Possible Worlds and Sacred Stories: How Evangelical Christians Apply Biblical Texts to Contemporary Moral Life

Megan Mansworth & Stephen Pihlaja

Aston University, Birmingham

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Article

Manworth, M, & Pihlaja, S. (under review) ‘The Cinderella of the Scriptures’: Using Possible Worlds Theory to Understand How Christians Apply Biblical Texts to Contemporary Life. Metaphor and Symbol.

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Background

• Evangelical Christians view the Bible as the infallible Word of God, making its study essential for moral living.
• Sermons and teaching use explanatory tools like metaphor and analogy to connect biblical stories with contemporary life.
• Possible Worlds Theory may help explain these connections.

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Possible Worlds Theory

• Possible Worlds Theory (PWT) examines how real and imagined worlds are constructed and perceived.
• Accordingly, Ryan’s (1991) influential model distinguishes between the textual actual world (TAW) – the world that the narrative presents as real, or actualised – and the textual possible worlds (TPWs) that surround this world.
• Importantly, PWT concerns not only how worlds are built but also how readers co-construct them, meaning that the consideration of cognitive processes of readers has become embedded in PWT.

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Religious Discourse & Sermons

• Sacred texts are a core element of many religious traditions, and often play an important role in how people understand both theology and moral life (Vermeulen, 2021).
• Sermons are essential elements of Evangelical Christian religious teaching and serve to teach believers about the meanings of texts and how they should be applied in contemporary life (Bryan, 2023).
• The relationship between the TAW and the actual world can be constructed not only through metaphorical language but also through allegoresis (Gibbs, 2011) in that stories from the bible inform how Christians think about their own position in the actual world.

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Research Questions

1. How does the biblical text motivate and inform speculation about the characters’ internal thoughts and emotional lives?
2. How do pastors, as readers of biblical texts, understand and discuss the motivations and internal lives of characters from biblical stories?
3. How do metaphor and allegoresis affect the kinds of connections sermons make between textual actual and possible worlds and the readers' actual world?

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Method

Corpus of 303 sermons focused on the biblical story of Ruth, taken from the Old Testament were collected from a popular online sermon database.

161 sermons (445,475 tokens) identified for analysis.

• Where, if at all, was there evidence of the characters’ internal lives being represented beyond the explicit textual actual world?
• Where, if at all, was there evidence of the sermon author connecting the world of the text to the contemporary world of the congregation?

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The Book of Ruth

Ruth, a Moabite woman, married Mahlon, an Israelite. After his death, she chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, Naomi, instead of returning to her own family.

Naomi and her daughter-in-law then travel to Bethlehem, where Ruth gathers grain in the fields of Boaz, a wealthy relative of Naomi’s late husband. Boaz promises to protect Ruth and marries her after securing the right to reestablish Naomi’s family line.

The story is generally understood to be a testament to God’s protection of Ruth and Ruth’s faithfulness to God, which is rewarded.

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The Internal World of Characters

Ruth must have felt her whole world had fallen apart. (6)

[Naomi] had lost her entire life. It was gone. She had nothing. (53)

The thought may have crossed their mind to just give up and stay where they were. (75)

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The Internal World of Characters

By constructing details about the internal lives of characters that are not supplied by the biblical narrative, then, pastors can morally frame characters’ choices to influence their listeners.

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Speculation about Internal States

Ruth’s experiences are screaming that it was a huge mistake to turn from Moab’s worship (5)

Naomi realizes they [her family] didn’t know what being empty was. (5)

Naomi was experiencing what we call in year 2003 clinical depression (56) 

Naomi was bitter and angry at God… She wanted to be left alone so she could continue being mad at God. (56) 

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Unmarked Speculation

Unmarked speculation is a central mechanism for expanding the biblical TAW by facilitating the development of more richly detailed interior lives than those present in the bible. These sermons develop a significantly extended and altered TAW, which is nonetheless often presented to the congregation as if it were simply a re-telling of the biblical story.

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Marked Speculation

Imagine all the questions Ruth would have been asking […] Imagine what she must be remembering. (5)

We could assume that Naomi and her husband are cursed […] But are they cursed? Don’t be so quick to assume so.

Perhaps if they stayed in Israel, things could have been worse – but all that is just speculation.

Be careful about making assumptions about God causing this […]. (157)

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Marked Speculation

Marked speculation enables pastors to acknowledge gaps in the biblical TAW and also to invite congregational co-construction of TPWs to emphasise their own moral reading of the text.

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One-to-one correlation

When you are faced with a decision, do you…give it your all? (21)

What then is happening to Ruth has happened to us. (43)

When trouble comes to our lives, we can do one of three things: a) endure it, b) try to escape it, or c) enlist it. (170)

Are you feeling abandoned? Forsaken? Who is it that God has placed in your life that may be “hidden in plain sight?” (115)

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One-to-one correlation

Clear evidence of allegoresis in that the listeners are either primed, through the reading or presentation of the text prior to the application, or through reference to the text to explicitly think of themselves in the same way as Ruth and to compare their own experiences to her experiences.

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Integrating story world & real world

How does our relationship with Jesus compare to Ruth’s relationship with Naomi? (133)

Are you like Naomi wandering in a foreign land away from God? (158)

Perhaps it is that you are experiencing a famine in your own life in these days. (165)

Charles Fuller called Ruth the Cinderella of the Scriptures. (102)

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Integrating story world & real world

Pastors use their interpretations of the TAW and TPWs of the bible as a resource to apply moral reasoning to the actual world of the congregation with consequences for right living.

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Conclusion

• Pastors regularly speculate about the internal states of characters within biblical stories, linguistically marking different degrees of awareness of this speculation, with the purpose of understanding and explaining the motivations of biblical characters.
• The speculation about biblical characters may be rooted, to differing extents, in textual evidence, but it is often supported by reference to other parts of the bible, the experiences of the pastor themselves, and/or an assumption that the experiences of the characters are fundamentally like those of contemporary audiences.
• In speculating about characters’ internal states, pastors reconstruct the TAW and associated TPWs by presenting them as if they were part of the biblical narrative.
• Finally, connections drawn between the TAW of the bible and the actual world of the congregation — through speculation about characters, allegoresis, metaphor, illustrative stories, and imaginative extensions of the TAW and TPWs of the text — allow pastors to make moral judgements about right and wrong behaviour and promote specific actions and beliefs.

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References

Bryan CD (2023) Pandemic Sermon Rhetoric and Evangelism. In: Pihlaja S and Ringrow H (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion. Routledge, pp. 194–207.

Gibbs R (2011) The Allegorical Impulse. Metaphor and Symbol 26(2): 121–130.

Mansworth M (2025) Possible Worlds Theory and Readers’ Emotional Responses to Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Ryan M-L (1991) Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Indiana University Press.

Vermeulen K (2021) Sacred Texts. In: Pihlaja S (ed.) Analysing Religious Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 311–327.

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Thank you, etc.

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