Propositions are important, but they depend on the stories out of which they arise for their power, meaning, and application.  Imagine having all the propositions of faith but none of the stories.  They would be true, but we wouldn’t know what to do with them.

Propositions are shorthand for story.  They stand in for stories that we don’t have the time to tell.  And the Bible doesn’t ask us to choose between proposition and story.  They are both there, and they need each other.

Propositions serve as a check on story, clarifying how they ought to be interpreted, and stories serve as a check on propositions, keeping them from being shallow, inert, or legalistic.  So we need them both.  But take warning: never let your propositions get far from the stories out which they came.

- Dan Taylor, “The Life-Shaping Power of Story”

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.  When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.  The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experience meaning, the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.

- Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (p. 96)

(HT: Joe Rigney)