Doctrine Good. Stories Bad. That’s the mini-theme of this month’s Christianity Today.
I begin with the most egregious offense. There’s a short inset on p. 26, snipped from a book by J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett (Grounded in the Gospel; Baker, 2010) entitled, “The Lost Art of Catechesis.” The point? Back in the old days, folks used to have to learn their theology. That waned for a bit, but was revived in all its glory in the Reformation. Doctrine. The church has to learn its doctrine.
When did this all go astray between then and now? When Sunday Schools entrusted instruction to lay people and rather than teaching people theology substituted “instilling of familiarity (or shall we say, perhaps, over-familiarity) with Bible stories” (26).
I could not disagree more with the claims being asserted here: that the real thing we need is theology, and all those stories in the 
Bible (you know, the actual Bible God, in God’s wisdom, decided to give to the church) are second-rate tools the learning of which makes us less competent Christians.
This is the classic inversion of sola scriptura: no longer do we really want you to do what the Reformers did (read your Bible), we want you instead to read and memorize what they said after they had read their Bibles.
This not only gets the Bible wrong, it leads to us getting our own story wrong as well. A glimpse of this is caught when they say, “A pastor’s chief task, it was widely understood, was to be the teacher of the flock.” Ugh. At least, ugh given the vision of teaching depicted here.
No. The story is the thing. Regurgitation of catechism not only fails to make good theologians, it fails to make good Christians. I’ll wrestle with this one a bit more in a subsequent post, in which I’ll take up the cover story–an essay claiming that theology is an essential component to spiritual growth.
Yes, we do need to have well-trained minds, but such assertions as these generate an anticipated result that can be empirically verified or falsified. And in the case of the equation “theology ==> piety” the data fail to convince.
So in response to the story-disparaging Packer and Parrett I want to say, “I’d rather have someone grounded in the Gospels than grounded in ‘the gospel’.” The story is the thing.
As one of those lay people charged with teaching her Sunday School class Bible Stories, I couldn’t agree with you more. People may memorize theological rules and doctrine, but they internalize stories. A deeper, personal relationship with God isn’t going to come because I know follow all the rules. It comes from recongizing myself in the stories I learned as a child and which I now teach my children. Great post, Dr. Kirk.
So what you are suggesting instead is that “story ==> piety” ?
If so, could you fill that out for me?
Joel, I wouldn’t make the case for storied piety being empirically verifiable. But I would say that stories are actually what God saw fit to give us (for the most part), and a storied theology where stories themselves aren’t present. That leads me to believe that stories are of greater power for walking rightly under God than de-storied theology.
Serious questions are also raised about how we should talk about God, etc. Do the catechisms really tell us more truly about God when they tell us God doesn’t change or change his mind than the stories tell us about God when they show that he does? Etc.
I find it somewhat awesome that a book about doing things “the old-fashioned way” is co-authored by a guy named Parrett.
What? You think he’s parretting Packer?
Or more generally, that the whole book advocates parroting as theological method.
This is a good post and I agree that ‘stories are of greater power for walking rightly under God than de-storied theology’. They are more conducive to the formation of faith and piety than abstract universalized de-historicized concepts alone. To think otherwise is to substitute sola theologia for sola scriptura.
“If the place where we look for ultimate truth is in a story and if (as is the case) we are still in the middle of the story, then it follows that we walk by faith and not by sight. If ultimate truth is sought in an idea, a formula, or a set of timeless laws or principles, then we do not have to recognize the possibility that something totally unexpected may happen. Insofar as our knowledge is accurate, we shall be able to predict the future. Future and past are governed by the same laws, the same principles, and the same realities. But if we find ultimate truth in a story that has not yet been finished, we do not have that kind of certainty. The certainty we have rests on the faithfulness of the one whose story it is. We walk by faith.” – Lesslie Newbigin
Can I have both?
MMT: Yes. You get a special dispensation–but only if the doctrine fits into the story…
Confessions, Creeds, and Catechisms are very important to the Church. They are distillations of truth that help create a standard by which to judge error..etc. I think it’s a false dichotomy to say that Scripture and the “C’s” are at odds. All the confessions I know are BATHED in scripture references and proofs. I think if we follow that thought out then we shouldn’t have sermons. Rather, pastors should just read the scriptures and then end the service. I could hear someone argue that preaching is commanded in scripture when the three “C’s” are not. I would answer that the New Testament is filled with councils which did basically the same thing. The Westminster Confession was particularly important. It followed the The Great Ejection of 1662 and the Act of Uniformity of the same year which decimated the protestant church of the time. With many Pastors imprisoned it was important o have a biblical commentary of sorts to help avoid error.
I agree that some reformed folks lean on the confession too much but it’s just a matter of fact that the confessions says some things in such a succinct way that it’s nigh impossible to improve upon it. SOme quote books and some quote sermons. Others simply quote the confession.
One must then also ask about denominational doctrinal statements. Most denominations have a doctrinal statement that must be agree upon before someone can claim membership in said denomination. Are these contrary to sola scriptura as well?
I also want to say that I love both stories and doctrine. I hate that dichotomy as well!
Michael, I was once upon a time where you are now. What I discovered, the more I dug into the Bible, was how poorly the WCF and Catechisms actually reflect the texture of the biblical story. To saturate a document with proof texts is a very different thing from capturing the biblical narrative itself.
What difference does it make, for example, whether we conceive of God as “Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth;” or whether we conceive of him as “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” “The God who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist,” “The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”?
I think it makes all the difference in the world. The latter statements recognize that God is tied to a particular narrative in a way that Westminster doesn’t, in a way that Westminster can’t, even, because of the way that it conceptualizes the theological task (which is tied to how it conceptualizes God, etc.).
Creeds and confessions are important, but they are best when they reflect the biblical narrative. The Apostles’ and Nicene creeds work well because they are basic outlines of the story. The CRC’s contemporary creed is a good example of a creedal formulation applying theology to our story. The Reformational creeds contain some good content, but their forms diminish the biblical-narrative flow.
Wow, what absurd claims. To me, this communicates that the story (re: the text) is unimportant. What’s important is what’s behind the text, the aphorism of the text (which really can’t communicate what the text says in full). The doctrine is man-made, the story is inspired by God. Absurd, just absurd
I like what Hauerwas says about this. He notes that the “doctrines” are just outlines, heuristics, of the story. Ideally, they should help us tell the story better. However, they are secondary to the narrative. The inspired & most important thing is the narrative, but the doctrine helps us communicate it better (ideally).
Unfortunately, we replace one with the other. What tyranny there is in either/or dichotomies.
What tyranny there is in either/or dichotomies.
Exactly.
Amen!
rjm: Keep your Roman Catholic theology out of this.
Hey, I’m just echoing your non-Roman Catholic colleague, who put it very well down below.
I would say that many people don’t know the stories or the theologies!
I haven’t read the book you reference and don’t think I’d agree with it (at least not all of it) but I do think BOTH are needed and important. I’m disturbed by many believers (and some pastors included) who have gotten so off on their understanding of the theology that they start to believe the crazy ideas/theologies in books like Brian McLaren’s most recent one. I think the balance of “knowing the story”/God’s word says personally (as you suggest) and understanding core theological ideas derived from it would protect people against this. That’s my 2 cents! 
Scott, I think McLaren would say, “Yes, I’m disagreeing with the theology. That’s the point. Now come and read this story with me and let’s see what ‘theology’ makes better sense of it.” While I don’t think I’ll arrive at McLaren’s conclusions, that posture of holding our theology under our bibles rather than reading our Bibles through it is precisely the correct posture, IMHO. I believe what I believe because the story keeps developing that sort of picture.
The reason I’m not going to jump on board with Michael’s assertions of the tyranny of false dichonomies is that this is often used as a veneer to keep us from realizing the real problems that the Bible poses for our theologies, and/or to keep us from having to wrestle with critical issues that might allow the Bible to run roughshod over our sacred cows.
I totally agree with what you said, “the real problems that the Bible poses for our theologies, and/or to keep us from having to wrestle with critical issues that might allow the Bible to run roughshod over our sacred cows.”
I’m not meaning, in any way, to suggest we don’t go to the bible as the primary source or that we hold theology over God’s Word.
I guess I’m just speaking from my experience as a former youth pastor and current church planter who realizes that some of my former “youth kids” and people I’m trying to reach don’t know or never learned (some of it is my fault in the case of my former youth) key views of “truth v. lies”, “right v. wrong”, & “inerrancy of scripture”, why salvation is in Christ alone, etc.
I think this happened because, sometimes, they heard stories but never heard/understood the key concepts/views that the disciples and biblical authors had of the world, God’s word/revelation, etc.
I think that even though there’s a danger in “tyranny of false dichotomies” there is an equal danger in choosing story without theology or vice versa. I think it needs to be what you call this blog “Storied Theology”.
Anyway, I think we probably agree more than disagree, so I won’t go on. Plus I realize you probably have forgotten more than I’ve ever known when it comes to some of these things!
And some of the smartest ones, Scott, probably left behind the idea that the Bible draws clear and consistent lines of “right vs. wrong,” truth vs. lies,” and even moreso that the Bible has any kind of concept of “inerrancy” in it…not because of your lack of drilling them in theology, but because they actually went on to read the Bible for themselves.
It was once I started reading the Bible as it is and stopped saying to myself “well, I know that’s what it looks like, but it can’t be, because my theology says…” that I noticed the Bible is far more diverse and wilder than our theologies want to allow us to believe.
It is interesting that when the Hebrew Bible decides to abandon the story (i.e. portions of the writings), they do not produce doctrine. In fact, this literature more so than the rest is most antithetical to doctrine and dogma, and yet at the same time it is highly catechetical. Of course, Israelite catacheses came in many shapes and forms, the least of which not being story–”I am YHWH God who . . .” Perhaps the move toward doctrine is a New Testament phenomenon, not in terms of what we see going on in the New Testament, but in how we have learned to interact with it. New Testament writers have a powerful way of spinning the ancient stories to fortify their message. This then raises an important question, Has the New Testament exhausted the significance of these stories, or is it teaching out to mine them for ourselves? How you answer this question will have a serious impact on the theological significance you attach to story.
That posture of holding our theology under our bibles rather than reading our Bibles through it is precisely the correct posture, IMHO.
But, in history and practice, is not a stance that the church has ever taken, or could ever take. What would it mean to have a Bible without or apart from theology (= conviction, belief), since that is what led to the production of the Bible, the shaping of the canon, and the rejection of Marcion, in the first place? Even the Reformers read their Bibles in light of the creeds and the regula fidei. None of them ever actually said “sola Scriptura.”
I’ve come to see the second commandment to be not simply about graven images, per se, but about how representations made by humans are always inadequate to reality. This is equally true of texts as it is of “graven images.” At the time the Ten Commandments were delivered, the majority of the Hebrews were pre-literate (meaning that a small minority of people would ever learn to read or write, and most of the reading and writing would be used to clerical tasks, record-keeping, and transcriptions of oral histories, but not at all the way we use writing now, as a primary and necessary means of communication. ) Writing to the ancient Hebrews was, until the time of Christ, similar to how we use our computers’ hard-drives — a way of storing information.
As such, it wasn’t necessary to forbid *written* or textual or even linguistic definitions of God or God’s relations to humans, because the *only* discourse that existed along those lines were oral narratives.
Stories are adaptable in ways that definitions and propositions are not. The best example of this is how powerfully the Exodus story has been used by the Abolitionist movements, freedmen, and the Civil Rights movements in the United States. In the face of a dominant theology that said slavery, and then segregation was ok, and God’s will, even, these groups relied on the *story* of the Exodus from Egypt to help define the moral and political nature of their movement. It can’t be stressed enough that *theology* was used as a justification for the injustices of slavery, racism and segregation, while the *stories* of the BIble were used to champion and inform causes we now understand as heroic and just and necessary to our nation’s moral survival.
Stories incite conversation and communal creation of ad-hoc theologies that can be discarded when no longer useful or when they become monstrous or unjust, which is bound to happen, simply because our descriptions of the natural and supernatural worlds can never make a 1-to-1 analogy to reality.
That is why St. Paul was so wary of texts in a time when literacy was becoming something more than a tool for record-keeping. “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” is a result of that concern, as is “If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love…” It’s also what makes the beginning of John’s gospel so interesting — almost as if to remind us of the second commandment, John describes the Son as the *spoken word of the Father* — a contrast to any human-made abstraction.
My question is, if we aren’t reading the story of Scripture through the lens of our theology, what lens are we reading it through? I agree with what you’re saying, but I’m just trying to think about what that would look like practically. Would it mean reading Scripture through the lens of our (hopefully) Scripture-based theology, but holding that theology much more loosely and editing it as need be? Would it mean reading Scripture through a historical lens? If we all bring frameworks through which we read Scripture, which frameworks are “right”?
What if none are always 100% right? What if, since we “see as through a glass, darkly,” we abandoned the project of getting the lens, always bound to be inadequate, “right” in exchange for some other project(s), like incarnating the Beatitudes or something? What if we started being conscious of our lenses and learning to use and discard them as they are more or less useful in completing such projects?
That *seems* be what happens in the New Testament. Paul, especially, seems to be willing to use Greek philosophy, Hebrew tradition, and the teachings of Christ as needed, but was also willing to ditch them, or even use them out of context (he does that a LOT with the Old Testament) in order to further the projects he found important. What if we were just up-front that that’s what we *all* do anyhow, and that anyone who pretends otherwise has ulterior motives of which we should be suspicious?
Then our practice becomes about good/bad or useful/useless ways of choosing lenses, and about being aware of our own and being willing to be critical of our own.
Guys,
I had Dr. Parrett as a professor in seminary at Gordon-Conwel, actually last year. I think you may be misunderstanding him a bit. I don’t think he is saying stories bad, doctrine good as much as saying that often we teach are church members bible stories as moral lessons rather than stories about God’s redemption in history. Also, teaching Bible stories without doctrine betrays the fact that we always look at the Bible through the lens of a tradition. He thinks churches need to ask the question, what must we teach? What is a local church responsible for educating its members about? I think he is right about Catechesis, not because propositions are better than story, but because its important for our church members to know how those before us have read the bible and that we don’t read the bible in a vacuum. By the way, Parrett’s and extremely kind and thoughtful Christian man. He is not a Reformed theology pit bull. His book should be worth reading.
Brian, thanks for the scoop on Dr. Parrett. It’s great to hear that he’s a kind and thoughtful Christian man, not a Reformed rottweiler.
The challenge from a Biblical scholarship point of view is that the world and traditions within which we read often read from a theological angle that creates anachronistic readings of texts. Yes, that will always occur, but part of our job is to listen for what it said in the first century, before hearing what it said to a 16th century audience, before trying to figure out what it is saying to us now. The challenge that I experience is that folks too often have few categories for thinking like this, and are often not able to see how their theology is determining a reading that would be completely inaudible to early readers.
This topic reminds me of something I read in Robert McKee’s book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting”:
“Story isn’t a flight from reality, but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.”
As Christians, the reality we are being carried towards is a God in relation to his people. It is the quintessential love story, and is told as such in Scripture. It’s depressing to think that people would even hint at placing doctrine, knowledge, over that most story-bound virtue love.
1 Corinthians 13 might not be so well understood after all.
By the way, terrific blog Dr Kirk. Long may it continue.
When did this all go astray between then and now? When Sunday Schools entrusted instruction to lay people and rather than teaching people theology substituted “instilling of familiarity (or shall we say, perhaps, over-familiarity) with Bible stories”
I know it goes against the point you’re making, but I could suggest that, if these guys really want to put an emphasis on doctrine, they could start insisting that Sunday School teachers be trained professionals.
Frankly, that means paying them, which is why I don’t think even they would go for it.