Beeson Podcast, Episode 344
Gwenfair Adams
June 13, 2017

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Today we have the pleasure of hearing a lecture given right here at Beeson Divinity School by Dr. Gwenfair Walters Adams. She is a professor of church history and director of the Master of Arts and Spiritual Formation program at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. She gave our Reformation Heritage lectures here at Beeson back in 2007. This is the very first of her, I think there were three presentations in that series. This one is called "Tell me a story". She begins by talking about the power of story and relating that to the history of the church, in particular to Calvin, and she closes by actually using two stories from the New Testament, John chapter four, the woman at the well, and then Luke 24, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to illustrate how story is itself a powerful form of gospel presentation. 
	Dr. Gwenfair Walters Adams is the author of "Visions in Late Medieval England, Lay Spirituality and Sacred Glimpses of the Hidden Worlds of Faith", a fascinating book. She is also the editor of Romans one through eight in the Reformation Commentary on Scriptures series from Inter Varsity Press. A wonderful scholar, a wonderful woman of faith. Let's listen to Dr. Gwenfair Walters Adams.

Gwenfair Adams:	Good morning. I have been looking forward to being amongst you for over a year now, since Dean George graciously invited me to be here. What a sweet community you have here. Already, I've only been here less than 24 hours, and I've just felt overwhelmed by the hospitality. Y'all take southern hospitality to a whole new level here at Beeson. Thank you so much for your warm welcome.
	Do you remember the very first story that you ever heard? It was probably back when you were a child. It might have been a fairy tale. It might have been "Run Spot Run". Can you remember what it was, that very first story? I think my very earliest memory of a story is my grandmother telling me a bedtime story. For the life of me, I can't remember what it was. I just remember the warm feeling that it gave me and asking her to say it over and over again. I get a kick out of thinking of my grandmother making up a children's story, because she was a strong woman and she pretty much ruled the village in south Wales that she was in. The idea of her sitting beside my bedside and telling a children's story and creating an imaginary world makes me chuckle a little bit now. 
	Do you remember that very first story? We tend to associate stories with childhood and with innocuous kinds of things. They're children's stories, kids' stuff, mere entertainment. It's just a story. I would propose to you that story is a powerful force. Story is a powerful force. As such, it needs to be reckoned with, especially in ministry. A story is rarely just a story. Someone once said, and I think it was Robert McKee, that a story is an idea wrapped in emotion. An idea wrapped in emotion. 
	I love it when my little nephew asks me to tell him a story. There he is up there. I had to bring a picture of my nephew and one of my nieces there. He asks me to tell him bedtime stories sometimes. There was this one time ... I'm not very good at making up stories, unfortunately, so I was starting to tell him a story. I had been to a park that day, so I was telling him a story about the birds and describing in detail the park. He finally said to me, "Make it go sad, Auntie." I had to chuckle because he just had, even as a little six ... I think he was in kindergarten at the time when he said this. He had this innate sense that a story involves conflict and it involves emotion. 
	Any time that you take emotion and you attach it to something, you're making that thing potent. When you take an idea and you wrap it in emotion, you're giving it power. When you wrap it with feelings of love or jealously or anger or hatred or fear or suspense, something that could be abstract now becomes something that people are going to pay attention to. Ideas that might be rejected out of hand, if presented in their raw form, slip in unobtrusively and often with great impact when they're delivered in the form of a story. Kind of like Trojan horses surreptitiously delivering enemies within the gates. Stories bring, in their message, they bring it in strategically and in disguise. Incognito.
	Now we might be tempted to think that since there's potential danger involved in stories, since they link ideas with emotions, that perhaps we should separate out the ideas and just deal with them. Then we'll be safe. It's a bit like the billboard I saw on the way here from the airport yesterday. I don't know if any of you have seen this one. "What to do when you feel like touching a power line. Don't." Why is there a billboard saying that? Do you feel a sudden urge to touch a power line? I don't know. 
	We may be tempted to do that with stories. The problem is this thing right here. If we feel that because stories are dangerous, we shouldn't touch them, we've got a problem as Christians, because this thing that I hold in my hand is full of stories. Not only is it full of stories, but it is made up of one overarching very large story, known as the creation-redemption narrative. I hasten to remind us at this point that stories can be true. When we say stories, we're not talking about fiction. Certainly when we're talking about the Scriptures, we're talking about a true story. It seems that God may think that stories are a good idea and that perhaps linking emotions to ideas might somehow be beneficial. 
	Now why would that be? For the same reason that we still have power lines, even though you shouldn't touch them. We may want to keep stories, even though they can be dangerous, because power can be a good thing. It all depends on how it's used. Stories aren't just Trojan horses carrying enemies. They're also the bubble gum flavor carrying medicine. Good things can come wrapped in stories. 
	Now I ask you again the same question from before. What is the very first story that you remember hearing as a child? What are some of the other stories that you remember hearing as a child or as you were growing up? Now I want to add some questions to that. How did they affect your view of the world? Of yourself? Of God? Stories are powerful. They don't just entertain. They teach. They shape our thoughts on life. This week I invite you to spend some time thinking about the stories in your life, the ones you have heard or read or seen, the ones you have experienced, the ones you are telling. Stories can shape for good, but they can also shape for ill. We want to make sure that the stories in our lives are not mis-shaping our theology. I invite you to take a week to take an inventory of the stories in your life. What do they teach you about yourself and what do they teach you about God? Knowing yourself. Knowing God.
	The knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are key concepts that kind of get twinned together sometimes. This interplay of knowing God and knowing ourselves has been explored by many theologians throughout church history. In this next little section here we're going to cater especially to the historical theologians and theologians and philosophers amongst us, of whom I hope there are many here. We're going to go through a little, not necessarily chronological survey, of some of the different ways that our brothers, I think they are all men, so our brothers from the past have thought about this connection between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. 
	The one whose life we celebrate today in particular, John Calvin. I understand he's up there somewhere. I feel like I should wave at him. I grew up in a Calvinist home. My father had done his doctoral work in Calvin, on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Believe it or not, John Calvin believed in the Holy Spirit. My father would have you know he was a man of the Spirit. Every meal time pretty much, we had a place set at our table for Calvin to join us for dinner. I'm very comfortable with Calvin. 
	He wrote, as you may be familiar, if you've had the privilege of reading the 1,500 page tome that is his, known as "Calvin's Institute", that he starts it by saying, "Our wisdom insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts. The knowledge of God and of ourselves." Calvin argued that without the knowledge of ourselves, we cannot fully know God. Without knowledge of God, we cannot know ourselves. He spent the rest of the Institutes exploring the knowledge of God and then the knowledge of ourselves. For Calvin, knowing God and knowing ourselves are inextricably linked.
	For those of you that are not Calvinists, and I understand there may be a few of you here, we have John Wesley. His sermon on heaviness includes a section that argues against an unnamed mystical writer from the medieval era who claimed that when he, most likely it was a he, went through a time of heaviness or darkness, a time in the desert, like the spiritual desert wilderness kind of experience, that that meant that the "proper source of this grief", this desert feeling, "is the knowledge of ourselves. The more you know about yourself, the more miserable you should be." Because you are sinful and desolate and all of that. On the contrary, "since God may increase ..." No. I'm going into Wesley's part here. Oh yeah. The more you think about yourself the more miserable you should be.
	Now Wesley says no. That's not what the twin knowledges should do for each other. "On the contrary, God may increase the knowledge of ourselves to any degree and increase in the same proportion the knowledge of himself and the experience of his love." That the more we know about ourselves, the more love we should feel. The more peace and the more joy that should be springing up within us. For Wesley, the knowledge of ourselves should be the cause of love, peace and joy, not of sadness, for it is the occasion for us to increase in our knowledge and experience of God's love for us.
	John Owen, in "Communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost", adds one more point to the sum of all true wisdom. He says, "The sum of all true wisdom and knowledge may be reduced to these three heads: the knowledge of God, that is, his nature, his properties, the knowledge of ourselves, in reference to the will of God concerning us, and skill to walk in communion with God" is the third part. The skill to be able to put those two things together and walk in communion with him. For John Owen, the two knowledges, combined with the knowledge of how to make the two work together was the sum of all true knowledge, or the sum of all true wisdom.
	Matthew Henry, commenting on Psalm 94, takes a slightly different approach. He says that we can know God by the fact that whatever we are, he is that, only greater. Since God invented eyes, we know that God can see, but at a much greater scale than we can. He invented ears. We know that God can also hear, but so much greater than we can. For Matthew Henry, whatever we know good about ourselves, especially our physical bodies, we can know that those qualities are there, even better and bigger, in God.
	Jonathan Edwards talks about sin, righteousness and judgment and says, "In the knowledge of these things consists the true knowledge of ourselves and the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, or the light of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ." 
	That brings us to the two people that we're going to be focusing on this week, which are Luther and Augustine. Luther stated that "Saint Paul teaches that Christ was born to the end that he might restore and bring everything to the state in which it was created at the beginning of the world, that is, to bring us to the knowledge of ourselves and our Creator, that we might learn to know who and what we have been and who and what we now are, namely that we were created after God's likeness and afterwards according to the likeness of man. That we were the devil's wizard through sin, utterly lost and destroyed, and that now we may be delivered from sin again and become pure, justified and saved." For Luther, Christ's very life, his story, as it is told in the Scriptures, involves in and of itself bringing us to a knowledge of ourselves and our Creator.
	Finally, Augustine. Noverim te. noverim me. "I would know you God, I would know myself", says Augustine of Hippo in his soliloquies. In the confessions, Augustine says, "I will confess then what I know of myself. I will confess also what I know not of myself. And that because what I do know of myself, I know by thy shining upon me. What I know not of myself, so long know I not it, until my darkness be made as the noon day in thy countenance." He spends the Confessions exploring knowledge of himself in light of the knowledge of God. For Augustine, knowing oneself is done in the context of telling one's story, as he does in the Confessions, in the light of God's larger story.
	A number of different views on how the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves relate to each other. I'm particularly interested in the ones that Luther and Augustine talk about, because they relate to this idea of knowing our stories, knowing ourselves through our stories, knowing God through his story, and knowing ourselves in the light of God's larger story. To help us begin exploring these paired knowledges of God and of ourselves through the lens of story, we're going to spend the rest of our brief time today looking at two stories in the gospels. They're the two that we heard so beautifully read for us earlier this morning. They're the woman at the well and the road to Emmaus.
	Let's start with the woman at the well. The townspeople knew her story. She came out to draw water in the heat of the day alone because of her story. In Samaritan culture, having a story in which one married five husbands was not acceptable, and living with a man to whom one was not married, even less so. Technically, if adultery was involved, she could have had her story prematurely ended, courtesy of a shower of stones. Given the lack of ability in that culture, she had probably lived in the same village all her life. These townspeople may have witnessed all of these marriages and divorces and whatever else was involved in this story. They knew her story. They probably told her story over and over. Gossip, the art of telling a story in a destructive manner. She probably heard her story many many times from unkind raconteurs. Her story had been destructively told for years. 
	Perhaps the most cruel story teller was her own heart. In her mind, she had chided herself repeatedly for the decisions she had made, the losses she had endured, the isolation from the other women, the loneliness of drawing water in the heat of the day. She was alone, engaged in perpetual self recriminating rumination. Brooding, the art of telling one's own story to oneself ad nauseum. The telling and retelling of her story had brought her nothing but pain.
	Then one day, someone arrives who will tell her story in a whole new way, a way that will change her forever. It happens while she is alone, yet again, in the middle of the day, pulling up water by herself, all because of her story. She sees a man, a Jewish man. To her shock, he talks to her, crossing powerful cultural and gender divides, asking for a drink of water, implying that he would drink it from the same cup that she drank from. He was risking being made ritually impure as a Jew coming into drinking glass contact with an unclean person, a Samaritan. He started the conversation off already completely differently from what she would have expected, but at least it was still within the realm of the human. As the conversation progressed, it must have started to feel a bit surreal. 
	I live half a mile from a wildlife sanctuary and I often take walks through it. When I was out on a walk recently pondering this encounter between Christ and the woman at the well, I saw something move on the side of the road. I looked over and less than 20 feet away, a doe and a fawn stood staring at me. I immediately froze in my tracks, and all three of us stood still for a long time, transfixed. Have you ever done that with an animal, where you just suddenly see this otherness? We looked into each other's eyes in the peace of the moment. There's something about connecting with wild animals. There's a sense of bridging a deep divide. I think it's the delight that kids get swimming with dolphins, or the feel of the trunk of an elephant on one's palms when you feel them peanuts at the zoo or something, or the fascination my nephew has with birds' nests and turtle eggs. There's an enchantment in sharing moments across this gap between wildness and domesticity.
	As I gazed at the deer in the evening quiet, I thought of the encounter between the woman at the well and Christ. I wondered if it was a little like that for Christ and this woman. The wildness of Christ. You think of Aslan in C.S. Lewis. He's not safe. The domesticity of the woman. Only at first, the woman wasn't really aware fully of Christ's wildness, his otherness. She probably thought he was just an unusually friendly man. He had crossed a line when he asked her for water, but it was a line between the Jews and the Samaritans, not the line between God and man. As their conversation progressed, it became clearer and clearer that there was something more going on with this man. By the end of the conversation, she had come the farthest a human being cam come in one conversation. She had come to realize that Jesus was the Messiah. She had crossed a line herself, the line between death and life, lost and found, broken story and forgiven story. Jesus had told her her story. The same facts as the ones in the incessant gossip. The same facts as the ones in her perpetual brooding, but a whole new story. Same facts told by a very different heart. 
	What is your story? What are the facts that others have thrown in your face? What are the events that you can't let go of? The memories that hurt you as you replay them in the early morning sleepless hours, or the ones that you have blocked out because they are simply too painful? What are the things you keep asking yourself about? The why's? The what ifs? We wonder what our stories mean. How to interpret them accurately. Who knows the truth about us, really? What if someone knew every piece of our life stories? Is there anyone who could still love us, respect us, treat us with dignity? Jesus knows your story. He's the one that knows every piece of what it means, what the truth is behind it. He knows the correct interpretation. He knows what it all means, what the point of it all is. He knows every ounce of sin in it. All the failures, ugliness, pathetic meanderings, repeated patterns of rebellion. 
	When I think about that with my own life, I think there's a little bit of a parallel to David, who had the choice of choosing his own punishment, or allowing God to punish him. Remember that? When we hand our stories over to Jesus, it's a little bit like David handing his destiny into God's hands. What is he going to do with it? David chose the right choice. He gave himself over to God, for he knew God's heart. He knew that the Lord's heart was merciful. In the same way, it is safe to hand our stories over to Christ. His heart is merciful. He is the best story teller. When he tells our stories, we can hear them with joy, even though the facts haven't changed. Only the story teller has changed, but that makes all the difference in the world.
	There is a bigger story than the story of the woman at the well, a bigger story than yours, a bigger story than mine. It is the big story, the creation redemption narrative. It is Christ's story. When Jesus met the woman at the well, he was in the middle of that story. The whole point of his story was to save this woman and all the others in his bride and men. I can only imagine what was going through his head as he saw her. "My dear, you are the whole point of my story, and your multiple husbands, your adultery, your sin, your outcastness doesn't get in the way of my loving you. It's why I'm here. I'm here in this land, on this earth, precisely because you have messed up your life." Did he look at her with fascination? Certainly with compassion. Clearly with gentle respect and firm honesty.
	Now Christ's story was a story that the Trinity had written long before and that he was now living. He knew that this story would involve tremendous suffering. He had already done the "unto us a child is born", predicted by Isaiah, and he had done it in Bethlehem Ephrathah, precisely as Micah had prophesied. He was now headed towards the climax of the story and he knew that it would be extraordinarily painful. He knew the whole point of it was to redeem people just like this woman. This woman wasn't getting in the way of his story. She was the point of his story. He knew that he was headed for the part of his story when he would lay his life down, yet he took time out to have a theological discussion with a Samaritan, a woman, a sinner. 
	I love the fact that she was a nobody, as it were. She had nothing to give him other than a swig of water for his thirst. In fact, she could have taken a lot of away from him, particularly in terms of his respectability. It was not acceptable for him as a Jew to talk to her as a Samaritan. It was not okay for him as a man to speak alone with her in a public setting, since she was a woman and should have remained in the private women's sphere. It was outrageous for him as a rabbi to talk with a publicly identified sinner, and so on. He talked with her and he told her her story, her painful, embarrassing, isolating story. This was the first time she had ever heard it told this way. It was being told with matter of factness rather than condemnation, and with gentleness. 
	What I find fascinating is that when she runs into town ... she has just had an encounter with Christ where he's told her this amazing theological rich stuff about worship and all this, but the very thing that she proclaims is, "He told me everything I ever did." That's what she tells the townspeople. I believe it goes far beyond her being impressed with his knowing her life story without her having told him. One's life does not become transformed simply by seeing a Houdini act. Her life had been transformed. One's life is transformed by forgiveness, by having one's story spread before Jesus and knowing that it is forgiven by him. By knowing that God has stared our story in the fact and not blinked. He knew her. How we all long to be known. "Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did." There's nothing like having Jesus tell you your life story.
	This telling of her life story is only possible because of Christ's story himself. After this encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus would go on to heal many hurting people, cast out demons, preach, feed thousands, raise a man from the dead, live a perfect human life, the only perfect one ever lived, and then when it was time, he headed for Jerusalem, the place where the climax of his story would take place. He knew who would betray him. He cooperated with his arrest. He submitted to his trial and beating. He even walked toward his place of crucifixion. At any point he could have stopped his story, but he didn't. He went through with dying for the world, paying for all our sins and our stories with the pain of his own, and then rising from the dead. 
	Later that very same day, we have the second story that was read to us. Two men were walking towards Emmaus. Their hearts were breaking. They were discussing the death of Christ. It is ironic, to say the least, that they asked Jesus if he is the only one in Jerusalem who doesn't know what has just happened. Of all the ones who know what has just happened, it is Jesus. There is no other human being who knows more. Jesus points out to them that they have a very different interpretation when they say that "We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." They had a very different interpretation of his story than was God's interpretation. 
	The angels had reminded the women, in verse six and seven of the story, how Jesus had predicted the climax of the story to them in advance. "Remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee, the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again." The women then remembered Christ's words. The Emmaus road men didn't seem to have remembered that. He walks them through the prophecies of the Scripture as he walks along with them. He retells the foretelling of his story, but this time it is a post telling. This time they have the fulfillment of the big creation redemption narrative standing right next to them, walking with them. Again, I wonder what was going through Christ's mind. Verse 16 says that they were kept from recognizing him, which seems to imply that there was perhaps divine involvement in their inability to identify him. Was he the one who kept them from recognizing him? If so, was he chuckling inside? Was it a fun and holy prank, as it were?
	This big story that has been set up from the beginning had come into its climax and Jesus was walking along with them and retelling that story through his telling of the Old Testament. Can you imagine being present at the first time that the gospel gets to be told after it's fulfilled, and you get to hear it from Jesus himself? What an extraordinary privilege that must have been for those men walking along there. Then he goes to Jerusalem, finds the 11 disciples, and they share their story of the story. They compare notes. Jesus shows up amongst them, continues to tell them the story, and tells them more of what's going to happen later in the story, referring to the time that we live in, the time after he is gone and has brought, sent down the Holy Spirit to be amongst us.
	"Let me know thee, O Lord, who knowest me. Let me know thee as I am known. Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge and God and of ourselves." So tell me my story, Jesus. I want to be known. Tell me your story, Jesus. I want to know you.

Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.