Daily Reading
Rooted in Truth
January 5, 2025
In centuries past, the church viewed the gospel as a Romance, a cosmic drama that permeates our own stories and draws together our fragmented stories into a redemptive whole.
Too many expressions of Christianity today have lost that truth. Their gospels read like a textbook—true, factually intact, but hardly something that will take our breath away. Somewhere we’ve lost sight of the gospel as a Romance that fills us with “reverence and awe, as with Moses at the burning bush, or the disciples in the presence of the risen Christ” (Alister McGrath, A Passion for Truth).
Those deep yearnings that catch us by surprise when we hear a certain song on the radio, or watch our children when they aren’t aware of being watched, are telling us something that is truer about life than the Message of the Arrows. It seems too good to be true, which ought to raise even deeper suspicions that it is true. As Chesterton recounts in Orthodoxy, he “had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. ... I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”
According to the part of the Story God has allowed us to see, the Haunting we sense is his calling us forth on a journey. The resurrection of our heart requires that the Sacred Romance be true, and that is precisely what the Scriptures tell us. As Frederick Buechner reminds us in his wonderful book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale, the world of the gospel is the world of fairy tale, with one notable exception:
Too many expressions of Christianity today have lost that truth. Their gospels read like a textbook—true, factually intact, but hardly something that will take our breath away. Somewhere we’ve lost sight of the gospel as a Romance that fills us with “reverence and awe, as with Moses at the burning bush, or the disciples in the presence of the risen Christ” (Alister McGrath, A Passion for Truth).
Those deep yearnings that catch us by surprise when we hear a certain song on the radio, or watch our children when they aren’t aware of being watched, are telling us something that is truer about life than the Message of the Arrows. It seems too good to be true, which ought to raise even deeper suspicions that it is true. As Chesterton recounts in Orthodoxy, he “had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. ... I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”
According to the part of the Story God has allowed us to see, the Haunting we sense is his calling us forth on a journey. The resurrection of our heart requires that the Sacred Romance be true, and that is precisely what the Scriptures tell us. As Frederick Buechner reminds us in his wonderful book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale, the world of the gospel is the world of fairy tale, with one notable exception:
It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name. ... That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.