Why do stories resonate so deeply and universally? Evolutionary theorists like Brian Boyd argue that narrative structures emerged through natural selection, serving pragmatic social functions rather than conveying truth. This paper argues that such accounts suppress the truth of divine revelation and ultimately fail to account for the intelligibility, moral coherence, and transcendental quality of storytelling itself.
By contrast, Christian theism grounds story—especially as articulated in the biblical metanarrative—in the eternal Logos through whom all things were made. While the Nicene Creed’s primary concern was Christological, its confession that the Son is “Light from Light, true God from true God” implies an epistemological foundation: that the world is ordered, knowable, and suffused with meaning because it was created through the Son who reveals the Father. In Him, the source of all light and life, narrative becomes not only possible but purposeful. Later Reformed confessions, such as the Westminster Confession and the Belgic Confession, make this connection explicit by affirming that the divine Son is the mediator of both general and special revelation, grounding all true knowledge in Christ and His Word.
Within this framework, the human impulse to tell stories reflects not adaptive instinct but image-bearing design. Storytelling echoes the structure of redemptive history—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—and derives its power from the truth it mirrors. Far from being a tool for evolutionary survival, narrative reveals the deep structure of reality, written by the Triune God and centered on Christ.
Drawing from Romans 1, Reformed theology, and Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, this paper critiques naturalistic approaches as epistemologically unstable and narratively insufficient. In light of the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea, it argues for the retrieval of creedal Christology not only as a doctrinal necessity but as the only sufficient ground for understanding why stories matter—and why they continue to speak to something far deeper than survival.