The Story and the Facts

When our children are young, we tell them stories. As they get older, we speak more directly - they have developed the maturity to handle the "truth." 

But there's something still about the story that draws us. 

And that is why women in theology are so important. 

It's a bit of a stereotype, but it's well-deserved; it's the way that our culture has formed, the way that it has shaped what we expect of our men and women. It hasn't always been this way, but it is this way now. 

Thousands of years ago, it was rabbis who sat around telling stories. Jesus was incredibly famous for this - for the stories that He told. In fact, every time Jesus wanted to convey a deep, meaningful, profound truth, He started it this way: Let me tell you a story. 

That's not the way of the world any more. These days, we applaud the father who reads his children a bedtime story, as though it's completely unheard of for a man to sit down and enter the world of narrative. To some extent, that is true - our men have been shoved into this post-industrial, highly-technological world of strings of code and text and facts and data, of spreadsheets and bottom lines, of optimization and automation. And in the machining of society, there's not a lot of room for story. 

That's how it came to be that women are, today, our story keepers. Women are the ones who pay attention to the details, to the context, who see more than the numbers on the page. Women are the ones who can step back and put all of the pieces together more easily than the men who are profoundly engaged in each little individual piece all on its own. 

So when we think about a theology that is rich in story, that rests itself on the foundation of the Word, we have to be honest and confess our need for women's voices in these spaces. 

Women engage us in story. 

It's the difference between the highly-efficient 3-point sermon with a neat, tidy outline that fits into the bulletin and a few key blanks to fill in along the way...and watching The Chosen. It's the difference between looking at all the little parts of the story and actually living it. 

Our men come in and want to cut straight to the case; our women remember that the chase is really the journey, the path that we are on, and they point out all the little wildflowers along the way. You know, the ones that have no worries in the world and the Lord clothes them with beauty anyway? 

Listen, I know I'm engaged in stereotypes. I know it. To be fair, I have met many women who are as type-A and detail-oriented as any man, and I have met many men who are tender and nurturing and as aware of the finer things as any woman. But by and large, these are the roles our world has pushed us into in our current culture. That's not a judgment on whether such a thing is good or bad; it simply is. Our men are simply not the ones, for the most part, sitting around and telling stories; our women are. Our women are the ones teaching in almost every place but the church. 

And we're suffering for it. From all directions. We're suffering from men who are too automated and women who are still relegated to the shadows and doctrines that are stuck in a culture that doesn't exist any more and timeless truths that don't change according to the culture. And it's up to us to find a way forward from here. 

I don't know what that looks like, but I know this: it's going to take both. It's going to take stories and truth. It's going to take the things that engage our young minds and active imaginations and the things that speak directly to us in our maturity. 

It's going to take men and women to keep telling us the story of Jesus in a way that shapes how we keep living it for His glory.