Review of The Stories We Tell by Mike Cosper
Mike Cosper’s The Stories We Tell falls in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’ line of thought that Christianity is the “one truth myth.” A worship and arts pastor and admitted television addict, Cosper sets out to find the spiritual core of modern cinema, showing how all the stories we tell flow from and point to the greater creation-fall-redemption-consummation narrative of the bible.
I’m surprised that this is not used more often as an apologetic for the Christian faith. Stories are a rather difficult thing to explain from a secular narrative. At least, they are hard to explain without reducing their significance to some sort of evolutionary byproduct, and to do that would strip stories of the very thing that makes them so beautiful and powerful in the first place: their meaning.
“Why imagination? Why fiction? Why daydreams and oral traditions? Why is so much energy dedicated to the storytelling organ in our heads?” Cosper asks.
“It seems to me the answer is much more simple: we were made in the image of a storytelling God.”
Part of being image-bearers of God means that we are by nature story-tellers and story-consumers. Stories permeate all cultures, teaching us about ourselves and our neighbors. We cannot escape them, and as such we would be wise to study them. In the case of today’s culture, they happen to be most popular in the form of television and movies. Hence the focus and value of Cosper’s book.
Stories are also valuable as an apologetic in that they show us our deepest desires. If our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, as St. Augustine said, it follows that stories are the expression of that longing for purpose and love and salvation that is only found in Jesus Christ. We see this longing–and our inability to fill it–in everything from ancient myths and epics to today’s popular sitcoms and gritty dramas.
“We’re like second-generation exiles who never knew the world they lost, but long for it nonetheless,” writes Cosper. “There is no paradise after Eden, no corner where the curse’s tentacles haven’t spread.”
The Stories We Tell resonates with me on this point because I find this idea of a fall to be perhaps the most intellectually compelling aspect of Christianity. Deep down, we all know that something has gone wrong. We all have a sense of how the world is broken, of how it could be better. Stories, Cosper writes, thus “provide windows into how our world is wrestling with the effects of the fall.”
As the band Switchfoot sings in the bridge of their hit song Dare You To Move: “The tension is here / between who you are and who you could be / between how it is and how it should be.”
It is from this tension that the most powerful stories flow. And the existence of such tension in the first place is explained most fully by the fall and resulting entrance of sin into the world. There is no conflict without the fall, and there are no stories without conflict.
The Stories We Tell should be mandatory reading for believers who prefer to exist almost exclusively in the Christian subculture. Cosper devotes a brief chapter near the beginning of the book to the never-ending “what can or can’t Christians watch” debate. From there, however, he leaves it to conscience, and proceeds to use examples like Mad Men, The Wire, and The Big Lebowski to show how stories reflect our status as image-bearers of God. These decidedly R-rated stories are rife with worldliness and depravity, yet even they, Cosper shows, can be enjoyed and praised to the extent that they explore the relational consequences of the fall, the vanity of life, or the redemptive actions of a messiah.
For a book purporting to explore the deeper, driving source of creativity that results in television and movies, The Stories We Tell is simplistic in its prose compared to most other writing on the topic. It reads more like a series of loosely connected blog posts than serious film criticism. Cosper’s observations, however, are sound (though he may have stretched a few points in the chapter about reality TV). He grounds them primarily in Genesis 3, Romans 1, and Ecclesiastes. These passages speak to the reality of a fall that brought sin into the world and ruined relationships, the fact that man knows God’s truth innately but suppresses it, and the human struggle to find meaning in a world that often seems meaningless.
In a way the simplicity of the book reflects the beauty of biblical truth itself. It deals with profound beliefs that the most brilliant of men have wrestled with – ideas that pierce through bone and marrow to expose the thoughts and intentions of the human heart. Yet these truths are also supremely accessible to everyone, even those “foolish” by worldly standards. The Stories We Tell is thus a book for the layperson, the average Joe who enjoys binge-watching Netflix after a long day at work or going to the local movie theater on the weekend to catch the latest blockbuster.
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