I worked in a congregation years ago, where I ran into problems when I said that the Bible contained stories meant to tell us about who God is and who we are in relationship to God.

Now, I know that doesn’t sound especially controversial, right? Most days, I say something more offensive than this before breakfast. But I mean, what is it if the Bible isn’t a collection of stories?

But when this woman heard me say “story,” what she heard was “made up fairytales.” She’d grown up in a conservative church and had acutely calibrated antennae set to detect any possible weakening of Biblical authority, any potential attempt to claim the Bible isn’t 100% accurate.

She remained convinced that she held the“Christian” position on the Bible’s essential infallible nature—and that anything that didn’t quite toe that line was an affront to God and a threat to proper theological order.

It will probably come as no surprise to most of you that I thought she was wrong about many things, but about the Bible in particular.

She didn’t understand that by claiming the Bible is a collection of stories, I wasn’t making claims about their truth or falseness—I was merely calling attention to the fact that stories are the way we construct meaning. Narrative is the peculiarly human attempt to establish an understandable and meaningful world from what appears to be a series of random events.

When you meet someone for the first time, and they ask you, “What’s your story?” you know they aren’t asking you to perform something from Dr. Seuss—they aren’t seeking information about your favorite campfire yarn. They’re asking about who you are. Out of all the hundreds of thousands of moments in your life, tell us the ones that give us a sense of what makes you tick.

It may not have occurred to you before, but that’s what history is. It’s not just the discipline of stringing together a bunch of facts about the world; it’s the act of combing through and choosing from the billions of episodes that have occurred in a given period and putting together a series of them to form a story that best identifies what it would have been like to have existed at a particular moment.

I tell my students that history is one of the most exciting subjects in the academy. And they give me this sort of dead-eyed gasp of incredulity—the one that says, “We knew you were old, but we didn’t realize you were also a dope.”

Sometimes, an intrepid student will pipe up, “History is boring.”

But I, committed to the pursuit of the mind, plow on. “No,” I say. “Seriously. History isn’t boring; you’ve just had bad history teachers. History isn’t just facts and dates. History is merely a form of storytelling. And to the extent that you find history boring, it just means you’ve been subjected to bad storytellers. The Spanish word for ‘story’ is ‘historia,’ and the French word for it is ‘l'histoire.’”

History tells us where we come from, who our ancestors were, and what it means to have inherited a story that gives us a sense of who we are and, therefore, what’s expected of us.

That’s why history the way it’s typically been done seems so disconnected from our experience, so irrelevant to understanding our lives now.

What do I mean?

Until recently, the modern discipline of history has defaulted to the dominant historiographical method: “The Great Man Theory of History.” This theory is generally thought to be the brainchild of Scottish philosopher and essayist Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, in which he states:

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

In other words, in order to understand where we’ve come from, we need to pay attention to great men and the things great men were in the middle of: Politics, War, Economics, Philosophy, Art, and so on. If we tell these stories, we’ll not only know what happened, but what it means for us—where we come from, who our forbears are, and what it all means for who we are and whom we’re supposed to be.

Okay, before the howls of deafening rage cause our walls to crack, let me ask you this: Do you see any particular problems with understanding our history, and therefore, our identities, through the prism of “The Great Man Theory of History?”

There’s at least one glaring difficulty in understanding ourselves and our past as a product of “Great Men.”

Turns out a bunch of us aren’t men—and even fewer of us are “great.”