The reason why stories come into conflict with each other is that worldviews, and the stories which characterize them, are in principle NORMATIVE: that is, they claim to make sense of the whole of reality.
Even the relativist, who believes that everybody’s point of view on everything is equally valid even though apparently incompatible, is obedient to an underlying story about reality which comes into explicit conflict with most other stories, which speak of reality as in the last analysis a seamless web, open in principle to experience, observation and discussion.
It is ironic that many people in the modern world have regarded Christianity as a private worldview, a set of private stories. Some Christians have actually played right into this trap. But in principle the whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is PUBLIC truth. Otherwise it collapses into some version of Gnosticism.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.42
That’s what is interesting about a story. It doesn’t aim to explain any one thing in particular and so it indirectly claims to explain everything (at least a little bit)!
If you say, “The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Godhead”, that’s a true statement, but just about one thing.
When you say, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” (Acts 4:13) – you’re saying a lot more.
It’s placed in history and has all kinds of implications about what the holy spirit is, what he does, what happened to some of the people, how the people who heard them were struck. It doesn’t carry quite the raw truth of the first statement (the proposition), but it reaches deeper into our lives.
As far as private versus public faith, Leithart often emphasizes the same:
In the New Testament, we do not find an essentially private gospel being applied to the public sphere, as if the public implications of the gospel were a second story built on the private ground floor. The gospel IS the announcement of the Father’s formation, through His Son and the Spirit, of a new city – the city of God.
-Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, Ch.1, Sec.3