” But buyer beware: Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Is true. And all these wonderful, sympathetic things that didn’t happen tend to compel us both, if they are morally true And if they are not. Edmund Spenser’s The Fairy Queen is a sustained defense of the positive moral and theologically formative power of stories, but Spenser is all too aware of the power of stories as “painted fakes”: his villain in Book 1 is a powerful artisan—a “maker”—named Archimago, and he is out to destroy Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness, with every compelling fiction he can conjure.
Capture through fiction
As parents, it can often feel overwhelming to meet our children’s basic needs. If children are so drawn to stories, and stories are so formative, the risks seem considerably higher when we collect stories to feed their hearts and minds. And our expectations are high; we care not only about the vitality of our children’s moral imaginations (what is good in the world and how we shape our lives to achieve it) but also about their theological imaginations (God as the highest good to which we aspire). So how can we, as parents who want to give our children good gifts, distinguish between the less obvious stories about scorpions and eggs?
One of my standard questions is, “What does this story want me to want?” Stories appeal to our imitative nature as humans made in the image of God by offering us all kinds of role models, and those role models are often likable and deeply recognizable. When fictional characters offer us their inner monologues and thoughts through an omniscient narrator, this access gives us a profound opportunity to see the world through their eyes: an Anne of Green Gables and her search for bosom buddies, for example, or Robin Hood and his ethics of thievery from noble Norman thieves.
This familiarity with the characters, in turn, raises the question, “What kind of world does this character offer me, and how does the story as a whole respond to the desires of a particular character?” Kenneth Grahame’s Mr. Toad, for example, has an inexhaustibly high opinion of himself, but the other forest dwellers (and the narrator) reject it, and when they cannot change it, they rebuke it, often with a humor that condemns it.
With our children, we can look at a story as a whole or at the characters individually and consider which actions, motives, and events are good, beautiful, right, pure, excellent, or admirable. Practice giving appropriate names to their reactions to the logic and lore of fictional worlds. My parents prayed nightly for my siblings and me that the Lord would give us the grace to hate evil and hold fast to what is good (Romans 12:9), and then they gave us ten thousand fictional friends to love and with whom we could explore what it might mean to hold fast.
