Apologetics and the Pathos of Narrative Theology Author(s): Edward T. Oakes Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol.

72, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 37-58 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1204101 Accessed: 13/04/2009 11:49
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Apologetics and the Pathos of Narrative Theology*

Edward T. Oakes, S.J. I
New York University

Theologians are, by profession if not by nature, a disputatious lot, and so it always comes as some surprise to find a consensus forming among so contentious a breed. But such seems to be the case among that growing body of North American theologians who claim for narrative the most privileged locus for doing theology. To be sure, the term "narrative"covers a wide swath, from denoting the formal nature of a literary genre to describing the essentially storied nature of human life, indeed of revelation itself.' But this wide range of issues that narrative theology has felt emboldened to take up is not just a matter of emphasis, even less of division in the ranks, but is much more a testimony to the heuristic power of the topic itself: that it can cover so wide a field and yet yield such an abundant harvest of real insight shows, to its advocates, both its power to unify diverse phenomena and its right to legitimate itself as the most fruitful method for reflection on Christian truths. The consensus, as it is currently developing, itself covers a broad spectrum of insights. Generally speaking, one will find among the large numbers of practioners of narrative theology the following basic operating assumptions: (1) narrative is the ideal genre for theology to establish contact with literary and humanistic studies in general, helping to pull it out of its academic ghetto; (2) narrative relates much more directly to pastoral needs than traditional academic theology because of its easy transition to each believer's autobiography; (3) narrative highlights aspects of the Bible that are much more central to its identity than traditional theology made room for; and, perhaps most important, (4) narrative no longer makes
* The author would like to thank Professor F. E. Peters and the editors and readers of theJournal of Religion for helpful suggestions and comments during the composition of this article. I Ronald Grimes has usefully distinguished six different "clusters" of narrative theology defined by those who focus on (1) hagiography, (2) the stages of moral development, (3) psychobiography, (4) the history of a community's ethos, (5) biblical narrative, and (6) myth and ritual. See his "Of Words the Speaker, of Deeds the Doer,"Journal of Religion66, no. 1 (January 1986): 1-17. ? 1992 The by University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/92/7201-0003$01.00

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The Journal of Religion revelation seem like a surprising, heteronomous "deposit" that landed on the human scene more or less literally out of the blue: when revelation is interpreted as a form of narrative, it is then more easily seen as simply a more intense and clarifying narrative, one that structures and gives meaning to all the other narrative lines that make up a human life. But a fuller and deeper exposure to the literature that expounds this kind of theology will reveal that theologians have in fact not reached their own professional Eschaton, where lion is suddenly lying down with lamb: a closer look at the contours of the debate will reveal fundamental fissures that run right through the whole narrative debate, fissures that do not correlate neatly with the different fields of application where the narrativists are working. These fault lines run much deeper than a debate about where narrative methods are most fruitfully applicable (whether that be in explaining the moral development of a child, or finding a narrative "canon within the canon" inside the Bible, or discovering how each individual bestows personal meaning and structure to his or her own psychic life through storytelling, etc.). Gary Comstock, I believe, has perceptively described the most severe fault line that is undermining the foundation of narrative theology when he shows how its proponents cannot decide whether their method yields truth or meaning: does casting the Christian tradition in narrative terms merely make it more meaningful to people who already believe, or does it actually give access to a form of truth that has previously eluded theology and that it could offer to the scrutiny of free inquiry?2This deep ambivalence has its roots in what motivated narrative theology in the first place: the challenges of Enlightenment thinkers to the cognitive plausibility of Christian doctrine and the subsequent privitization of belief in society. In Paul Lauritzen's lapidary phrase: "The category of narrative appears to address problems arising from the tenuous cognitive status of Christianity in the modern world."3 I think the operative word here is category, for, contrary to the oversimplistic views of some of its partisans, narrative was never ignored or denied in pre-Englightenment theology, however proposition-ridden it might have seemed. But those particular Christian narratives (usually of
Gary Comstock, "Truth or Meaning: Ricoeur versus Frei on Biblical Narrative,"Journal of Religion 66, no. 2 (1986): 117-41. This masterly article defines the crux of the issue so perceptively that the continued vitality of narrative theology will depend, in my opinion, on how well it meets his vigorous challenge. While I shall depend on his analysisthroughout this article in obvious ways, my own focus will be not so much to stress the shortcomings of narrative theology-already so well outlined, in my view, in Comstock's diagnosis-as to try to meet his challenge by restructuring its whole approach. 3 Paul Lauritzen, "Is 'Narrative' Really a Panacea?The Use of 'Narrative' in the Work of Metz and Hauerwas,"Journal of Religion 67, no. 3 (1987): 322-39, quote on 322.
2

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Pathos of Narrative Theology the Bible, but also of saints' lives) were always assumed to be part of one all-encompassing narrative, within which "propositional" theology did its work. But "narrative" only became thematized as a privileged category when that prior narrative-world collapsed under the impact of Newtonian physics and the slightly later Enlightenment critique of the particularity of revelation. In other words, narrative as a form drew attention to itself because it no longer seemed to be referring directly to the world as such; narrative became the focus of attention because, in Hans Frei's words, "There is now a logical distinction and a reflective distance between the stories and the 'reality' they depict."4 Of course, it is true that by so throwing into relief the category of narrative we are able to notice new aspects of Christian truths. Johannes Metz, for example, is quite correct in his assessment that the Bible's narration of the Exodus, its stories of conversions, and above all its account of the life and death of Jesus are not simply "dramatic embellishments of a previously conceived 'pure' theology but are the very structure of theology itself."5 But that does not immediately imply, as many seem to hold, that faith can only be made intelligible today in a nontheoretical, nonpropositional way. Lauritzen is right, I think, to see behind this aversion to "propositional" theology the looming shadow of Kant.6 For narrative emerged as a distinct category only when story, particularly the "story"of the unique and unrepeatable events of the human race (which English distinguishes by calling it "history"), was highlighted against a fundamentally uniform and unchanging Newtonian universe. This was a new universe for the human mind and imagination, one whose laws of motion were held to be so universal, rigid, and predictable that history itself-the realm of the unique and (relatively) unpredictable-suddenly emerged as something unsetand almost No tling inexplicable. longer could narrative give ultimate coherence to the world as such, for now narrative belonged to the story/ history of the most problematicpart of nature: the part that could not, or only with difficulty, be subsumed under the all-governing laws of nature. History thus began to look like a baffling field of inexplicable and irrational action where, in Shakespeare's phrase, "the specialty of rule hath seemed neglected." And of course, as this allusion implies, "when degree is shaked, which is the ladder of all high designs, the enterprise is sick."7
4 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenthand NineteenthCentury Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 5. 5Johannes Metz, Faith in Historyand Society(New York: Seabury, 1980), p. 51. 6 "By declaring religion to be an improper matter for theoretical speculation, Kant created a formidable wall between Christian belief and the intellectual life of the culture. It was a wall... that insured that religious life would be an essentially private affair" (Lauritzen, p. 325). 7 William Shakespeare, The Historyof Troilus and Cressida,act I, scene iii, lines 77, 101-3.

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The Journal of Religion Kant set himself to work at this sickness by juxtaposing the world of natural law with the moral world of human decision and seeing in this juxtaposition the opening for a new mode of faith, one divorced from knowledge of the world. Kant, of course, is famous for his aphorism, "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."8 This clearly expresses the Enlightened view that faith would lose whatever role it might salvage as a guide for action if it were not first divorced from the cognitive claims of science. But much more important as a grounding for the motivation of narrative theology is Kant's less well known statement about the real nature of that unmoored faith: "No, my conviction is not logical, but moral certainty; and since it rests on subjective grounds (of the moral sentiment), I must not even say 'It is morally certain that there is a God, etc.,' but 'I am morally certain."'9 This focus on the "I" rather on the impersonal "it" seems very Protestant, and indeed Kant cannot be understood apart from his Pietistic roots.'? But in the Reformers, the personal decision ofjustifying faith was still a faith that gave access to a world, not to a merely personal interpretation of it. The point of Kant's "I"of moral certainty, however, was not to give philosophical grounding to the faith of the Reformers but to show that faith's only legitimate role is to serve as a guide for moral action, located within the private decisions of the subjective "I." This double implication from Kant, that only personal subjectivity is the real locus for faith, and his insistence that that faith is serviceable only as a guide for moral action, provides, I believe, the initial epistemological foundation for the attraction that so many today feel toward narrative theology. I do not mean by this that all narrativists have abandoned drawing cognitive implications from their work or, even less, that they are avowed Kantians; for as Comstock has pointed out, there is a deep fissure running through this school that divides precisely along this issue of truth versus meaning. But partisans of the "meaning" side of the debate do base their work on these Kantian assumptions, abandoning the attempt to ground the meaning they find in narrative in anything other than the response of the individual person or community to the story itself. The
8 Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason,trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's, which Kant published 1965), p. 29 (B xxx; "B"refers to the second, revised edition of the Critique, several years later than the first edition. It is standardfor most editions of the Critique to give both versions of the text on the same page, citing the second edition according to the original German pagination.). 9 Ibid., p. 650 (B 857). 10One can occasionally detect an almost Pauline rhetoric beneath the abstract and Teutonic style of the first Critique,as in this apologiaso reminiscent of Paul's "boasting in the Lord": "In such cases the expression of belief is, from the objective point of view, an expression of modesty, and yet at the same time, from the subjective point of view, an expression of the firmness of our confidence" (ibid., p. 649, B 855).

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Pathos of Narrative Theology other side of the debate, however, resists these implications and claims to find in the very structure of narrative itself a clue to the ontological matrix of the world as it is formally constituted."' To establish this point, however, demands the most strenuous efforts (as we shall see), for in many ways the latter branch of narrativists must resist-and undermine-some of the most cherished presuppositions of our civilization's implied Kantian epistemology. How successful they shall be will depend, I think, on how they meet the challenges toward the whole narrative enterprise in general and which I hope to outline in this essay. For purposes of brevity, I shall subsume these challenges under the rubric of "apologetics." For corresponding to this division within narrative theology is a similarly divided range of opinion regarding the value of apologetics. This branch of theology, with its long and noble tradition, has always assumed that human culture must in some sense be one, that it must be possible to find some locale where norms are shared and rules for evidence can be admitted by both sides, so that conversation can, at least ex hypothesi,terminate in mutual agreement. But the stress on Kant's "I" of moral certainty, when paired with a narrativist's appreciation for the unique contours of every individual's personal autobiographical "journey," clearly presupposes the irreducibility of religious conviction to a common ground shared by all rational beings. Even among the neoorthodox there is a frank, almost fideistic avowal of faith's inaccessibility to argument. Indeed, what is "neo" about neoorthodoxy is precisely this refusal to consider the apologetic task, a stance clearly foreign to such "protoorthodox" projects as, say, Origen's Contra Celsum or Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles. But in the twentieth century, when Karl Barth came to reject the theological liberalism of his student years, with its Schleiermacherian (and thereby Kantian) stress on the locus of "experience" as the universal datum for theology, and to stress once more the gratuity and unexpectedness of revelation, he did not then move from this point to show the inherent connections that bonded the message of that revelation with the world inhabited by nonbelievers. This indeed was precisely part of his offense to his academic peers:

' Comstock calls these two factions "pure"and "impure"narrativists,respectively. Among the former he includes Hans Frei, Stephen Crites, George Lindbeck, Sallie McFague, George Stroup, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Goldberg, andJames McClendon. The latter group is represented by H. Richard Niebuhr, William Beardslee, Philip Rossi, Brian Wicker, David Tracy, and, above all, Paul Ricoeur. See Comstock, "Truth or Meaning," p. 121. We should also add to the list of purists the name of David Kelsey, which means that for some reason Yale heavily favors the purist school while the University of Chicago gravitates to the impurist camp. Such geographical mysteries are beyond the scope of this article.

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The Journal of Religion

He had already scandalized his liberal colleagues by proposing to write dogmatics at all. He now went further. When the first volume of the second version of his work appeared in 1932, it was seen that he had changed the title [from Die Lehre vom WortGottes].The work was now to be called Die kirchlicheDogmatik. The authorized translation, probably inevitably, renders this as Church Dogmatics. But that is not precisely what kirchlichmeans in ordinary German. It has much the same connotations as the English word "ecclesiastical." Again Barth had scandalized the theological public. Not only would he write dogmatics, he would now write ecclesiasticaldogmatics, dogmatics linked to the Church and to its confession, instead of to the academic community and free inquiry.12 Much the same tack is taken by those narrativists who simply take the Christian community, its beliefs, and Bible, as the prior given.'3 Their contribution to theology is then simply to insist that those beliefs and that Bible are best interpreted (or least distorted) when they are seen as narratives operating within the personal journeys of individual believers or within the community already constituted by those stories that drew it into an assembly of God. Hans Frei is particularly insistent that narratives express an internal world that is not accessible to outsiders by way of argumentation and apologetics, as Comstock has well noted: "Eschewing, like Barth, the apologetic task of trying to explain the stories of God's providence to the nonbelieving public, [Frei] takes up the dogmatic task of finding appropriate norms to rule the use of these stories within the Christian community. For Frei, the scriptural stories have a singular meaning that is known to those within the bounds of Christian faith and practice. Insiders, however, are mistaken in trying to argue with outsiders about their faith."14
12William Nicholls, The Pelican Guide to Modern vol. 1, Systematic and Philosophical Theology, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 108. It would be a mistake to call this step "irraTheology tional," although it was a word quick to come to the lips of Barth's critics. But as Nicholls also notices, rationality is crucial to Barth's project, but only internal to itself: "To my mind, Barth's most important and distinctive contribution to modern theology is his attempt to show how a form of rational speech about God is possible, leading to the development of a scientific and critical dogmatics" (ibid., p. 119). But as another author points out, his strict antiapologeticism has been hard for even some conservative Protestants to swallow, who "have echoed the postliberal theologians in affirming, against Barth and with the tradition, the fact of general revelation and of a limited natural theology based upon it" (Richard F. Muller, "KarlBarth and the Path of TheJournal 51 ology into the Twentieth Century: Historical Observations," Westminster Theological [Spring 1989]: 25-50, quote on 32). 13See, TheGospelas NarratedPromise(Notre e.g., Ronald Thiemann's Revelationand Theology: Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985): "Since a nonfoundational theology is concerned with justification internal to the Christian framework, its primary interests are neither epistemological nor apologetic" (p. 74). 14Comstock, "Truth or Meaning"(n. 2 above), p. 118. See also Frei's own interesting appreciation for deconstructionism (the most radically decentered and intratextual theory of all): "A Christian theological observer will want to resist a tendency toward global and foundational claims on behalf of inclusive theories, which Deconstructionists seem to share in practice, whatever the theory, with other theorists" (Hans Frei, "The 'Literal Reading' of Biblical Narrative in

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Pathos of Narrative Theology Running counter to this radical subjectivity of narrative meaning are the theories of Comstock's "impure" narrativists.'5 While clearly sharing the disaffection of the purists for a so-called propositional theology or an approach to the Bible that uses it more as a storehouse of proof texts than as an account of salvation history, these analysts refuse to grant that narrative could possibly bear as much weight as the purists like to think it can manage. No one form of analysis, this side claims, could possibly dojustice to the wide challenge facing theology: from elucidating the notion of God's action in history (both in ancient and modern times) to resolving the knottiest dilemmas in ethics.'6 For narrative to carry that kind of weight, say the impurists, it must not only submit to severe load tests on its own internal capacities, but, to withstand these tests, it must also let its isolated purity be alloyed with more tensile materials.'7 And among all those who recognize the need for such metallurgical reinforcement, Paul Ricoeur undoubtedly ranks the highest. Deeply rooted in all ages of the philosophical tradition,'8 Ricoeur has also lately developed into an acute literary critic because of his increasing interest in narrative and its implications for theology. Because I only want to touch on the main arguments of the impurist school of narrativism, I shall not even attempt to provide a treatment of Ricoeur's full-scale narratology, let alone give an overview of his operative presuppositions or overall hermeneutics. But he is particularly acute in the way he has sought to undermine the Kantian dynamic at work among the pure narrativists. For what sets him off against this other approach is his insistence that "all narratives make, in
the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?" in TheBibleand theNarrativeTradition, ed. Frank McConnell [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], pp. 36-77, quote on p. 59). This implies that the positions of deconstructionists in some way entail a challenge to defenders of apologetics, a question we will face in a later section of this essay. 15"Pure narrativists grant realistic narrative a privileged position over philosophical, social, scientific, historical and poetic discourse. Impurists give narrative its own independence but construe it as dialectially related to the others" (Comstock, "Truth or Meaning," p. 119, n. 4). 16 Lauritzen makes the telling point that, when ethicists use narrative as their overarching conceptuality, they still cannot be expected to reach a consensus: "When it comes to recommendations for practical action, the category of narrativeby itself appears to play almost no role at all. Indeed it neither helps to explain nor to justify the normative position of either Metz or Hauerwas. It fails to explain their positions because there is no substantive moral position entailed merely by appeal to the category of narrative" (Lauritzen [n. 3 above], p. 338). 17These metaphors of "pure" and "impure" work better if they conjure up metallurgical, rather than moral, images. 18"In 1948 Ricoeur was elected to a chair in the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and each year he committed himself to read the collected works of one great philosopher, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche" (John B. Thompson, editor's introduction to Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and theHumanSciences: Essayson Language,Actionand ed., trans., and introduced byJohn B. Thompson [Cambridge:Cambridge UniverInterpretation, sity Press, 1981], p. 2).

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The Journal of Religion a certain sense, a referential claim."'9 Narratives for Ricoeur do not simply denote the isolable and unique-and therefore the incommunicable-in human communities.They are not "creations" that arise
as mere "projections" and that inform us only of the inner psychic mecha-

nism and not of the universeabout whichit is narrating.20 As Ricoeurwell realizes,such a view rests on deep-seatedepistemologicalbeliefs that must be resisted and submitted to a well-deservedcritique:

The recognition of this referential claim is often hindered by the prejudices which still dominate in the domain of the theory of the imagination.According to these prejudices,the image is only a mental thing, a thing in the mind; moreover, it is only the copy or replica of a pregiven reality, which becomes the indirect referent of the mental image. Against the first prejudice, it must be re-emphasizedthat the image is not enclosed within the mind, that it has a distinctive intentionality,namelyto offer a model for perceiving the thingsdifferently, paradigmof a new vision. Against the second prejudice,it must be said that fiction is not an instance of reproductive imagination,but of productive imagination. As such, it refers to realitynot in order to copy it, but in order to prescribea new reading.... All symbolicsystemsmake and remakereality.... In this sense, all symbolicsystemshave a cognitive value:they make realityappearin such and such a way.21

"story" and "history"-which is found in so many languages22-reflects an inner fusion between reference, meaning, imagination, and time. As he

In this context, Ricoeuris referringto narrativefiction,but he has been at painsthroughoutthis essayto show that the etymologicalbond between

19Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," in ibid. (see n. 15), p. 289. 20This position directly opposes that of the theologian Gordon Kaufman, who follows the Kantian distinction between subjective imagination and objective and impersonal world, and thus he formulates the issue in such a way that stories cannot yield valuable information about the nature of the universe as such. Indeed, so confident is Kaufman of his own presuppositions, his rhetoric betrays him into assuming there is no other way of thinking about the issue in modern society: "Men of other ages found it necessary to createand believe elaborate mythologies and metaphysics of the 'beyond' in order to understand their world and themselves. Contemporary men in contrast-partially freed by scientific advance from the ignorance which mythological explanations attempted to fill, and through technological advance increasingly able to control forces which were to earlier generations simply mystery-find it more and more unnecessaryand even ridiculous to make this dualistic assumption" (Gordon D. Kaufman, "On the Meaning of 'God': Transcendence without Mythology," Harvard Theological Review59, no. 2 [April 1966]: 105-32, quote on 107; my emphasis). From the taken-for-granted assumption that humans "create" elaborate mythologies flows the equally easy assumption that it is now "ridiculous"to believe that these myths are genuinely informative. 21Ricoeur, "Narrative Function," pp. 292-93; author's emphasis. 22 "This is the time to remind ourselves that in most European languages the term 'history' has an intriguing ambiguity, meaning both what really happens and the narrative of those events. Now this ambiguity seems to hide more than a mere coincidence or a deplorable confusion. Our languages most probably preserve (and indicate) by means of this overdetermination of wordsGeschichte, histoire,history, etc.-a certain mutual belonging between the act of narrating (or writing) history and the fact of being in history, between doing history and beinghistorical. In

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Pathos of Narrative Theology says in his magisterial work where all of this is developed with the length and depth it deserves, "Historiography and literary criticism are both called upon and are invited together to form a grand narratology, where an equal right would be given to historical narrative and to fictional
narrative."23

Central to this bond is the reality and pervasiveness of time itself, that maddening reality that Augustine always knew what it was until he started to think about it. Locked within its frightening embrace as we are ("And time that gave doth now his gift confound"), we tend to push its inexorability outside of our immediate consciousness, having no means with which to fight it but no desire to celebrate it either. So pervasive is time as a phenomenon, yet so paradoxical to express, that discussion of it cannot help but occasionally seem like trying to scratch one's own elbow. Yet here is the central ontic reality that makes narrative truly referential and that gives hope (a rare gift in time's treasury) of making narrative a privileged perspective on the world, and this in both senses: fictional and historical. For as Ricoeur explains, "Historicity comes to language only so far as we tell stories or tell history. In a word, if our historical condition requires nothing less than the conjunction of two narrative genres, it is because of the very nature of our experience of being historical. In this experience, the subject-object relation is, as it were, undermined. We are members of the field of historicity as storytellers, as novelists, as historians. We belong to history before telling stories or writing history. The game of telling is included in the reality told."24 Because I shall argue throughout the rest of this essay for the clear superiority of the impurist school, it might be well to describe what is so attractive about the purist approach and why it has won the allegiance of important minds. As we have just seen, what most distinguishes these two school of narratology is the issue of reference: for the Ricoeur faction, narrative is inherently "impure" because it makes a referential claim. Why are the purists so reluctant to concede this point? Because their deep acquaintance with the history of interpretation has told them that that reference is too often presupposed rather than left to emerge from a close familiarity with the narrative in question. This is particularly true in the history of theology, where any number of schemata substituted for the world actually being disclosed in the narrative. For example, "Biblical
other words, theform of life to whichnarrativediscoursebelongsis our historicalconditionitself. To show this will be to resolve the problem of the referential dimension of historical discourse as a whole" (ibid., p. 288; author's emphasis). 23 Paul Ricoeur, Timeand Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 2:156. 24 Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," p. 294 (italics in original).

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The Journal of Religion theologians and existentialists had a prior notion of what Christianity was supposed to be. For the former, Christianity was the religion that matched an ahistorical system of beliefs drawn from a figural interpretation of the Bible. For the latter, Christianity was the mode of being of courageous authenticity in the face of meaningless existence. In each case, Christianity came in second; it was to be approached and described only after the ideal had been recognized. In each case, the validity of Christian doctrines and practices was to be evaluated in light of the independently known religious ideal."25 For the purists, the obvious anemia to which this strategy led has been prima facie evidence for its inutility. But beyond such pragmatic objections, the purists go further and make the telling point that reference itself gets distorted when outside schemata are superimposed on narrative directness. Again the biblical stories form exhibit A to the jury. Thus to speak of Jesus in terms of such genera as "holy man" or "supreme exemplar of absolute dependence" or "cipher of ultimate concern" is automatically to distort the referenceof the gospel narratives: the person of Jesus, who moreover is not a "person" as the conciliar church understood that term but is a person who emerges only when we tell and retell of the story of his life, death, and continuing presence in the (storied) life of presentday Christians. "Description of Christianity must come first, and it should be used to assess the accuracy of any other explanation.... [Indeed,] we might say that many story-theologians collapse explanation into
description."26

The impurists, for their part, respond with an equal vigor and, to my mind, carry the argument. For one thing, one will notice the often purely historical evidence adduced for the priority of narrative: because of the failures in the past to give an accurate assessment of biblical narrative, therefore narratives can have no further meaning than their own selfreferentiality. But this is more asserted (or, rather, implied) than argued. And how could it be? Who would really dare claim that the very genre of narrative is in and of itself enough to act as a cordon sanitaire preserving the text from the taint of outside schemata and philosophies? Purists never actually assert so unempirical a thesis, of course, but it is an essential presupposition to their program. Related to this same issue: not only is it unlikely in the extreme that narratives betray no taint of outside rational schemata, but the very case of the Yale school demands one such schema for its own coherence (that nar-

Gary L. Comstock, "Two Types of Narrative Theology," Journal of theAmerican Academy of Religion 55, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 687-717, quote on 692.
26

25

Ibid., pp. 692-93.

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Pathos of Narrative Theology ratives are themselves "pure" artifacts, whose correct interpretation demands their isolation).27 But more telling is the objection that biblical narratives have their rivals. It is hardly enough to assert as the purists do that "in the realm of human action and religious tradition, the act of describing a phenomenon by telling its story may be all that is needed to explain it."28 It is here that the historical evidence now comes to the aid of the Ricoeurians, for it has never been the experience of the church that a reasoned defense has been superfluous or, at least, supererogatory.
* * *

But if all of this is true-and I think the bent of my analysis shows how unrealistic I think the purist option is-then these conclusions will bear important implications for the role of apologetics. Barth had rejected apologetics because the "universe of adjudication," as it were, was stacked against him: to be academically respectable, theology had to have some kind of empirical content, and that, Barth claimed, Schleiermacher sought to provide in his elevation of the consciousness of "absolute dependence" as the starting point and ultimate empirical datum for religion, and thus for its academic study.29 But this starting point completely undermined the role of God's initiative, which is so obvious an aspect of revelation, and thus it vitiated from the start any attempt to make theology genuinely theological, that is, speech in response to God's initial
speech.30
27 "Two critical questions must be posed to Frei. First, in turning from realistic narrative to cultural and linguistic description, has not Frei simply exchanged theories? Does not the claim that meaning and truth are context-dependent notions betray a general theory as much (if not more) than the earlier allegiance to the category of realistic narrative? Is not Wittgenstein's adage 'Look not to the meaning but to the use' itself a manifesto for a general theory of meaning?Second, does this turn to cultural and linguistic description do justice to their truth claims? If the believing community's rules determine what counts as a 'literal reading' of the Gospels, who is to determine which communities are the believing ones?"(KevinJ. Vanhoozer, BiblicalNarrativein A Studyin Hermeneutics thePhilosophy and Theology of Paul Ricoeur: [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], p. 174). It is clear from these sharply addressed questions that the issue of overarching rationale is inseparable from the apologetic issue of truth claims. 28Comstock, "Two Types," p. 692. 29"An attempt to persuade, to convince, to win over, to defend, to commend, to achieve on Religion]are. But the agreement concerns the agreement-this, then, is what [the Speeches value of religion in general and Christianity in particular.... The situation into which Schleiermacher enters with his first step as a theologian is that of apologetics" (Karl Barth, The Lecturesat Gottingen,WinterSemester of Schleiermacher: Theology of 1923 / 24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982], p. 245). 30It has been the great merit of Ronald Thiemann's work, e.g., to insist that we not lose sight of this crucial feature of the very meaning of the term "revelation,"that God's prevenience is an essential aspect of the reality that Christian theologians articulate: "Christiantheology has traditionally been guided by the conviction that faith's knowledge of God is a gift bestowed through

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The Journal of Religion So something like Barth's break with Schleiermacher was necessary if theology was going to recover its true identity and not just parrot the latest findings from anthropology and psychology. But that need not entail, pace Barth and Frei, that we must also reject all forms of apologetics. In my view, narrative theology's popularity as a strategy, at least among the purists, relies far too much on its hopes for short-circuiting the very real challenges we face by living in modern society. No appeal to narrative can obviate these daunting challenges, at least if we take with full seriousness the task of making the Christian message both intelligible and compelling to a secular civilization that feels it can tune out that message because it feels so sure it has already superseded it. But to shirk this challenge in the hopes that each interpretive community can "live and let live" is in fact already to concede the very Kantian option that is still at issue: according to the current arrangement of our political culture, each community in our pluralistic society is allowed to represent its own personal "values" but that society at large has only one overarching value: tolerance toward all other values.31 But to adopt this strategy would mean to admit with Kant that all of our moral and religious convictions are fundamentally unmoored and disengaged from the universe that is so massively presented to us in our senses. It would be to concede that communities have traditions that are so unique that there exists no basis for dialogue, that historicity means isolation and not membership in a single drama, that on the lonely "I" hangs the fate of all that could possibly be meaningful in what is otherwise a cold and mechanical universe. Of course, theologians have been tempted to fly from the apologetic task for several very demanding reasons. Some of the reasons are rooted in the long experience that they and their guild have had since the dawn of the modern challenge to Christianity, which is rooted in Descartes's method of universal doubt and in the Deist challenge that no particular revelation within history to one people or one religious body was "reasonGod's free grace. Our thought and speech about God are not simply the free creations of human imagination but are developed in obedient response to God's prior initiative"(Thiemann [n. 13 above], p. 2). 31We see this implied presupposition of modern society most explicitly expressed in the most influential work of liberal social theory in the past two decades, John Rawls'sA Theory ofJustice (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap, 1971), which defines society primarilyas a set of rules that "specifya of cooperation" system (p. 4). Society is itself not the expression of a set of values in this scheme but, rather, a neutral court for adjudicating potential conflict between already posited values. This is the same theory that determines the views of David Little and Sumner B. Twiss, who claim that the general object of morality is to provide "a way of responding to what we call the 'problem of cooperation' among self-interested, competing, and conflicting persons and groups" (David Little and Sumner B. Twiss, Comparative ReligiousEthics:A New Method[San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978], pp. 26-27).

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Pathos of Narrative Theology able."As RonaldThiemann explains,meeting this challenge is more than ordinarily daunting:
In order to justify Christianclaimsto revelation, modern theologians have commonly adopted a dual strategy. Following the Cartesian pattern, they have assumed that claims to revelation must be "reasonable," at least in the sense of not being contrary to reason, if theologians are to avoid the charge of "special pleading."On the other hand, they have argued the revelationdesignatesa special category of truthsundergirdedby a unique mode of knowing.Truths of revelation are distinctive because they cannot be known through ordinaryuses of reason.... Such argumentsrequire unusualintellectualdexterity, for two limiting dangers constantlythreaten the coherence of the argument.The theologian must assertjust enough distinctivenessto establishthe irreducibilityof Christian claimsand sufficientsimilarity[to ordinaryknowledgegained through reason]to guard against the charge of irrationalityor unintelligibility.32

This particularchallengeis of course inherent in the very taskof apolowhen he getics, and was indeed faced as early as Origen's ContraCelsum, was forced, by dint of the vigor of Celsus's objections, to address this dilemmaof revelation'sparticularity. For Celsus,as a leadingAlexandrian intellectual, spotted this difficultyas the most significantaporia of the Christianclaim:"Everyone saw [Christ's] suffering,but only a discipleand a half-crazedwomansawhim risen. His followersthen madea God of him, like [Hadrian did with] Antinous.... The Christianidea of the coming down of God is senseless.Why did God come down for justificationof all things?Does not this make God changeable?Why does he send his Son into one corner of the world and not make him appearin manybodies at once?"33 Later D. F. Straussfelt the same difficultyin the nineteenth century when he said:"Itis not [the essence of an idea] to lavishall its fullness on one exemplar.... It ratherloves to distributeits richesamong a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocallycomplete each other."34 But beside this inherent difficultythat apologeticsmust alwaysaddress, there is a more unique dilemma raised by the history of the apologetic effort in modern times that has led a numberof thinkers(who range ideologically from Barth to Kaufman)to insist that apologeticsbest be abandoned: to make the Christian message intelligible and defensible to non-Christians meanswe must find a common ground which, ex hypothesi, cannot be that message itself. And after Descartesthat common ground wasunderstoodto be that samefoundationof self-evidentand indubitable
32

Origen, ContraCelsum,bk. 3, sec. 36; bk. 6, sec. 78 (Antinous was drowned in the Nile, A.D. 130; the Emperor Hadrian founded Antinopolis in memory of him, and he was formally deified). 34 D. F. Strauss, The Examined(1835; reprint, London: SCM Press, 1973), Life ofJesusCritically p. 779.

33

Thiemann,

p. 16.

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The Journal of Religion principles that Descartes sought as the foundation for all knowledge whatever. Apolegetics after Descartes therefore was pursued as part of a wider project of finding a foundation that all philosophers could agree on for all of the branches of knowledge, as Thiemann explains in this lucid summary: "While the Reformers could accept a claim as true simply because it was widely accepted as true in the community, Descartes and his successors insisted that claims to truth must ultimately be grounded in necessarily true arguments. For modern thinkers communal acceptance must always follow philosophical demonstration. A faith which assumes the truth of its background beliefs and seeks simply to understand them cannot flourish in an atmosphere which demands justification prior to belief. Under these changed modern circumstances, faith seeking understanding inevitably becomes faith seeking foundation."35 In my opinion, narrative theology, in its purist strain at any rate, has gained so many adherents and has abandoned the apologetic challenge so readily, not because theologians have resorted to Tertullian's credo quia incredibile in the face of Celsus's and Strauss's more basic challenge, but because it has become increasingly clear that apologetics (and the propositional theology with which it has long been associated) has reached a dead end: when it defines itself according to the Cartesian agenda, it gets hopelessly enmired in the snags of making revelation seem either an irrational exception to the universal reasonableness of self-evident principles or, as in Schleiermacher, merely seeing revelation as the culminating instance of an already present universal religious experience found in all souls. If apologetics adopts this agenda, then it does not take long before that agenda begins to usurp the very content of the message it is trying to defend; at least that is how Thiemann and many other narrativists see the outcome of the debate when the Cartesian challenge is accepted on its own terms: Theology [then] takes its place beside other theoretical inquiriesruled by general principlesof rationality.Whenevera theoreticalinquirydivergesfrom those general principles, it mustjustify that divergence by a special apologetic argument. Since Christianclaims often appear exceptional when judged by general principlesof rationality,theology must regularlyundertaketo defend its divergent tendencies. If a foundationalisttheologian is concerned at all to guard the distinctivenessof the theological subject matter, apologetics emerges as the primary theological task.... As a consequencethe foundationalview tends to subordinate the characteristicpatterns of Christian speech to the patterns of the philosophicaland apologetic argument.... This is especiallythe case if the primal religious experience which grounds the language of church practice is capableof expression in a universalphilosophicallanguage,for then the charac35Thiemann, p. 14.

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Pathos of Narrative Theology

teristic patterns of Christianspeech are reducible to the structuresof the more ultimate basic language.36 For Thiemann, as for so many others we have seen, the appeal to narrative is the way out of this zero-sum, lose-lose strategy: it places the primacy where theology should always place it, not with a commonly agreed on philosophical language that can then assume to judge all comers on its own terms, but on the Christian language of its own message-which is precisely what it should be defending, not surrendering. But as I have already tried to point out, for all of the advantages that attention to narrative has brought, the fissures within the narrativist school must give us pause precisely at this point-where it becomes tempted to abandon its apologetic responsibilities. For it seems to me there are really only two options: either one adopts Hans Frei's strategy (the "purist" school) and eschews apologetics as a concession which the very nature of revelation does not allow, or with Paul Ricoeur one sees that narrative can never be purely isolated but that it is related to many other forms of human expression, the ensemble of which truly indicates something about our world. Both of those options also entail, I argue, their own inexorable consequences. If one is a purist, one has certainlyjettisoned the apologetic burden, but it seems to me one has conceded outright the current liberal arrangement, whereby each community is vouchsafed its own set of "values" but no attempt is made to converse across those values. But if one admits, as I hope would seem more plausible, that narrative is genuinely indicative of the world, then that implies that we are indeed all linked by the horizon of that world. Admission of this latter option need not imply that we are required to fulfill the apologetic task under the lash of the foundationalist whip. Abandonment of the Cartesian assumption that all inferential knowledge must be founded on self-evident, noninferential insights ("clear and distinct ideas") is in fact a great boon, not only to apologetics, but to philosophy itself and to the whole human effort to get clear about what it means to know.37 But it is being abandoned not to suit the convenience of theologians but because it fails adequately to accountfor the world and our rela36

Ibid., p. 74.

is argued to great effect by Ralph Mclnerny in his introduction to the Aristotelian/ Thomistic over the Cartesian/Kantian option: "Philosophizing is said to begin with doubt. The philosophical life is pictured as casting a waryeye on ordinary claims to knowledge, cleansing our minds, making a blank slate of it, in search of a starting point of thinking. The first defensible thing we do takes place after we have begun the study of philosophy. Whatever thinking you do prior to that is by definition suspect and has to be subjected to doubt if not outright skepticism.... What by contrast with Modernity is the Classicalview?Everybodyknows for sure things about the world; things whose existence cannot be coherently doubted. The things of this world are what we first know and we become aware of ourselves insofar as we know the world.... Philosophy is [thus] not the study in which we for the first time come to know things for sure. Philos37 This

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The Journal of Religion tion to it; and that very world and our relation to it, I argue, simply demand that we meet the universe of discourse located beyond the precincts of Christian theology and Christian teaching.38
* * *

Ronald Grimes has worried out loud that "'narrative' and 'story' are exercising an almost incantatory sway over the field of religious studies."39 This danger would be even more acute if the invocation of this term meant the abandonment of the notion that narratives are truly located in a real world and interact in complex ways with other symbolic forms and genres that continue to shape and determine that one world. This, however, we have seen is not the case: not all narrativists wish to use the category of narrative as a refuge from other issues but, in fact, see narrative as a privileged locale for resolving them. While I believe this is possible if we follow Ricoeur's lead and see narrative as giving genuine access to the world, I suggest that the task of establishing this will prove much easier if the genre of narrative is not absolutized but seen as one of the many forms of human expression. For narrative will then be linked with a whole array

ophy presupposes that we are already in possession of truths about the world and ourselves. Indeed, if this were not so, the teacher would have nothing to address. Teaching is an effort to take us from what we already know to what we do not yet know.... [But] Modernity is incoherent in this way: it has to rely on what it wants to reject in order to reject it" (Ralph Mclnerny, A First Glanceat St. ThomasAquinas:A HandbookforPeepingThomists [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990], pp. 34, 36). 38 This is the juncture where deconstructionism, briefly mentioned by Frei as a potential ally (see n. 14 above) once more raises a challenge to apologetics. I do not believe, of course, that its critique of foundationalismjustifies the ostrich-like retreat of the pure narrativists.But there is no question that its attack on the entire metaphysicaltradition that values the intelligible over the sensible, presence over representation, the simple over the complex, immediacy over mediation, will have profound effects on the task awaiting those who want to answer the apologetic challenge. Derrida claims that these polarities are always conceived in Christianity (or more specifically, in "ontotheology") as a fallfrom the former to the latter. That is, Christian theology (if not the narratives at its origins) superimposes on narrative a set of quasi-Platonic notions that when we fall into "sin"we fall into complexity, re-presentation, language, etc. But this a position which for him collapses into incoherence because it must first posit the presence of what is absent trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (Jacques Derrida, Marginsof Philosophy, 1982], p. 63). The difficulty with this view, in my opinion, begins with its too-heavy dyadic schematization into pairs, whereas meaning, as John Sheriff argues, is fundamentally triadic: "Derrida demonstrates convincingly and repeatedly that so long as we have a conception of language that begins with dyadic sign, meaning cannot be treated as such any more than can essence or presence. Given the strength of his conclusions, it is somewhat puzzling why more people have not questioned the necessity of starting [here]. [But] Derrida ... admits that the choice of where we begin is just that, a choice, a nonrational act" (John K. Sheriff, TheFate of Meaning:Charles Peirce, Structuralismand Literature[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989], p. 49). This admission, however, is a damaging one, for it once more raises the question of rival choices, which itself reopens the question of apologetics. 39 Grimes (n. 1 above), p. 1.

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Pathos of Narrative Theology of cultural expressions, establishing numerous and important links with our pluriform world when the time comes to argue apologetically. Grimes, for one, sees narrative as intimately linked with an even richer source of insight: drama and ritual enactment. Both in a way are expanded expressions of narrative (both are more specific forms of the wider category of plot), but they are also much more. And as that "much more," drama and ritual are for Grimes that much more useful for theology too: "Performance-based metaphors (the world as stage, interaction as ritual, social conflict as drama) have wider applicability, I suspect, because they do not imply that storytelling, or worse, literacy, is a condition of human selfhood. A performatively grounded hermeneutic also exposes the ritual avoidance that is still deep in the heart of post-Protestant theology. We are still afraid that if enactment were to take its place alongside narration, we would have to perform, that is, do good works or do something other than write and speak in order to be religious."40 If Grimes is correct in his generalization of Protestantism, perhaps we have located the real neuralgia to apologetics. For besides a suspicion that deeds and action can lead to a self-appropriated righteousness, Protestantism has also inherited a suspicion of the claims of reason vis-a-vis faith, which easily leads into a view that faith is so utterly the work of God that it needs no defense against wider challenges. In any case, whether Grimes is genuinely characterizing or simply caricaturing the Protestant stance here, he is certainly on to a point that the mere relating of narratives is insufficient as an expression of Christianity on any terms, whether internal to itself or in external defense of its claims within the world. Narrative alone is a deficient form, for, as he says, "narratives are not necessarily incipient actions; they can be, and often are ... substitutes for action. Most of our utterances lack sufficient body and drama to arc all the way across the gap between text and event."41 Of course, narrative and drama (as different forms of plot) are categories that bleed into each other to a great extent.42 But there is still a significant contrast between the two, and the contrast itself points to a crucial fact: that mere relating is not enough. It is insufficient to tell a story, for life is a constant state of enactment,and only in that sphere can we really be challenged by, as we proclaim, a "God who acts."43It is of course no secret
40 Ibid., p. 6. 41Ibid., pp. 7-8. 42 "To put the matter simply, plot is what becomes of story when its internal relations grow complicated" (Frank Kermode, "The Bible: Story and Plot," in his An Appetitefor Poetry [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989], p. 208). 43 We should also recall that, while storytelling has been popular with the human race from the time campfires were invented, the same has by no means been true of theater, which has been looked on with the deepest suspicions from at least Plato until the early twentieth century. This is

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The Journal of Religion that the apologetic challenge facing the Church today is the meaningful defense and explication of this expression "God who acts." No presupposition is more basic to the Bible and to the Church's kerygma than the the news-that God has acted in history, actively shaping notion-no, events, and, in the resurrection of Jesus, culminating and setting the seal on this redemptive intent to save history. But ever since Descartes, Newton, Kant, and the Deist challenge, that is precisely the issue that so many people find unworthy of their belief.44 Facing this issue, I believe, is at least as daunting as the objections of Celsus that were met so thoroughly and with such boldness by Origen in the third century. And narrative theology, if it is to serve in the lists of this difficult struggle, will have to refuse to regard itself as a refuge from this important challenge. In other words, it will have let itself be open to those forms of expression that elucidate the notion of act better than mere narrative can do, and here I am thinking of Grimes's recommendation that

even reflected in our language: "Mostepithets derived from the arts are laudatory when applied to the other arts, or to life. If one describes a landscape as 'poetic,' or a man's struggle with adversity as 'epic,' or a woman's beauty as 'lyric,' one is using terms of praise. In an old movie comedy, an affected matron expressed her appreciation of dinner by declaring that 'the fish was simply a poem'-obviously the most rapturous word of approval she could think of. Similarly, terms like musical,symphonic, graphic,sculpturalare nearly alwayseulogistic. But with infrequent exceptions, terms borrowed from the theater-theatrical, operatic, melodramatic, stagey,etc.-tend to be hostile or belittling. And so do a wide range of expressions drawn from theatrical activity expressly to convey disapproval:acting,play acting,playingup to, puttingon an act, puttingon a performance, of oneself,playingto thegallery, and so forth" (Jonas Barish, The makinga scene,makinga spectacle Anti-theatrical Prejudice[Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981], p. 1). Barish's thesis, in this superbly written tour de force, is that theater's presentation of human deeds is alwaysmuch more unsettling because of the way it relies for its success on the duplicity of role/identity that a person could adopt at any time in everyday life: we can dissemble on stage because we so often resort to it in daily life. He also holds that theater is a much more confrontative and challenging art than mere verbal relating, which is surely of relevance to the single-minded focus on narrative by the purist school. 44 "The concept, 'act of God,' is central to the biblical understanding of God and his relation to the world. Repeatedly we are told of the great works performed by God in behalf of his people.... However hallowed by the Bible and traditional faith, this notion of a God who continuously performs deliberate acts in and upon his world, and in and through man's history, has become very problematical for most moderns. We have learned to conceive nature as an impersonal order or structure. The rising of the sun, the falling of the rain, the development of the solar system and the evolution of life, catastrophes like earthquakes or hurricanes, as well the wondrous adaptations and adjustments through which the myriad species of life sustain and support each other, terrifying plagues and diseases as well as powers of healing and restoration-all are grasped by us as natural events and processes.... In no case is it necessary to invoke the special action of God to account for such occurrences. Indeed, we have learned, especially in the last three or four hundred years, that it is precisely by excludingreference to such a transcendent agent that we gain genuine knowledge of the order that obtains in nature, are enabled to predict in certain respects the natural course of events, and thus gain a measure of control over it" Review61 [1968]: (Gordon D. Kaufman, "On the Meaning of 'Act of God,"' Harvard Theological 175-76).

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Pathos of Narrative Theology we exploit the resources of drama and ritual enactment.45 But after assembling the resources of theater, further work will need to proceed on that basis, so that we also achieve some measure of philosophical clarity about what it means for God to act. Although I do not think his own positive proposals will work, Langdon Gilkey is surely right that Christian theology lacks an adequate ontology of action, especially divine action, when he points out that "what we desperately need is a theological ontology that will put intelligible and credible meanings into our analogical categories of divine deeds and of divine self-manifestation through events. ... Only an ontology of events specifying what God's relation to ordinary events is like, and thus what his relation to special events might be, could fill the now empty analogy of mighty acts, void since the denial of the miraculous."46

Gilkey's abrupt assertion about the impossibility of the miraculous, asserted more a priori than worked through, no doubt does much to hobble his own positive suggestions, for it concedes the dilemma rather than tries to face the issue head on. This is not the place to argue the issue of the miraculous-a standard fixation in eighteenth-century apologeticsbut it is apposite to point out what difficulties we get into when we uncritically import such assumptions into our theology before working out their full implications or testing their justification. Thomas Tracy is one of the few Protestant theologians working openly at the apologetic and fundamental task of explicating a notion of what it means to say that God acts, and as part of that task he most trenchantly points out that the mere assertion of scientific difficulties with the proclamation of God's deeds in history is not the same thing as establishing the nature of that dif45The mere invocation of drama and ritual, of course, will resolve issues no more readily than an empty incantation of narrative, but for theology the field of drama is certainly white for the harvest. And for that purpose, one could do no better than begin with Hans Urs von Balthasar's multi-volume Theodramatik (Einsiedeln, Switzerland:JohannesVerlag), now being translated into This work is especially valuable for the way it DramaticTheory. English as Theo-Drama: Theological helps to break down the assumed hammerlock that the "scientificworldview"(to which Kaufman accedes too readily) has on our view of what it means to act: "In fact, theatre owes its very existence substantially to man's need to recognize himself as playing a role. It continually delivers him from the sense of being trapped and from the temptation to regard existence as something closed in upon itself. Through the theatre, man acquires the habit of looking for meaning at a higher and less obvious level. And at the same time it dispels the disheartening notion that this higher level is no longer dramatic but a static level where nothing happens and which relativizes all events beneath and external to it. In thiswaythetheatre actsas a brakeon all tidyphilosophies... How it does this, and with what result, is questionable, but at least it holds fast to the question. And so long as the question continues to be put, we can still hope for an answer. To that extent the theatre, in the background, is making its own contribution to fundamental theology" (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: DramaticTheory, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Graham Theological Harrison [San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988], p. 20; my emphasis). 46 Langdon Gilkey, "Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,"Journal of Religion 41 (1961): 203, 200.

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The Journal of Religion ficulty or justifying the sweeping statements of theologians about the of belief in mythological "meaning"of science or the "ridiculousness"
motifs: It is safe to say that the natural sciences do seek to give a complete causal explanation of events whenever they can. But it is not at all clear that the natural sciences are committed, as part of their very identity, to maintaining that a complete causal explanation can be given of every event in our world. Universal causal determinism represents an arguable metaphysical view which we can read out of a definition of the scientific enterprise only if we have first written it in. The tendency to write determinism into science has hung on tenaciously in theological discussion even while it has been overcome by scientists and philosophers. Theological remarks about "the scientific world view" most often identify science itself with a simple Laplacean picture of our world as a closed network of causal necessities; and this picture is preserved in spite of the fact that physicists have long recognized the limited domain within which Newtonian mechanics can be applied. It is probably a mistake to look to contemporary physics for a normative world picture (as though physicists were the new metaphysicians, assuming a task abandoned by disgruntled philosophers). In any case it is certainly a mistake to adopt, as the scientific view, a mechanistic world picture formed in the 18th century under the first impact of Newton's discoveries.47

These wise words, of course, do not give us a positive defense of the meaningof divine act in a way that would do justice to the biblicalmaterials, to the experience in Christianworship,and to the realitiesof contemporary worldviews,but they at least help remove a persistent objection that has so often been raised.And this in turn will help to put apologetics on a sounder footing.48Moreover,narrativetheology has a real contribution to make here, for narrativists are quite right to bridle at the peremp47 Thomas F. Tracy, "Enacting History: Ogden and Kaufman on God's Mighty Acts,"Journal of Religion 64, no. 1 (January 1984): 32. These trenchant remarks are given more extensive grounding, if I might borrow a metaphor from the foundationalist camp, in Tracy's underappreciated but important God, Actionand Embodiment (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984). 48 Perhaps we should let ourselves be admonished at this point by the distinguished historian of science Thomas Kuhn, about this habit of invoking "science"as a way of making the most sweeping statements about other fields. He is assessing historians here, but I think his remarks could equally apply to theologians: "Despite universal lip service paid by historians to the special role of science in the development of Western culture during the past four centuries, history of science is for the most of them still foreign territory.... But men who consider socioeconomic development or who discuss changes in values, attitudes, and ideas have regularly adverted to the sciences and most presumably continue to do so. Even they, however, regularly observe science from afar, balking at the border which would give access to the terrain and the natives they discuss. That resistance is damaging, both to their own work and to the development of the history of science" (Thomas S. Kuhn, "The Relations between History and History of Science," in Interpretive Social Science:A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979], p. 268). And Etienne Gilson makes a more fundamental point of method: "Scientists never ask themselves whythings happen, but howthey happen. Now as soon as you substitute the positivist's notion of relation for the metaphysical notion

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Pathos of Narrative Theology tory way earlier theology was robbed of its rich and storied character by the too ready assumption of theologians that they must work in the manner, if not of science, at least in that Cartesian style characterized by rigor and the search for self-evident principles-that is, propositionally. So narrativists, especially of the Hans Frei "purist"school, should have no difficulty in agreeing with the apologete Tracy when he asserts that "we misidentify the central challenge facing contemporary theology ... when we conclude too quickly that modern ways of understanding natural and historical processes impose necessary limits on theological reflection."49 But far from obviating the need for apologetics, this assertion highlights it, for to resist these imposed limits means that we must justify any challenge we make to that standard invocation, "the modern worldview." Indeed, as Tracy points out, the most distinctive difficulties in justifying Christian belief before a skeptical public may not be specifically modern at all (let alone Cartesian or foundationalist). On the contrary, everyonewhether believer or nonbeliever, contemporary, medieval, or ancienthas always had to struggle with much more central difficulties: We must struggle again and again with the possibilitythat the world maybear in on us as too disharmoniousand destructive, too full of sufferingand loss, to be portrayedas the continuous creation of a God who deservesour worship.Or we may be unable to work out an account of God's action in our world which preserves both the sovereigntyof God's will for the creatureand the integrityof the creature'swill for himself. Whether we will continue to speakof God's action in history (or whether anybodywill listen) may finallydepend, even in the modern context, on our response to these ancient questionsabout evil, human freedom, and God's grace.50
of cause, you at once lose all right to wonder whythings are, and why they are what they are. To dismiss all such questions as irrelevant to the order of positive knowledge is, at the same time, to cut the very root of all speculation concerning the nature and existence of God" (Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy[New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1941], p. 112). At any rate, it seems well past the time when theologians can get away with saying, as Rudolf Bultmann once did (in perhaps what is his most famous sentence): "It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles"(Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," in Kerygma and Myth,ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller [New York: Harper & Row], p. 5). It is extraordinary how influential this statement has been in twentieth-century theology and yet how Bultmann was allowed merely to assert it like some obvious pronunciamento without either justifying it or investigating its presuppositions. 49Tracy, "Enacting History," p. 36. 50 Ibid. Besides attending to these aporias in Christian doctrine itself, we must also not neglect the issue of the dispositions of the human heart. This was a matter of such great concern to Cardinal Newman, for whom the "evidence"for Christianity "tells a certain way, yet might be more," and a person will believe or not believe "accordingto the state of his heart." Unbelief itself "criticizes the evidence of Religion only because it does not like it, and really goes upon presumptions and prejudices as much as Faith does, only presumptions of an opposite nature" (John Henry Cardinal Newman, FifteenSermonsPreachedbeforethe University of Oxford[London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1868-81], pp. 232-34).

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The Journal of Religion It is, I believe, the pathos of much of narrative theology that it too easily tries to finesse these issues by a retreat into a mere act of recital, meant for the sustenance and benefit of the believing community, rather than going outward and facing the hard issues of preaching to a world that can raise objections to the Christian message almost at every point. But underneath those ready objections of the nonbeliever is another pathos too, as Tracy has seen: the deeper fear that the Christian message may simply seem too good to be true. Perhaps indeed the pathos of narrative theology reflects that larger pain. For insofar as it represents a retreat to the stories of isolated communities, it seems to share in that same fear, conceding by its inaction, if not in its words, that the wider world has actually not been redeemed after all. If in fact these two fears are linked-and how can believers not share in the doubts and fears of their contemporaries?-we might have there the beginnings of a real dialogue, for as narrative theology continues to recount to itself the stories of God's deliverance of his people, it will come to realize how far-reaching those acts of deliverance are.

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