Christian doctrine comes in the form of summaries. But summaries are always summaries of something, an experience, like a journey. It is the many little intangible things, and the order in which they came, that make your journey what it is, each event only interesting because it was unforeseen and surprising given the previous event. So a summary is not self-standing. We can summarise only in order the better to come back to the story. The story cannot be substituted for. It is irreplaceable because it relates to this series of unpredicted events. So Christian doctrine is a summary that relate the of a story, and in the course of doing Christian doctrine, we toggle between the story and the summary. But all the pagan part of the Western tradition is in denial about story. It wants to remove the narrative from our history. It attempt to undo all the (stochastic) little histories and chance meetings that made the whole thing what it was. This is like refusing to believe that your parents met for example, just because it was a chance meeting that brought them together. It is a form of autism. You are the evidence of the reality of that contingent event, and thus of the reality of contingency. We cannot do without the story, the narrative, and the is one of the first things we must say in any account of Christian doctrine. Of course we will be discussing sets of propositions, they do not substitute for the narrative of God’s dealings with us. The manual of Christian doctrine I am winding up to is different from others in being heavy on the narrative, and it will keep the narrative of the history of the West under the control of Scripture and the evangelical narrative.
