Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching

Reuniting New Testament Interpretation and Proclamation

Green, Joel B., Pasquarello, Michael,III

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781441206541
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

There is often an unfortunate division between the technical work of biblical scholars and the practical work of preachers who construct sermons each week. These two fields of study, which ought to be mutually informed and supportive, are more often practically divided by divergent methods, interests, and goals. Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching aims to bridge that divide.
Using narrative as an organizing theme, the contributors work through the New Testament offering examples of how interpretation can rightly inform proclamation. Three pairs of chapters feature an exemplary reading by a New Testament scholar followed by a sermon informed by that reading. Introductory and concluding chapters provide guidance for application of the model.
Pastors and seminarians will find here a uniquely practical work that will help them with both the reading and preaching of Scripture.

1

The (Re-)Turn to Narrative

Joel B. Green

What makes a sermon “biblical”? This is a notoriously difficult question, and we often find ourselves retreating to the equally evasive response, “I know it when I see it!” Even more burdensome would be attempts to garner some sort of community consensus around the attribute “biblical” when used of the preaching moment. Does it have to do with following the common lectionary? With a sermon that, in the order of worship, comes after the reading of a biblical text? With a sermon whose structure is drawn from the biblical text on which it is said to be based? With one that proceeds clause by clause, verse by verse through a text, preferably peppered with references to Hebrew or Greek? With a sermon that upholds a high christology? With one that embraces the authority of Scripture without wavering? All of these definitions, and many others besides, have been championed.

To the uninitiated, these questions must and often do seem ludicrous. Whatever else they might expect, folks presume of sermons that they will hear from God, and most presume that this has something to do, directly and significantly, with God’s Word, the Old and New Testaments. Indeed, the earliest “commentaries” on biblical texts among Christians took the form of homilies, a reality that speaks of the assumption that, whatever else it is, preaching is biblical interpretation that shapes the performance of Scripture in the life of the church. The immediate relation of text and sermon, long an unquestioned presupposition, can nowadays hardly be assumed, and often is flatly countered by precept or practice, or both. How this came to be, why this is unacceptable, and how it might be remedied is the focus of this chapter, which urges that the way forward is marked by the recovery of “narrative” in biblical studies and homiletics.

The Inescapable Work of (Narrative) Interpretation

In an essay entitled “It’s Not What You Know, but How You Use It,” Yale University’s Robert J. Sternberg observes, “Traditional education, and the intellectual and academic skills it provides, furnishes little protection against evil-doing or, for that matter, plain foolishness.” He hypothesizes that intelligent, well-educated people are particularly susceptible to self-deception at four points. They falsely imagine that the world revolves, or should revolve, around them; that they know all there is to know, so have no need of the counsel of others; that, on the basis of their knowledge, they are all-powerful; and that they are shielded from the machinations and retributions of others, who will never be able to figure them out.[1] Sternberg goes on to insist that our educational goals need revamping, since, however necessary academic skills may be, they are insufficient if people are to use their intelligence to seek a common good. Persons immersed in Proverbs may hear echoes of a familiar text: “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever else you get, get insight” (Prov. 4:7).

It is a peculiar characteristic of the West that we so easily succumb to the temptation to confuse the amassing of facts with learning. Surely, our prejudices tell us, the winner of the Bible trivia contest is self-evidently the most biblical person around, just as a genuinely biblical sermon is one that most obviously weaves explicit citations of biblical texts or that takes us, verse by verse, through a Pauline letter. We should not be surprised that we are so easily fooled, even if it is appropriate that we are stunned by the deleterious effects of our folly. How could we know so much and be so ill-formed? Is it not because there is no simple line of causation from the accumulation of data to the formation of a person?

We should not be surprised because we are, after all, a people weaned on the milk of a Christian faith defined by its rational essence, distilled into its dogmatic essentials. Talk about God among the theologically trained tends effortlessly, naturally, toward propositional statements, toward t he unequivocal, toward the objective, toward a unified witness. As John Goldingay puts it, however, scriptural reflections on God’s nature have an altogether different flavor. Rather than enumerating the immutable attributes of God, the Bible has it that

God’s person emerges in a series of contexts. God is a creator, then a destroyer. God relates to a family in the concerns of its ongoing family life, such as the finding of a home, the birth of children, and the arranging of marriages; God then relates to a nation in the different demands of its life, which includes God’s becoming a warmaker. Entering into a formal relationship with this people takes God into becoming a lawmaker and into becoming a deity identified with a shrine (albeit a movable one) and not merely by a relationship with a people.

That is, “the ‘revelation’ of God’s person is inextricably tied to the events in which God becomes different things, in a way that any person does; it is thus inextricably tied to narrative.”[2] This understanding of God is “storied.” Its content is embodied, lived. This is the theological inheritance bequeathed to us in Scripture.

It is the peculiar inheritance of our Enlightenment past that the faith is present to us in other terms—as principles and systems that tend by their concern with their formal elements to dismiss mystery and resolve tensions left standing by Scripture (and by life!). However, our theological track record increasingly demonstrates that the formal aspects of our faith cannot be segregated or distinguished from the narrative content and context of God’s revelation of himself to us. On more pragmatic grounds, this criticism is animated by observations such as those made by Robert Sternberg, who recognizes that increased intelligence and enhanced knowledge skills have not been correlated with formation in wisdom. This critique is urged already by the shape of Scripture itself. Not only is the overwhelming portion of the Bible cast as narrative, but even lists of precepts (“You shall . . .”) and the formulation of truth claims (“God is . . .”) appear and are rooted in the ongoing narrative of Israel’s life with God. To read Genesis-to-Revelation as Scripture requires something more than the turning of pages and the movement from one book to the next, Leviticus to Numbers, Malachi to Matthew. This “something more” demands of our learning to account for the grand narrative plotted therein, from creation to new creation. Garrett Green has argued, elegantly and powerfully, that the narrative content of Christian faith is essential to the logic of belief in Jesus Christ as the revelation of God in human history, and that this “content” is an unavoidable feature of the grammar of Christian faith.[3]

For Garrett Green, the mischief that bedevils us can be traced back to the impulses that led G. W. F. Hegel in 1795 to reject “the positivity of the Christian religion.” By “positivity,” Hegel referred to teachings of the faith that were grounded in arbitrary appeal to the authority of specific historical figures and occurrences; this would become the basis for a distinction between natural religion (religion accessible through reason) and positive religion (based on religious authority, whether human or divine, and especially on Scripture and the classical creeds). For Green, this represents an indefensible accommodation to the spirit of the age, the effect of which has been to neuter Christian theology of its power to engage the human person. “For Christians,” he writes, “the chief point of imaginative contact with God is Holy Scripture, that epic of positivity whose narratives, poetry, and proclamation are able, by means of their metaphoric inspiration, to render God himself to the faithful imagination.”[4]

Lest it appear that the recognition of the intimacy of narrative and faith is merely an attempt to turn back the clock, as it were, so as to accord privilege to “positive” over “natural” religion, it is worth reflecting on how the natural sciences have in recent years urged the centrality of “narrative” to what it means to be fully human. In the early modern period, Christian theology could be profitably explored through God’s “two books,”[5] the Bible and the natural world. If emphasis on “natural religion” came not only to eclipse revealed religion, but actually to rewrite its grammar, it is ironic that science itself has come full circle now to underscore the storied quality of distinctively human existence, together with the essentially hermeneutical nature of human life. That is, we have it from God’s “two books” that the proclivities championed in the Enlightenment—proclivities that were themselves expressions of an earlier science and that came to enjoy powerful ecclesial sanction—have intruded on a basic human quality: our location in a social-moral order whose meaning is neither objective nor neutral, but that is generated within and through narrative.[6]

It is increasingly clear from neurobiology that meaning-making is central to our day-to-day experience, and that we will go to great lengths to construct stories that provide a context for understanding and interpreting what we perceive to be true. My brain imposes structure on the data it receives from its sensory organs, contributing to a baseline conclusion that my sense of reality is both embodied and interpreted within the framework of my formation as a social being. Apparently, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the human family, when compared with other inhabitants of the earth, is this capacity for and drive toward making sense, storied sense, of our experienced world. My “perception” of the world is based in a network of ever-forming assumptions about my environment, and in a series of welltested assumptions, shared by others with whom I associate, about “the way the world works.” Ambiguous data may present different hypotheses, but my mind disambiguates that data according to what I have learned to expect to see. Interestingly, when taught to interpret the same data in a different way, I can do so, flipping from one interpretation to another as my perception of the input shifts.

Similarly, we typically explain our behaviors not by physical and chemical chains of cause and effect, but through the historical narratives by which we collaborate to create a sense of ourselves as persons. Memory, then, is not passive retrieval of information, but active reconstruction, through which we seek coherence. Our sense of who we are is profoundly nested in our long-term memories, which, then, are the prerequisite for self-representation. “She isn’t herself,” we say of persons suffering significant lapses of memory, whether caused by a traumatic brain injury, for example, or by the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease.

What is more, because we are intensely social beings, the stories we tell about ourselves, through which we construct our sense of self, are woven out of the threads and into the cloth of the stories present to us in our social world and communal traditions. We can press further, observing the consequences of our interactions, our environments, on who we are and who we are becoming. Our brains, from their neural pathways right down to their synapses, are continually in the process of being shaped, sculpted, by our interactions, by our experiences, by the narratives that surround us like the air we breathe. Consequently, embodied human life performs like a cultural, neuro-hermeneutic system, locating (and, thus, interpreting) current realities in relation to our grasp of the past and expectations of the future.[7] For Christian formation, this presses the question of the character of our ecclesial lives and the importance of our ongoing reflection on Scripture to an even higher level. Accordingly, it is crucial to inquire, What stories do we tell? How do we construe the past and future, by which we make sense of the present? What stories are shaping the worlds we indwell? What stories are we embodying? In what stories are we teaching others, especially our children, to build their playgrounds, their backyards, their homes? Clearly, “truth claims,” however necessary, are insufficient for vital Christian faith, since these “beliefs,” these “statements,” are quite capable of functioning as raw data in a narrative whose beginning, middle, and end are antithetical to the biblical story.

Of the implications that could be drawn from these ruminations, two are of particular importance for our purposes here. First, there is no escaping either the fact (or necessity) of interpretation, nor the narrativity involved in Scripture. This is not foremost a statement about method in either exegesis or homiletical theory, but rather an essential aspect of the nature of the world and of human identity and comportment in it. “Reality” does not come to us “clean,” but always through the filters of our perception. The world is always for us already an interpreted world. The critical question then becomes, Perceived how? Or, better, Within what narrative account will we interpret?

We can say more about this first point in relation to the second, which centers on our capacity to adopt fresh points of view from which to apprehend the world around us. Turning to philosophical hermeneutics since Gadamer,[8] we have realized that, in the never-ending work of interpretation, we cannot jump out of our skins. We bring with us always and everywhere our selves—that is, our presuppositions and histories, our stories. And these presuppositions enable our understanding, as well as disable it. We cannot escape our histories because it is in them that our identity is generated. The miracle is that the horizons of our presuppositions can be enlarged and transformed. Here is the crucial point: The biblical narrative is present as an alternative framework within which to construe our lives, and so challenges those who would be Christian by calling for a creative transformation of the stories by which we make sense of our lives and of the world.[9] If we all live story-formed lives, then we are confronted with the question, What stories will shape us? For Christians, the answer is nonnegotiable: Our task is to make our lodging the Genesis-to-Revelation narrative so that our modes of interpretation are conformed to the biblical narrative, so that this story decisively shapes our lives.

The Partings of the Ways

Our introductory claim that “narrative” needs recovery may strike some as odd. After all, “narrative” has been standard diet in homiletical circles for some time. It is at this juncture that we encounter a semantic problem of great significance. Eugene Lowry offers no less than five strategies for “narrative preaching,” for example, and his is not the only relevant analysis.[10] Three observations will help to point the way forward. First, by “narrative,” we do not refer primarily, as in recent homiletical theory, to a particular genre of sermon, to the sermon as a particular art form, or to a certain “style” of preaching. To use the categories borrowed by Lowry from Aristotle, we are not concerned with a sermon that moves from a problem to its resolution to the consequences of that resolution. We will be concerned in part with narrative as a genre in which much of the Bible is cast, but more so with narrative as a theological category, as a way of grasping and making sense of the whole of history as this is interpretively presented in Christian Scripture. Second, the shift in homiletical theory from a pivotal concern with the performance of Scripture to a focus on sylistics and communication theory is understandable as a symptom of a more general malaise in theological studies, broadly conceived. Although not wishing to marginalize the importance of rhetoric in its classical sense of persuasive speech, I nevertheless want to observe that concern with style or form has generally come at the expense of content. And this is because, third, biblical studies and preaching have grown distant from one another as a result of the shift from an ecclesial context to a scientific framework within which to engage the biblical materials. This is due in large part to the interests of the modern period, which pressed the study of the Bible more and more in the direction of historical inquiry, opening wider and wider the chasm between “the world of the Bible” and “the world of the congregation.”

It is nonetheless worth asking, as I will do momentarily, whether homiletics might not have influenced, and might not still influence, biblical studies more in the direction of its theological home in the church and in proclamation. Need homiletical theory follow in the footsteps of biblical studies, as it often has? Can it not issue a prophetic call for a needed transformation in the way the Bible is engaged as Scripture for the church?

In the seminary curriculum, or at least in the experience of many seminarians, the problem is typically felt at a deeply existential level when moving from courses in biblical studies to one’s first course in preaching. How does what I learned in the one relate to the other? Faced with the task of preparing a sermon on a passage from Ezekiel or Galatians, the preacher faithfully walks through the “-isms” she has learned: text criticism, literary criticism, genre criticism, historical criticism, and the rest. Then she consults the major commentaries on the text. In hand are philological, structural, and historical data; exegetical issues are tackled; and the life-world of the biblical author has been thoroughly explored. What now? Without wishing to pull the rug from under a discipline of preaching informed by serious study, the reality remains that the text as imagined by the scholar is often separated by a great chasm from the world faced by the preacher. How does our preacher stand before her congregation and make use of this text, and of the pages of notes gathered from study focused on the meaning of this text back there and then, to speak of God here and now?[11] How did we come to this parting of the ways, between the way of scholarly study of the biblical materials and the way of proclamation of the Word of God?

In an important sense, the pivotal question here is one of “meaning,” and especially of its location: What is the “address” of the text? Where can one locate what it “means”? On the broad canvas where generalizations can assist us, we can exegete the problem in terms of the relationship between biblical text and historical context. Pre-modern perspectives on text and history worked with the assumption that text and history were coterminous or at least that the history behind the text was ...