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.

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. T h e theological conversation about "story" is influenced by fields as diverse as literary criticism, psychology, linguistics, social ethics and communications theory, with formulations showing the marks of these pursuits and the partisans within them. T h e 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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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 T o 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, T h e Westminster Press, 1^80), pp. 1-17. 5. T h e 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.

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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 Jungian 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. Disenchantment 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. T h e 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 necessary 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 T h e 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 J o h n 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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by some Kierkegaardian accents, can illustrate the dialectic presupposed. Our way in to ultimate reality is by symbol. T h e 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." 1 1 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. T o make "truth claims" in this latter way is to assert in propositional form the cognitive weight of symbol. T h e 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. T h e representatives of narrative theology group themselves around three kinds of story, distinctions that will constitute our typology: canonical story, life story, and community story. T h e 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 academic, social, and ecclesial arenas with their fitting theological ventures: fundamental 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. T h e 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, T h e Macmillan Co., 1939), p p . 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.

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its stories we are put in touch with "the dearest freshness deep down things/' T h e 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. T h e 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 resources 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 J u d a h 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 Northrop 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. T h e 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 sacrament 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 T h e Biblical Version," in fesus' Parables and the War of Myths (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1982), pp 43-69

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matter are indissoluble, that the disclosive and transformative power and meaning 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 exposition, "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. T h e 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. T h e story as an instrument of moral exhortation 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 Scripture (not all tales) honor ambiguity, acknowledge complexity, and presuppose indeterminacy (Alter). T h e 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 development 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. T h e 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, J o h n Knox Press, 1981], pp. 10-19, 153-84).

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all good storytelling, we recognize ourselves in the depiction. Not the concept of liberation but the journey out of Egyptian bondage, not an essay on the teleological 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 running 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 ordinary? 1 7 We have noted the story component of suspense in the canonical narratives. T h e 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? T h e sensitive probes of Amos Wilder into both eschatology and narrative suggest their bonding, one inseparable from Wilder's experiences in the trenches and ambulance 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). T o 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 consummation. 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. T h e 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). Interpreters 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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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: T h e 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 T h e protest against system and "signal" (Cox) presses these interpreters toward the recovery of personal story. The quest for spontaneity and selfexpression 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. T h e 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. T h e 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, storytelling 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 h u m a n 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).

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meeting to m o d e m 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). T h e receptivity of American experience to individual story is manifest as early as the narrations of personal faith expected of parishioners as J o h n Cotton described them, "the high stiles for hypocrites." 2 1 T h e 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 theology 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 O r r 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 spirituality. A search for authenticity goes on "over time and memory" in the pilgrimage and books of J o h n 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 journeyin the encounter of beginnings and endings and in the passage across the boundaries of culture and religion. Storytelling becomes a theological journaling 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 paths. 2 2 3) Hearing another's story. A third variety of this overall type draws our attention to someone else's tale. T h e 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). T h r o u g h 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 autobiography 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, T h e Macmillan Company, 1972)

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therefore the fundaments of life putting us in touch with the God who comes to us in the common ventures. Augustine's Confessions are the frequent subject of commentary in autobiographical theology. George Stroup is one such expositor who attempts to reconceptualize revelation in terms of the "collision (not fusion) of horizons" in personal story, when an individual's life trajectory is engaged and redirected by encounter with the lore of a religious community (The Promise of Narrative Theology). James Hillman examines the psychological case study report and finds that it is more study than history because of the presence of plot designed by the narrator's interpretative scheme and literary artistry. 23 4) Hearing and using the moral power ofstory. For many, storytelling means a way of forming character and confronting injustice. Metz and Robert Mac Afee Brown draw attention to how the disenfranchised have kept hope alive through their stories. 24 T h e black community has lived its narrative theology in song and sermon preserving its identity and waging a struggle against oppression as James Cone and Olin Moyd have shown. 25 Carol P. Christ has demonstrated that women's stories have made possible their self-affirmation and the recovery of bodily and ecological values overrun by the dominant male narrative (Diving Deep and Surfacing). Stanley Hauerwas believes that the stories we have learned form the story of our lives and has given emphasis to narrative as the matrix and expression of character (Vision and Virtue). Michael Goldberg's study and critique of various narrative theologies is itself a species of this genus of moral narrative, read in the context of Israel's call to obedience to the divine righteousness (Theology and Narrative). And while he criticizes the more recent writing of Elie Wiesel for the kind of polemics found there, works like Dawn and Night have few peers as tales of moral passion. 5)Telling stories in communicating faith. T h e act of storytelling itself, whether its subject matter is a tale from Scripture or tradition or rises out of them, is yet another form of the life story model. T h e potency of narrative structure and flow themselves are deemed the way of communicating the faith. In its simplest forms this means telling Bible stories. Some, such as Richard Jensen, declare for the role of narrative in preaching (Telling the Story). Others like Thomas H. Grome view religious education in a story framework. 26 T h e current effort to recover the ministry of the laity is bound u p with lay narrative in the context of Bible study and support groups, as in the research and practice of Richard Broholm, William B. Abernathy, and Philip J. Mayer. 27 All the elements in the composition of narrative make their appearance in this
23. "Fiction as Case History: A Round," Religion as Story, pp. 123-73. 24. Metz, Faith in History and Society , pp. 20528; Brown, "My Story and 'the Story,' " T h T o , 22:166-73 (July, 1975) and "Starting Over: New Beginning Points for Theology," CCen 97:545-49 (May 14, 1980). 25. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York, T h e Seabury Press, 1975) and The Spirituals and the Blues (New York, T h e Seabury Press, 1972). Moyd, Redemption in Black Theology (Valley Forge, Judson Press, 1981). 26. Christian Religious Education. Sharing Our Story and Vision (New York, Harper & Row, 1980). 27. Empowering Laity for Their Full Ministry, published by the Center for the Ministry of the Laity, Andover Newton Theological School, Richard Broholm, Director (1982). Abernathy and Meyer, Faith Horizons and Images. Andover Newton Theological School, doctoral dissertation (1983).

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type. A vote for meaning is cast by coherences sketched in life story plots, characters proliferate, events pile up, tension, movement and resolution abound. In its various manifestations the life story model is activist in its appropriation and execution of narrative. With apologies to Marx on Feuerbach, the message is, "Our story is told to change our history." Community Story: We come now to the "overarching tale" (Frei), "world-plot" (Wilder), "cosmic story" (Roth) that is the datum for a third variety of narrative theology. T h e narrator, in this case, is neither a specific textmaker nor a personal storyteller but a faith community. For the proponents and practitioners of this model the canonical stories are crucial subplots in the drama, and life stories are its continuing episodes; but the framework for interpreting them is the "God-story" (Bernhard Anderson) itself. Tom Driver's complaint that Paul has "beclouded" the humor and irony of the storytelling Jesus by the heavy saga of redemption reflects the doubts that exponents of the first two views have of this third view (Patterns of Grace). Some do not even credit the tradition of world story as narrative theology (Stroup, p. 73). These suspicions are understandable, for when the narrator's eye is fixed upon the great arc from alpha to omega the richness of tension and fulfillment below it can get lost from view. Again, the larger the scale of drama, the more the tendency to move to a generalization commensurate with distance from the ordinary, and hence the quest for "the dogma in the kerygma" (W. Elert). Reductionist temptations aside, the structure of our third model establishes its narrative credentials, even in its discursive expositions. When the community and its consensus pointstraditionare given a significant role in narrative theology, the great saga comes to high visibility. This vantage point enables us to see a biblical world story in the very framework of the canon, with its beginnings in the Genesis accounts, its historical sweep in a train of events in the life of Israel, its center in the relationships, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, its movement to the birth of the church, through the subsequent struggles for liberation and reconciliation in personal, social, and cosmic dimensions, and on to the consummation of the divine purposes. 2 8 This flow is in the texts, but its narrative ordering comes from the tradition. Incipient in the accounts of early preaching in Acts, in the Pauline saga, in the Johannine prologue, it became the "pattern of teaching" found in the early rules of faith that established personal identity at the baptismal rite and corporate identity in the controversies with other sacred scenarios. T h e confessional form and didactic use of these "symbols" should not obscure the narrative skeleton discernible in them and their heirs, the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Greed. T h e concurrent development of the doctrine of the Trinity is another witness to the crucial role of tradition narrative. The economic Trinity is the drama in nuce. And the immanent Trinity is the community's way of saying that we have to do with true God at each turn of the tale.
28. God, Creation, Fall, Covenant, Christ, Salvation, Consummation, God, the doctrinal "chapters" of the narrative in the writer's The Christian Story

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Theologians since, as varied as Athanasius and Cocceius, have set forth Christian belief according to this narrative trajectory. Thus, the traditional loci of doctrine themselves. Nineteenth century "salvation history" schools built their theology on this structure. Subsequent theologians and/or movements (there is still debate whether the former were also the latter) spoke of the "history" of God acts, as "biblical theology." An Oscar Cullman, G. Ernest Wright, James Smart, or Bernhard Anderson brought drama into the discourse of mid-twentieth century theology; and a Karl Barth in his unique way proved himself to be its profoundest expositor. Now Jrgen Moltmann rethinks this dynamic in terms of "the trinitarian history of God" and Wolfhart Pannenberg in the categories of "universal history." Even those who have made the sharpest criticisms of heihgeschichte, such as James Barr, continue to work within this community model of narrative theology replacing "history" with "story." When this is done, we should, however, be clearer than Barr is about the change. T h e story nature of biblical recital has to do with its control by the vision of the narrator rather than ostensive reference, as Hans Frei has argued, and is not primarily a matter of the specifics of the account or the depictive devices. Further, as Barr rightly says, the biblical story does include history and must do so at critical junctures or else fall into Gnosticism. But it is history read in the light of transhistorical vision by a narrator community which orders characters and events in a unitary and fateful storyline that points to what is ultimately so. All the elements of narrative make their presence felt in macro-story. Plot is there in the primordial origins of eternal promise, vision, word and is worked out in the evolving drama. T h e characters, writ large, are the majestic, compassionate, stubborn, suffering, and finally enfleshed God beckoning to a beloved partner who responds with shaking fist. Writ small, they are the people and other participants of the variety of canonical episodes. T h e events are all the turning points in the epic with their christological centerpiece. T h e movement over time and place takes us from creation to consummation with the mystery of iniquity, the horror of Calvary, the victory of Easter, the promise of fulfillment when "all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" (T.S. Eliot). This is deliverance, salvation story. Doctrinal Implications: In our scrutiny of the approaches to narrative theology, we have made only passing reference to the specifics of Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology. Not much is said about doctrine by many of the proponents themselves because the focus is theological method, not content. Further, the assertional language of traditional dogmatics is a mode of discourse whose adequacy is being put in question. However, there are clear implications for the classical loci. For example, on the question of christological singularitythe "scandal of particularity"Dunne's interpretation of life story suggests the relativity of Christian truth claims given the unity at the deepest level of our respective journeys. On the other hand, narrative in the communal model requires the decisive singularity of the Christ event, for the whole story turns upon it. 351

T h e doctrinal fertility of narrative method has been impressed upon the writer in his own struggle in a community story model with the issues of theodicy. 29 T h e problem of evil in Christian perspective must hold together three commitments: the love of God, the power of God, and the reality of evil. Conventional responses "solve" the problem by eliminating one of the non-negotiables, as in views that trace suffering to the divine omnipotence and thus render the divine love dubious or espouse a loving but finite deity whose power to secure justice is inoperative or call into question the reality of evil by misperception, chiarascuro, or pedagogical theories. When Christian faith is understood in thoroughly narrative terms, evil is accorded its reality in a tension-filled drama. T h e love of God is forcefully portrayed in the beginning as the divine vulnerability that risks the abuse of freedom by a covenant partner but patiently and stubbornly pursues a rebel creation. T h e power of God is reconceived in the light of the central chapter of the story in which "the weakness of God (proves) stronger than men" (a macho definition of power is overturned) in cross and resurrection and the liberation accomplished there goes forward in a manner commensurate with its instrument (the "divine persuasion" not fiat or force in patristic theology) over the time line of long-suffering love that reaches into the eschaton itself. Thus power is in the future tensenothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God . . ."one that requires narrative time moving in real tension with real foes yet toward real resolution. Conclusion: T h e emergence of today's narrative theology is itself an interesting story. T h e plot thickens as protagonists arrive on the scene, the foes are identified and set upon and here and there make their own countermoves. In its present early stages the storyline is still somewhat obscure and perhaps not yet determined. If the latter, it is not too late for the principals in narrative theology to become better acquainted with one another, to learn from one one another, and even to make some improbable alliances with the dialectical and doctrinal. T o that larger end this overview is pointed.

29. Fackre, "Almighty God and the Problem of E\i\t" Pacific Theological Review 15:11-16 (Fall, 1980).

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