What is a Story?

Western thought began with an attack on religious myth by philosophers who held that the highest truth must be non-narrative and timeless. They left a paradox to haunt us: for on the one hand everyone knows that stories are important to us and our religion is full of them, while on the other hand stories continue to have a bad name as myths or fictions. It has been so difficult to say just how stories convey truth that until recently theologians were still trying to 'demythologize' religious belief. Now, however, philosophy has at last become more friendly to literature. There is talk of narrative theology and of rehabilitating story. Don Cupitt spells out the remarkable implications of the current return of philosophical and religious thought into time and narrative. He shows how stories produce reality, the self and time, how they awaken our desires and shape our lives, and how they express our paradoxical hopes of individual and corporate redemption.