22 July 2025
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4 Ways God Was a Dramatist Long Before 'Christ the Storyteller'
“There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through [its] stock of stories.” ~ Andrew Swafford, STD
From Aleteia
By Tom Hoopes
God has been telling stories since the foundation of the earth. That's why man is a story-telling animal.I have always been fascinated with one aspect of God we forget: God is a dramatist.
Dr. Andrew Swafford, a theologian at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, where I work, just released a video series about the parables of Christ, called “Christ the Storyteller.”
It is a great reminder that our God is a storytelling God, and we who are made in his image are storytellers also.
First: The stories we tell make us who we are.
The late philosopher Alasdair McIntyre said, “Man is a story-telling animal,” and added, “I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
He means that if I tell my story as “a husband and father, journeying to heaven” I will behave differently than I would if I see my story as “me, myself, and I grabbing whatever I can before it all ends.”
We are built for stories, according to McIntyre. “Deprive children of stories and you leave them un-scripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words,” he says. “There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through [its] stock of stories.”
Stories don’t just tell me what I need to do, they tell me who I am.
Second: We are this way because God was that way first.
As one ancient analogy puts it: the Father speaks the Word, who is the Son, with his Breath, which is the Holy Spirit. That makes all of creation a story. In fact, in the creed each Sunday, we profess that God is “the Father almighty,” who created all things — but not without his Son, because, “Through him all things were made,” along with Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the giver of life.”
On Trinity Sunday, Jesus described how this eternal storytelling works, saying, “I have much more to tell you,” but insisting he would say no more. Instead, the Holy Spirit, “will speak what he hears” from the Father, because, “Everything that the Father has is mine.”
Thus, God tells the story of Scripture.
But third: God wrote another book in addition to Scripture: the Book of Nature.
As theologian Matthew Ramage points out, God’s “two books” have been a favorite Christian theme from the Church Fathers to Pope Benedict XVI, who said:
“The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose ‘writing’ and meaning, we ‘read’ according to the different approaches of the sciences.”
Anyone who has been through the Bible in a Year podcast has seen how one of God’s two books works. From the shockingly sinful lives of ordinary human beings, God draws together a narrative that points to him. His other book works the same way.
Fourth: The Book of Nature, like the Bible, is a messy story that is ultimately ordered to God.
Notre Dame University’s Chris Baglow says that science reveals that the universe’s development is “a meaningful story — a drama.”
To have a good story, he said, you need an underlying principle of order, plus a sufficient time for the drama to unfold — and then an element of novelty or surprise.
We have all of those in the universe: Natural laws work together with unerring order, but then surprising things happen: asteroids collide with planets, changing their climates; life emerges in one place but not another; animals adapt in surprising ways; certain mammals develop scales while others develop flippers, and then the most surprising thing of all happens: human animals begin telling their own stories.
To see a great depiction of the “scientific story” of creation, watch Terrence Mallick’s movie Tree of Life. At the 19:30 minute mark, a grieving mother asks God, “Lord, why? Where were you?” and the movie answers with a beautiful depiction of God’s answer to that question in the book of Job.
Fifth: And that is the backstory to the tales Jesus tells in his parables.
In telling the story of “Christ the Storyteller,” Swafford draws on his work as one of the authors of Ascension’s A Catholic Guide to the New Testament.
The book describes how Christ was an expert teacher in many ways, but adds: “For Jesus, telling stories was his favorite technique.”
Just as students remember teachers’ stories longer than they remember their lessons, Jesus knew his parables would make a deep impact on people.
That is because they come from the very ground of being and the heart of nature. They are stories about seeds and sowers, vineyards and vineyard owners, plant life and human life.
In other words, they are echoes of the story God has been telling since the foundation of the earth.
Pictured: Illustration of the parables of the lamp under a bushel & of the growing seed