Narrative Theology

An Overview
GABRIEL FACKRE
Abbot Professor of Christian Theology
In the plot, coherence, movement, and climax that
characterize a story, narrative theology sees a way
to overcome the problems theology creates for itself
through its subservience to discursive reason.
W
E BEGIN OUR INQUIRY sobered by Johann Batist Metz's comment on
the damage done to narrative when it is "pinned and classified like a
butterfly in a collector's case."
1
After all, is not the rediscovery of story bound up
with well-founded doubts about the inordinate claims of discursive thought? Yet
the art of theological storytelling today is recommended and expounded in tracts
and tomes of intricate analysis. And irony upon irony, a systematic theologian is
doing this introduction.
2
But with the same author who warns us about the risks of
pinning butterflies, we believe that "there is a time for storytelling and a time for
argument" (Metz, p. 209).
The variety and imprecision of terminology in the discussion of narrative are
striking. The theological conversation about "story" is influenced by fields as
diverse as literary criticism, psychology, linguistics, social ethics and com-
munications theory, with formulations showing the marks of these pursuits and
the partisans within them. The interdisciplinary character of narrative study is
one of its strengths, but the too simple transfer of categories or ideology from a
favorite sector as key to the theological subject matter can exclude the insights of
other disciplines and, more importantly, obscure the unique features of narrative
1. Faith in History and Society , trans. David Smith (New York, The Seabury Press, 1980), p. 216.
2. Another systematician, fchard Jensen, breaks the pattern in his work on preaching, Telling the
Story (Minneapolis, Augsburg Press, 1980).
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Narrative Theolgy: An Overview
Interpretation
theology. We begin therefore with some distinctions and definitions, drawing on
learnings from the literary habitat of narrative but with an eye on (a) contributions
from other areas, (b) the nature and use of narrative in religious communities,
and (c) the issues and types of current narrative theology.
A narrative in its literary form is distinguished by "the presence of a story and a
storyteller."
3
Narrative, in its encompassing sense, is an account of events and
participants moving over time and space, a recital with beginning and ending
patterned by the narrator' s principle of selection. This general description is
roomy enough to include "history." Here we understand history to entail a
chronicle of events based on empirical investigation, always deferring to fact but
never divorced from a framework for viewing and selecting the same. In our
definition we are building toward one of the important debates in some circles of
narrative theology, the distinction between history and story.
4
To that end, as well
as some others, we identify a storya narrative in the narrow sense (most narrative
theologians use these terms synonymously, and we shall follow that practice
here)as an account of characters and events in a plot moving over time and
space through conflict toward resolution.
5
While narrative broadly conceived
includes history as action patterned according to some interpretative horizon, the
narrator in a story plays a "plotting" role; the narrative defers to the intention of
the author rather than to the purposes of "estensive reference" (Hans Frei). This
does not mean that historical elements are excluded from the story, even crucial
ones on which the tale turns, but rather that the coherence, meaning, and
direction of the events are acknowledged to be the expression of the narrator' s
vision. Pattern becomes plot, participants become characters, and movement has
directionality through conflict toward resolution.
Many narrative theologians hold that the power of great stories, including the
sagas of faith, lies in their resonance with who and what we most essentially are.
Robert Roth points to their purposiveness as kindling a universal human hope
(Story and Reality); Stephen Crites views them as reflecting the "tensed modalities"
of memory, attention, and anticipation (JAAR 39:291-311); Metz finds them
honoring the facts of suffering and conflict (op. cit., pp. 211-12); Robert Alter
stressed the place they give to human decision (The Art of Biblical Narrative). In
each case the constituents of story structure appear: cumulative action in all its
suspense and tension depicted as moving toward resolution, led there by narrator
vision.
Before we attend to the specifics of narrative theology, some chronicle of its
recent arrival is in order. Talk about storytelling in religion (not the practice of it
which goes back to human beginnings) gained momentum in recent years in
3. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellog, The Nature of Narrative (London, Oxford University Press,
1966), p. 4.
4. E.g., James Barr, "Story and History in Biblical Theology," in The Scope and Authority of the Bible
(Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1^80), pp. 1-17.
5. The word is "toward" not "to" because of the place of ambiguity and irony in the modern novel.
On the movement away "from dogma, certainty, fixity and all absolutes. . ."in storytelling that reflects
a wider relativism see Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, pp. 276ff.
341
contexts as diverse as annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and
national colloquies on the meaning and methods of evangelism. Anticipations of
its are found in circles that sought to bring together religion and the arts,
6
efforts
to relate Jungi an themes to counseling theory and practice, the "myth and truth"
disquisitions of Reinhold Niebuhr (Nature of Religious Experience, pp. 11735), and
the symbol theory of Paul Tillich (Systematic Theology, I, 238-47), the midcentury
"salvation history" principals, and developments in biblical scholarship, especially
those influenced by the new literary criticism. Cultural factors played their role.
The reclaiming of imagination in countercultural and other movements of the
sixties and seventies is inextricable from the growing interest in story. Disen-
chantment with things abstract, rationalistic, cerebral, didactic, intellectualist,
structured, prosaic, scientistic, technocratic, and the appeal of the concrete,
affective, intuitive, spontaneous, poetic contributed to the story focus. The
challenge of right brain to left brain and the preference of "first order language"
to second and third order communication prepared the narrative soil. The
revulsion with the Vietnam war was of a piece with the general critique of an
imperial technocracy with its "linear logic . . . that designs digital computers and
napalm antipersonnel weapons."
7
The feminist identification of and attack upon
male hegemony in modes of discourse, religious and secular, made its influence
felt on the reappreciation of the role of imagination.
8
And what of the impact of
our television environment? Some, like Harvey Cox, argue that it has made us
hungry for the telling of tales (see Seduction of the Spirit) while others believe it has
impoverished our narrative sensibility with its "signals" and "instant stories."
Deserving special mention as influences on narrative theology are cultural
developments that draw exponents to either the subjective or objective aspects of
narrative form: storyteller or story. Thus both a sense of historical relativity and
existentialist interests make the story form attractive to some because telling a tale
suggests a perspectival stance and confessional commitment without the neces-
sary entailment of universal truth claims. On the other hand, some, responding to
the range and depth of modern conflict and historical peril, are drawn to the
dramatic structure of narrative as befitting both historic faith and contemporary
fact, a usage anticipated in the conflict and victory motif of classical soteriology
and in the metaphors of Christian hymnody.
The religious and cultural antecedents and concomitants of narrative theology,
especially as they suggest a confrontation between the affective and conceptual,
"recognition" vs. "cognition" (Roth), invite clarification of a premise of this
inquiry: the "not only" rather than the "not merely" view of story vis vis more
measured exposition.
9
The interpretation of symbol by Wilbur Urban, as shaped
6 Amos Wilder describes some of this recent history in Theopoetic (Philadelphia, Fortress Press,
1976), pp 43-55 See also John Dominic Crossan's account, A Fragile Craft The Work of Amos Niven
Wilder (Chico, Ca , Scholars Press, 1981)
7.Wilham G Doty, "The Stories of Our Times," m James Wiggins, ed , Religion as Story (New
York, Harper & Row, 1975), 105
8 See Lucy Bregman' s left and right brain list cited by Salile McFague in her Metaphorical Theology
(Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1982), 195
9 On the other hand a "not merely" disdain for abstraction and the determined espousal of
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Narrative Theolgy: An Overview
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by some Kierkegaardian accents, can illustrate the dialectic presupposed. Our way
in to ultimate reality is by symbol. The One with whom we have to do meets us in a
manner commensurate with who that God is and what that God does, engaging us
in presence and passion.
10
Symbols drawn from the sensuous world of living and
dying are natural vehicles of this divine action.
"Symbolic truth, " therefore, is the power of this medium to bring us into
relationship to divine reality. As such, it is not decorative and dispensable but
integral to encounter and in this sense "true." Yet, there is a "truth of the symbol"
as well as "symbolic truth."
11
In the context of public inquiry about meaning and
the exploration of the relation of language to referent, analytical modes of
discourse are entirely appropriate. To make "truth claims" in this latter way is to
assert in propositional form the cognitive weight of symbol. The necessity of each
of these dimensions of religious symbol and finally of theological narrative is
assumed in the following discussion. Both the propositiona&i, who ignores the
function of symbol as the port of entry to ultimate reality or treats it as dispensable
once we "get the point," and the "imagination^, " who derides the function of
intellectual analysis or treats it as of lesser consequence in the quest for truth,
violate a critical parity and unity.
What then is the "narrative theology" that has appeared in the midst of this
imaginai upwelling? Taking into account its very wide borders, narrative theology
is discourse about God in the setting of story. Narrative (in its narrow sense)
becomes the decisive image for understanding and interpreting faith. Depiction
of reality, ultimate and penultimate, in terms of plot, coherence, movement, and
climax is at the center of all forms of this kind of talk about God. The represen-
tatives of narrative theology group themselves around three kinds of story,
distinctions that will constitute our typology: canonical story, life story, and community
story. The first makes extensive use of literary analysis of biblical material, the
second draws heavily on psycho-social resources in the exploration of personal
experience, and the third is shaped by communal lore and the sedimentations of
tradition. In terms of the data, these perspectives look very much like the three
refrains in the historic discussion of authority in Christian theology: Scripture,
human experience in its multifarious aspects, and tradition.
12
From the angle of
"publics" and their commensurate disciplines, they correspond roughly to aca-
demic, social, and ecclesial arenas with their fitting theological ventures: funda-
mental theology, praxis theology, and systematic theology.
13
Canonical Story : Narrative theology in this mode focuses upon a body of received
literature and using the appropriate critical methods seeks to understand how in
imagination rarely employ the mode it commends. The exception is an occasional story, as in Michael
Novak's, "An Experimental College at Athensburg," Religion as Story, pp. 179-97 and Amos Wilder's
word artistry.
10. S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Swenson and Lowrie (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1944) and esp. nis interpretation of quidquid cognoscitur, per modem
cognoscentis cognoscitur, pp. 5Iff.
11. Urban, Language and Reality (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1939), pp. 443ff.
12. See Fackre, The Christian Story (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1978), pp. 20- 51.
13. David Tracey, The Analogical Imagination (New York, Crossroad Pub. Co., 1981), pp. 47-98.
343
its stories we are put in touch with "the dearest freshness deep down things/' The
literary corpus so engaged and investigated is the Scripture of the Jewish people
and the Christian community. Of late, "the Bible as literature" has taken on fresh
meaing as a generation of scholars of the two Testaments makes use of the new
literary criticism to discern its structure and power.
14
Constituencies in the
religious studies program of colleges, universities, and secondary schools have
provided a forum and leadership for this inquiry. While the technical discussions
and interest in literary artistry for its own sake preoccupy some of the participants,
many others look for the theological significance of biblical narrative. Of primary
importance for the latter are the canonical stories, although some combine
attention to the particularities with exploration of the "world-plot" or "cult
epic."
15
If we do not keep before us the theological focus, the examination of this first
view could lead us down various connecting but finally tangential trails. The
intricate taxonomies of French structuralism are one such detour. Another is the
reduction of the significance of narrative texts to patterns detectable by either
computers or the methodologies of the new literary criticism. All of these re-
sources can illumine biblical narrative (the last more than the others in the writer's
opinion), but they do not constitute the heart of our subject. Narrative theology
happens when visions are seen and hypotheses ventured. So Robert Alter, after
tracing the artistry of the Judah and Tamar account in the setting of the Joseph
drama, declares that
. . . in biblical narrative . . . God's purposes are always entrammeled in history, dependent
on the acts of individual men and women for their continuing realization . . . . The biblical
tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder
complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because they are essential aspects of its
vision of [humanity], created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human
freedom (Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 12, 22).
With Eric Auerbach' s searching comparison of narrative in Genesis and the
Odyssey (Mimesis), the formative work of Nort hrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism), and
the pioneering witness of Amos Wilder as landmarks, the tools of literary analysis
have helped to shape an important model of narrative theology.
The indispensability of the story form is a refrain in all narrative theology but is
given special accent in the canonical story model. Metz compares story to sac-
rament in this regard, for each is an "effective sign" that does what it says (p. 208).
As Tracy describes it: "If the narrative bears its own classic power, Aristotle's
Rhetoric and its descendants will not prove sufficient. We must turn instead, with
Aristotle, to the Poetics and its insistence that, for certain expressions, form and
14 E g , see "The Bible in Literature Courses" volumes edited by Kenneth R R Gros Louis, Literary
Interpretations of Biblical narratives, Vols I, II (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1974/1982) and James
Ackerman, Thayer Warshaw, and John Sweet, eds , The Bible As/In Literature (Glenview, Scott,
Foresman and Co , 1976)
15 On the defense of "little story" against the overarching narrative see Doty's comments on David
L Miller's polytheistic thesis in Religion as Story, pp 11617 On the saga interpreted from a literary
perspective see Wilder's "The World-Story The Biblical Version," in fesus' Parables and the War of Myths
(Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1982), pp 43-69
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Narrative Theolgy: An Overview
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matter are indissoluble, that the disclosive and transformative power and mean-
ing of the story are grasped only in and through the narrative itself (p. 275). Thus
for Wilder the biblical Apocalypse is grounded in and puts us in touch with "the
nethermost piers and caissons of human being itself (War of Myths, p. 37). While
the "reality" to which some canonical story interpreters point, influenced as they
are by a secular and pluralist context (either the restraints of academia or the
constraints of modernity), is metaphysically elusive, most of the interpreters of
canonical story speak about the One with whom we have to do in the events that
narrative depicts.
16
As Wilder puts it in the midst of an intricate literary ex-
position, "I am not conscious of surrendering my confessional premises" (War of
Myths, p. 47).
Following Tracy's suggestive characterization, we distinguish disclosive and
transformative strands of canonical narratology. In the former, reality "looks me in
the eye" (Wilder), unveils itself, gives insight into the depths. The kinship with
painting appears and the sensibilities of the artist are at work. In the latter, the
literary narrativist calls attention to the "jars" and "jolts," the story's power to
reorient. We are different in attitude and behavior after narrative encounter.
And some would like to make us more so by intentional use of story in pedagogy,
thus bringing together the canonical type with our second psycho-social view.
Didacticism is, however, far from the minds of either the theoretician or
practitioner of transformative text. The story as an instrument of moral exhor-
tation or as convenient allegory for theological instruction separates form from
matter and treats tale as ornamental to truth rather than as avenue to it.
The specifics of this view as narrative theology are to be found in canonical
material that reflects the structure of story. One feature to which attention is
regularly drawn is the open-endedness of biblical narrative. Tales told in Scrip-
ture (not all tales) honor ambiguity, acknowledge complexity, and presuppose
indeterminacy (Alter). The canons of logic do not order events. Indeed the hand
of God is in the action, but that means real drama in the theatre of divine glory, not
the strings of a puppeteer. As tension and surprise are elements in the develop-
ment of plot, so, too, they appear in biblical storytelling in a compelling way.
Plot entails coherence as well as surprise. The patterning of events according to
narrator purpose is discernible in the overarching canonical narrative and in the
multifarious subplots of Scripture. The march of events in micro-story makes its
way to the larger denouement. And the cumulative and fateful movement is
manifest especially in the turning points of such epochal narratives as Exodus and
Easter. Biblical story promises meaning in the midst of the imponderable and
ambiguous.
Narrative speaks in the idiom of the earth. Reality meets us in the concretions of
time, place, and people, not in analytical discourse or mystical rumination. As in
16. Lonnie Kliever interprets the interest in narrative theology (also hope, play, liberation) against
the background of the 20th century' s progressive secularizing and relativizing of human consciousness
and the concomitant quest of some modern theologians for an experiential grounding of religious
faith and language (The Shattered Spectrum. A Survey of Contemporary Theology [Atlanta, John Knox Press,
1981], pp. 10-19, 153-84).
345
all good storytelling, we recognize ourselves in the depiction. Not the concept of
liberation but the j ourney out of Egyptian bondage, not an essay on the tele-
ological suspension of the ethical but Isaac and Abraham on Mount Moriah, not
the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement but the blood of Jesus on
Golgotha, not an exposition of the motif of Agape but the open arms of the
runni ng father. Would a historical God speak to us in any other way than through
history first and then in the "history-like" accounts of biblical narrative, the
extraordinary in the ordi nary?
1 7
We have noted the story component of suspense in the canonical narratives.
The indeterminate in story rises out of the experience of negativity. Conflict is
integral to narrative. So it is with the recurrence in the biblical stories of the foes of
the divine purpose. Here we meet the enemy not only in this oppressive monarch
or that false prophet but also in demonic principality and satanic power and in
that imperial drive or deceptive proclivity in the most righteous among us. Story
captures the sin, evil, and death that encounter us at every turn in our own lives
and names them in the language of faith.
Special attention is given by some literary narrativists to the end point of the
Great Tale as it is expressed in the eschatological stories. Does decisive canonical
movement toward resolution itself contribute to the new interest in story? The
sensitive probes of Amos Wilder into both eschatology and narrative suggest their
bonding, one inseparable from Wilder's experiences in the trenches and ambu-
lance runs of World War I where for the first time modern technology put the
question of theodicy in an awesome new context (War of Myths, pp. 23-24). To the
extent that narrative climax addresses the quandary, and now agony, over the
human future, biblical narrative grapples with a modern problematic. Finis and
telos dwell together in canonical story as narrative culmination becomes con-
summation.
Events, characters, time, place, action, surprise, tension, resolution, plot,
narratorthey are all there in the stories of Scripture. In one or another of these
components of narrative, the disclosive or transformative are to the fore and often
are found together. Parable surprise and polyvalence are explored by Crossan
(Cliffs of Falls, The Dark Interval), and its powers of personal reorientation are
stressed by Sallie McFague (Metaphorical Theology) and Walter Wink, all this in the
vein of the transformative canonical. The same material provides disclosive
insight to Amos Wilder, yet an aesthetic unveiling not divorced from its ethical
import. Comparable is the "linguistic incarnation" of parable in Robert W. Funk's
perspective in which the conventional world is exposed for what it is, and we are
summoned "into the future" (Language Hermeneutic and the Word of God). Inter-
preters of the Hebrew scriptures, like Alter, not only help us to see the "subtlety
and inventiveness" of the biblical storytellers but finally their moral vision and
passion. So, too, does Phyllis Trible in her recovery of biblical characters and
17 Hans Frei (The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), 11 and
passim
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Narrative Theolgy: An Overview
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qualities, human and divine, obscured by the myopias of male exegesis (God and
the Rhetoric of Sexuality). Thus a narrative theology in literary idiom finds in the
canonical stories the gift of a new sight into the really real and the demand for
response that accompanies it.
Life Story: The second expression of narrative theology is closely related to the
recent era of resistance to "the cloture of science, the emptiness of mass-speak.. . .
the tyranny of definitions and dogma" (Doty, p. 94). In this time, and with the
resources of narrative, there is a claiming of "title to the full diapason of human
feelings."
18
The protest against system and "signal" (Cox) presses these interpre-
ters toward the recovery of personal story. The quest for spontaneity and self-
expression in the face of the hegemony of external structures and authoritarian
traditions leads to a search for the immediacies and intimacies of experience. But
the focus here on life story has its social as well as its personal side. The right to tell
one's own tale is a weapon of the marginalized in the struggle against their cultural
captors or a preserve of identity in a world of uniformity. Narrative in this mode is
a way of giving voice to the voiceless, of affirming the plural and the protean. "Not
The Myth but the myths, the stories . . ." is the byword (Doty, p. 114), therefore not
so much the response to the received texts of canon but the making of new
onesthe telling of my story rather than the hearing of another' s. Or if we are to
listen to someone else's, let it be done purposefully, to alter conditions, to right
wrongs in self and society. There is a strong activist strain in this kind of narrative
theology: personal growth, moral claim, social change.
While there is interplay among the variety of subsets of life-story theology as
well as mobility between this model and the others, the diversity of emphasis is
real. Five clusters of narrative interest are detectable.
1) Telling one's own story. The uniqueness of a person' s life experience and the
value of self-articulation to oneself, to others, and before another are to the fore
here. In a form influenced by the study of psychology and the practice of therapy,
represented, for example, in the life journey and writings of Sam Keen, storytell-
ing becomes a way out of inherited authoritarianisms (one becomes a "cognitive
outlaw") and the way in to depth and authenticity.
19
The encounter group and
human potential movement, some of Freud but much of Jung, constitute the
environment for personal narration. The theological credentials of this view are
demonstrated in its function in ecclesial settings of pedagogy and therapy as well
as the explicit defense of its premises as the way God works in human
experience.
20
Another form of personal storytelling with a long pedigree is to be found in the
testimonial tradition of various Christian communities. David A. Stewart has
linked personal statement of faith from Polycarp through the Wesley class
18. James W. McClendon, Jr. , Theology as Biography (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1974), p. 90.
19. Keen and Anne Valley Fox, Telling Your Story (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday and Company,
1973).
20. See John Navone and Thomas Cooper, Tellers of the Word (New York, Le Jacq Publishing Co.,
1981).
347
meeting to modem revivalism with the use of story in Christian education
(Theology and Personal Story), and Cox has made a case for the spontaneities of story
in a world of technological signals (Seduction of the Spirit, pp. 9-19). The receptivity
of American experience to individual story is manifest as early as the narrations of
personal faith expected of parishioners as John Cotton described them, "the high
stiles for hypocrites."
21
The integration of personal story and canonical tale is the special strength of
some narratologists. Walter Wink brings together the insights of psychoanalytic
theory and left hemisphereright hemisphere research with stories of and about
Jesus in developing a "new paradigm for biblical study" (The Bible in Human
Transformation). Navone and Cooper in a wide-ranging study of narrative the-
ology draw on and address Catholic pastoral practice as they explore how the art
of storytelling expresses the art of living and seek to help people to both craft
stories and listen to those of others that connect with the Jesus story (Tellers of the
Word). Dick Orr and David L. Bartlett also seek to bring together biblical narrative
and personal story (Bible Journeys), and Beiden Lane's cassette lectures blend the
storytelling of the ages with counsel about how we can give expression to our own
life experiences, individually and in community.
2) Exploring one's own story. Another kind of life story theology is in the spirit of
Kierkegaardian self-examination and in the traditions of introspective spiritual-
ity. A search for authenticity goes on "over time and memory" in the pilgrimage
and books of John S. Dunne as the companion and reader are invited to go along
on the Odyssey. Moments of illumination come at the occasions of "passing over"
from one time or place to another. In the transition and return, richness of insight
is brought to the human j ourneyi n the encounter of beginnings and endings
and in the passage across the boundaries of culture and religion. Storytelling
becomes a theological j ournaling whose outcome cannot be forecast. While our
story is shaped by the tradition in which we live, there is a unity that underlies all
our separate pat hs.
2 2
3) Hearing another's story. A third variety of this overall type draws our attention
to someone else's tale. The empirical narrative of biography, autobiography, or
case study is the subject of inquiry and viewed as the agent of change. McClendon
explores the "compelling" figure, the Dag Hammarskjold or Martin Luther King,
Jr., whose life both illuminates and interprets Christian doctrine (the atonement)
(Theology as Biography). Through the medium of biography we can be moved to act
on our theological professions and be enriched in our understanding of them.
Others are drawn to autobiography as personal narrative that both evokes and
expresses insight in ways closed to discursive thought. Here Sallie McFague joins
her work in biblical parable to a wider metaphorical theology in which auto-
biography along with confession, letter, and poem stay close to the rudiments and
21 Darrett Rutman, "Winthrop' s Boston," in George Waller, ed , Puritanism in Early America
(Lexington, D C Heath and Co , 1973), 114
22 Time and Myth (Garden City, Y , Doubleday & Co , 1973), A Search for God in Time and Memory
(Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame, 1977), The Way of All the Earth (New York, The Macmillan
Company, 1972)
348