I remember a while back in a thread where I asked about neo-paganism that someone mentioned that paganism does’nt have the same kind of narrative as God does in Christianity.I find that so strange.What narrative?.It’s not like God is narrating existance like the one’s you would hear in a nature documentary,is he?. Could someone clarify this phrase please?.Thank you very much so for your time.
The narrative is the storyline.
The Bible is a great story, but people don’t know how to read the Bible as a narrative book because it is very difficult to do without training. But with very little study, one can learn to see the narrative thread and follow the storyline through the Bible. One can be taught to see the storyline and know what parts of the Bible are narrative and what parts - like Leviticus - are supplemental to the storyline.
People read the Gospel of John, then they go read Hebrews and maybe Acts, then they jump all the way to the start of the story, to Genesis, and then they read the end of the story in Revelation and wonder what it all means and why they can’t understand all these seemingly contradictive or unrelated verses. And that’s not the way the Bible was meant to be read. It’s like reading random chapters of the seven Harry Potter books and expecting to understand the whole story. Revelation is at the end because the Church, who put these books together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, expects you to have read everything which comes before it and to have understood the story.
Or someone starts to read the bible cover to cover, and then when they get to Leviticus or Numbers, the get bored because they loose the storyline. Leviticus is a manual for temple worship. It’s not part of the story. I remember reading the memoirs of General William T. Sherman… It was an awsome story, until he spent three whole chapters on military statistics. I had to skip it to get back into the story. The Bible is like that.
If I had to explain the story of the Bible, and of the history of Christianity, it would be a story about learning to trust God. Adam and Eve didn’t trust God. Abraham was the first, and he had to be taught by God that God was trustworthy. Israel had to be taught how to trust God, and they fell short. But Jesus walked out of his own grave and so we know we can trust him. The God-man who walked out of his own grave also gave us a Church which we know we can trust. That’s the story. That’s the narrative. Even the Romans and Greeks had a storyline for their Gods, but paganism doesn’t have that.
If you want to learn about the story of the Bible, I would recommed getting
The Bible Timeline study from Great Adventure.
-Tim-
to meet his children,