This weekend I reflected on the importance of narrative theology for keeping our theology from coming off the rails. A commenter drew attention to an article in this month’s Christianity Today to ask about those parts of the Bible that aren’t, in fact, narrative.
This is an important question to address. What’s all this talk about the Bible as “story” when we have these lovely psalms and proverbs and prophets and letters?
It’s an important question to wrestle with, but one that ultimately misses the point.
To say that the Bible is a story, and not just any story but the story of God’s revelation of himself in, and salvation of the world through, Jesus Christ, is to provide an overarching framework within which all the parts find their significance.
Let’s take the Psalms.
Psalm 1 begins like this:
The truly happy person
doesn’t follow wicked advice,
doesn’t stand on the road of sinners,
and doesn’t sit with the disrespectful.
Instead of doing those things,
these persons love the LORD ’s Instruction,
and they recite God’s Instruction day and night! (CEB)
Who is YHWH? What is this Instruction, this Torah, that YHWH has given? Why should someone who sings this song think that keeping such Torah will lead to happiness and flourishing?
The Psalm assumes the story of Israel, a particular God who has done particular things (such as giving Torah) and made particular promises.
I’m not just cherry picking.
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.Net
Psalm 2 is an enthronement psalm, celebrating Israel’s king: “Why do the nations so furiously rage together? And why do the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise up and rulers take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed” (Handel’s Messiah Version).
It assumes not only YHWH and Israel, but a particular place for the king, and a particular relationship between the king and YHWH. It even assumes Abrahamic promises of inherited land, now being focused on this royal emissary.
You can sing the psalms without the story, but you’ll be transforming their meaning.
This is one reason why the article in CT was not very helpful or profound in its critiques of narrative theology. In essence, the article was a complaint about people who had done a bad job telling the story, or who had not figured out what to do with psalms or proverbs or that dread beast Qoheleth.
Similar points could be raised about NT letters. One might say, rightly, that Paul did not write stories. Of course he didn’t. And this misses the point entirely.
Paul is writing as part of a religious world formed by the story of Israel and Israel’s God. When he speaks to churches and says, “Our fathers were all under the cloud,” he is writing them into the story of Israel. When he says, “Our unrighteousness will not nullify the righteousness of God, will it?” he is comparing two characters in a story the he recognizes himself to be part of–and that he recognizes Jesus to lie at the center of as well. (More here.)
Within this huge story of Israel and of creation heading to consummation, however, there is a smaller story, an inner story that determines the rest. For Israel, that story was the Exodus. For Christians, that story is the Christ-event.
When we want to know what it looks like for this story to be on track, for this story to–for once!–not run off the rails, we look to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
It’s in light of his instruction that we can sing Psalm 1 with its praise of Torah; it’s in light of his crucifixion and resurrection that we can sing Psalm 1 with its expectations of flourishing; it’s in light of his enthronement that we can sing Psalm 2 and know what it is to have a king who has asked, and is being given, the world as his inheritance (and, incidentally, sharing it with us).
So no, I don’t find the lack of narrative at points to be any argument against narrative theology. In fact, I would argue that those parts can only be read aright in light of the larger story within which they are given voice and thereby find their meaning.
I would have answered similarly. I’d be very interested in what you would say about the wisdom literature.
“When he speaks to churches and says, “Our fathers were all under the cloud,” he is writing them into the story of Israel. ”
So the funny thing is, is that particular God who did particular things with a particular people at a particular time can actually DEPARTIUCLARIZE himself to apply to anyone anywhere anytime.
So, suddenly YAHWEH’s instruction is, kinda universal. And we’re back at natural law. (surely, enriched by re-storifying it)
I don’t see the basis for your funny thing, pduggie?
What allows Paul to say you gentiles now have fathers who were baptized in the cloud.
Where did that story come from? How can that plot twist happen, that the ‘particulars’ can all be ignored and people can be said to have fathers who came from egypt?
Literally, you say “. For Israel, that story was the Exodus.”
But this very citation says, for Christians, you too have that story.
No. There is no departicularization; there is adoption. There is the expansion of adoption from the covenant fathers out to all nations. The particulars are not ignored; in adoption in Christ, we become children in Abraham. “You gentiles,” who have been baptized into Christ, now belong to the people of God by God’s own election—rather than by human choice. Read Rm 9-11, and then go back and read chapters 3-4 and 5-8 as the logic behind it.
This particular god who did these particular things at these particular times is not bound to the limits of those things, but does new things and brings them into continuity. Not identity, but continuity. And in this way we gentiles in Christ, even we who call ourselves Christians and have tortured horribly our relation to the Judean traditions that belonged to Paul his whole life, still stand in continuity of adoption with Abraham, the beginning of God’s covenant adoption of creation. There is no departicularization; we enter the story by a new act that grafts us into the constant action of God from the very beginning.
The problem in the ways we, as non-Judean Christians, have historically adopted the Hebrew stories is that we have forgotten that they only belong to us as we belong to them after the fact. The Exodus, the Exile, the Golah; these are not our stories by right of having been there. But they are stories of the God to whom we have become bound in relationship, and they are the stories of the generations before us in the family of this people of God.
I was going to reply to pudggie, but this pretty much takes care of business. It’s not a universalizing but an inscripting…
Sorry to steal your thunder!
Being Lutheran, I’d like to agree with you. But since humans are naturally “storied” beings, I’m slightly skeptical: Your story is internal to the text, but not universal. But then you seem to make that small version of the story into the hermeneutical lens by which you incorporate everything else into a larger part of that shorter story. Isn’t that story, while being initially internal, actually external to the other parts of the text? In other words, shouldn’t the ‘Sitz im Leben’ of the non-narrative, non-Jesus, parts of the Bible be prioritized before its incorporation into the Jesus-story?
I confess to getting loss in your back and forthing.
But, I’ll take a stab at your last question: It depends on what you mean by “prioritized.”
I think we should give a historical reading of a text as a “first” reading, but then recontextualize it within the story as it comes to its fruition in Christ. So it’s prioritized in time but not prioritized in terms of significance for the Christian story/reader/canon.
I think the concerns of the historical context ought to guide us in incorporating them into the Christian story. In other words, captivity to sin should not be understood outside the historical concern of captivity to empire. I typically think your ‘storied theology’ does this well, but in other contexts, the story serves a theology prior to addressing the historical context.
One difference between a “narrative” and a “theory of …” (a set of propositions) is that the theory surrounds its object: referents and allowed operations are well-defined and the theory can only mean what it says. Whereas a narrative is nested inside its object: it requires a hermeneutic/”interpretation” that binds it to its object, and so can be bound to a broad range of objects. Therefore a theory is time- and culture-limited whereas a narrative is not. As a narrative, the story of the Exodus can be applied to concerns of today; as factual history, not so much.
I think this gets at pduggie’s question. The usual new-atheist objection to this sort of post-modernism is that the choice of hermeneutic is unlimited; but in fact as Christians we have a master hermeneutic, namely The Cross, under which we evaluate particular interpretations. Absent that, pduggie is quite right, arrogating to ourselves the privileges granted to the Israelites in the Sinai would be unjustified. Paul’s point precisely, if I am correct?
Marshall,
Your distinctions between narrative vs. theory of sound nice, but can you offer any support and/or argumentation for these assertions? Sounds like a lot jargon designed to put “narrative” on the good side of various popular divides while leaving “theory of” on the bad side.
BTW, I don’t bring this up as part of rejecting “narrative” approaches to theology; in fact, I find them incredibly useful.
Thanks!
I don’t think I understand your request. I’m serving up my take in the hope of getting into a nice conversation with somebody. As I tried to suggest, I think these thoughts play into the “Are Science and Religion Compatible?” conundrum. Science/theory/propositions are good/useful when I am trying to do engineering; Narrative, when I am trying to “practice virtue” in MacIntyre’s sense.
I suppose it is jargon-y; part of what I’m doing is exploring the use of this language, not being a native speaker. If I’m using words in a bad way that invites misinterpretation I hope someone will give some feedback; I do believe I have some interesting things to get out.
“the dread beast Qoheleth” – [snicker!]
Lately there is a lot of interest in discourse analysis: using linguistic methods to analyze NT text (see Steve Runge’s work for example). The following introduction is excerpted from Robert A. Dooley and Stephen H. Levinsohn, Analyzing Discourse: A Manual of Basic Concepts (Dallas: SIL International, 2001), 7-8. (see: http://www.ntdiscourse.org/2011/01/rethinking-narrative-genre/)
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2.1 Broad categories of genre
By definition then, genre is culture-specific, and each language and culture will have a bewildering variety of specific genres which are distinctive to it. 2 Hence, any list of universal genres must be more general. In this text, a very broad level of genre categories is presented, following Longacre 1996. Not surprisingly, these general categories lack many of the characteristic properties associated with specific genres; they do, however, retain useful distinctives.
Longacre’s broad categorization makes use of plus and minus values for a set of four features. Two of these features—contingent temporal succession and agent orientation—can be taken as primary, and serve to identify the four broadest categories. CONTINGENT TEMPORAL SUCCESSION refers to a framework “in which some (often most) of the events or doings are contingent on previous events or doings” (p. 9). Thus, Little Red Riding Hood’s arrival at her grandmother’s house is contingent on her setting out through the woods, and the putting of a cake in the oven (in a recipe) is contingent on having first mixed the proper ingredients. The second primary feature, AGENT ORIENTATION, refers to whether the discourse type deals with “events or doings” which are controlled by an agent (one who performs an action), “with at least a partial identity of agent reference running through the discourse” (loc. cit.). Again, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf are agents in that story; the hearer is a (potential) agent in an exhortation, etc. The four categories of genre resulting from these two features are presented in (5):
(5) Broad categories of genre (from Longacre 1996, Chapter 1)
+ Agent orientation - Agent orientation
+ Contingent temporal succession NARRATIVE PROCEDURAL
- Contingent temporal succession BEHAVIORAL EXPOSITORY
That is, NARRATIVE discourse (e.g., stories) is + agent orientation, + contingent succession, for the reasons discussed above. PROCEDURAL discourse (“how to do it, how it was done, how it takes place”) is +contingent succession but – agent orientation, since “attention is on what is done or made, not on who does it” (loc. cit.). BEHAVIORAL discourse (exhortation, eulogy, some speeches of political candidates, etc.) is –contingent succession but + agent orientation, since “it deals with how people did or should behave” (loc. cit.), and EXPOSITORY discourse (budgets, scientific articles, etc.) is – in regard to both features.
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Using the above schema, you can see that if one see the Bible as only a narrative, you would be ignoring the communicative intent of parts of the Scripture which have no agent orientation or which do not rely on contingent temporal succession. By reading Scripture only as narratives, you would miss the writers’ intent in their procedural, expository and behavioral discourses.
The discourse analysis schema is useful because it does not seek to impose its theoretical construct, but rather, to seek the communicative pragmatics of the writers. ”
Narrative theology” , on the other hand, seeks to impose a certain way in understanding the text; it is not objective but starts from a post-modernistic viewpoint. It seeks to accomodate on the reader’s a priori belief rather than the writers’ intention.
Another example of … classic … helpful Dr. Kirk
I so appreciate your work on narrative theology and how you help us to frame the greater story. Meaningful, important and necessary work.