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“Tell
someone to do something and you change their life—for a
day; |
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tell someone a story and you change their life.” |
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- N.
T. Wright |
Everyone
loves a story. Whether we hear, read, or watch, gather round the
campfire, gather round the screen, or just cozy up to a book, we
all pay people to tell us good stories. Spielberg knows it.
Disney, Shakespeare, and Homer knew it. Jesus understood it, and
told some of the best stories around: the Good Samaritan, the
Prodigal Son. He inspired stories too: the Four Gospels. In
fact, he’s really the inspiration behind the whole Bible and
the epic story it tells. Generations of Jews and Christians have
been thrilled and shaped by its memorable narratives.
In
the last 40 years, biblical scholars have rediscovered the Bible
as story, what they call narrative criticism. Under the
influence of scientific rationalism, scholars had investigated
biblical texts like archeological sites, digging up their
different layers of history. Critical methods used—source,
form and redaction criticism—were designed to break large
texts up into small sections apparently pieced together by the
writers. Ordinary believers, who relate intuitively to biblical
stories, were frustrated and alienated. Their stories had been
torn up by ‘experts’, and not put back together again in a
way they could grasp or use.
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Used
wisely, critical methods really do enhance our grasp of texts,
but many of these methods are not very accessible to
non-professionals. As Stephen Barton says, “Each of these ways of questioning the
text is necessary and legitimate.
Nevertheless, if we attend only to the archaeology of the
text, devoting all our time to reconstructing the layers of
tradition which lie concealed beneath it, we may miss what is
most obvious: namely
the text as it stands.”
Narrative criticism is appealing precisely because 1) it deals
with a whole text as it stands, and 2) it involves us in
interpreting stories, something we have been doing—consciously
or unconsciously—since childhood. We all need more insight
and practice, but the process is not alien or inaccessible to
us, as some critical methodology is.
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In
the 1970s biblical scholars began applying new insights from the
field of literature to Scripture. In the early 1980s some
landmark studies were published,
and now narrative criticism is mainstream. N. T. Wright, one of
the most influential theologians and church leaders of our day,
gives high priority to the role of story in articulating human
perception and experience: “… human beings tell stories
because this is how we perceive, and indeed relate to, the world.”
And, “a story, with its pattern of problem and
conflict, of aborted attempts at resolution, and final result
… is, if we may infer from the common practice of the world,
universally perceived as the best way of talking about the way
the world actually is.”
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Old
Testament/Hebrew Bible teacher, Bernard Anderson, had likewise
made story a key theme in his time-honored textbook, Understanding
the Old Testament. His aim, like Wright’s, is “to
interweave the elements of historical study, archeological
research, literary criticism, and biblical theology by viewing
the history of Israel as a story.”
Even
ethicists recognize the role of narrative. Richard Hayes, who
like Wright commands widespread respect in New Testament
studies, zeroes in on the forming/transforming power of story.
In contrast to ethical instruction,
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Stories
form our values and moral sensibilities in more indirect and
complex ways, teaching us how to see the world, what to fear,
and what to hope for; stories offer us nuanced models of
behavior both wise and foolish, courageous and cowardly,
faithful and faithless. That is why, as Amos Wilder remarked, 'the road to a moral
judgment is by way of the imagination.'
Consequently
the ethical significance of each Gospel must be discerned from
the shape of the story as a whole. In order to grasp the moral
vision of the evangelist, we must ask how Jesus’ life and
ministry are portrayed in the story and how his call to
discipleship reshapes the lives of the other characters.
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Glen
Stassen, in the acclaimed textbook, Kingdom Ethics, also
highlights imagination and story in moral reasoning. Noting
Nathan’s use of a parable to convict David of sin, he
observes, “We imaginatively enter the particular story, place
ourselves in the narrative in one or another role and then find
ourselves drawn or driven to particular courses of action.”
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What
Stassen calls “imaginative entering into the story”
gets to the heart of how we humans interact with narrative.
Common humanity, imagination, and deepening life experience all
help us to identify with, and learn from, what Hayes calls “nuanced
models of behavior” both good and bad offered by
narratives. In fact, this kind of humanely nuanced narrative
ethics helps check our tendency toward by-the-book,
black-and-white legalism (cf. Mark 2.1 – 3.6).
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It
is true that, influenced by postmodern subjectivity, some
scholars fail to ground their imagination in historical background
and
authorial intent. For them a text becomes an autonomous entity
into which a reader pours meaning: this is obviously eisegesis not exegesis.
The artful interaction between the world of the author, the
world of the text, and the reader's perception of them is a
complex process, which requires giving them each due attention.
Interpreters have rarely held all three in appropriate balance,
but it is irresponsible to react by casting a text off from its historical moorings. Alert readers will notice that
Wright and Anderson both seek to integrate literature, history,
and theology in the interpretive process,
preserving checks and balances that make it more rigorous and
sound. Any conscientious reader will try to ground her or his
imagination similarly.
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Even
a conservative like Craig Blomberg, concerned to defend the
historicity of the Gospels, values narrative criticism, and is
satisfied that tendencies to discount historicity so as to
promote subjective agendas "are not inherent in the
method; a well-crafted piece of historical writing also promotes
certain ideological concerns in an artistic and aesthetically
pleasing way."Blomberg appreciates, too, how accessible and intuitive
the medium of story is when he suggests that a narrative approach stresses "aspects of the reading process that come most naturally to
first-time Bible readers not yet taught to treat Scripture
atomistically (e.g., verse by verse)."
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Because
it focuses on story, a universal mode of human expression and
communication, narrative criticism is a powerful interpretative
tool, which both scholars and congregants can appreciate and
use. When imagination is properly grounded in history and
theology it is an especially apt methodology for the postmodern
era. The challenge is for scholars and pastors to teach the
method in sound and accessible form, and for congregants to learn and
practice it in community, “to imaginatively enter the story”
together, following in the steps of the one who inspired the
story, the artful Word.
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See Craig G. Bartholomew
and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2004).
Stephen Barton, “Mark
as Narrative: The Story of the Anointing Woman (Mark 14:3-9),” Expository
Times, 102, no. 8 (May 1991): 231.
See Mark G. W. Stibbe, John
as Storyteller (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), 5-6, for a brief but
helpful summary of these developments. Likewise Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels ( Nashville:
Broadman & Holman, 1997), 104. Most scholars will cite the same four
works as programmatic: David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark
as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); R. Alan Culpepper, Anatomy
of the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); Jack D.
Kingsbury Matthew as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1986); Robert C. Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts, 2
vols (Philadelphia and Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986-1990).
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N. T. Wright, The New
Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1992), 40. See his ongoing multi-volume work, Christian Origins and the Question
of God.
Bernard W. Anderson, Understanding
the Old Testament, 4th ed. abridged (Upper
Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), xvii.
Richard B. Hayes, The
Moral Vision of the New Testament, (San Francisco: Harper,
1998), 73-4.
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Stassen, Glen H., and
David P. Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in
Contemporary Context (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 2003), 101-2. Wright, 40, uses the same illustration of
the transforming power of narrative.
Note the perceptive
discussion and comment from a pioneer and spokesperson for
narrative criticism, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, "Narrative
Criticism" in Mark and Method, Janice Capel Anderson
and Stephen D. Moore, eds (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 35-36:
"No doubt biblical criticism would benefit greatly from
an approach that could—if not simultaneously at least
sequentially—keep in view all parts of the communication
process: author, text and reader." Her challenge
had to some extent been taken up that same year by Stibbe,
197-99, in his work on John as Storyteller. See fn
3.
Wright, 12, and Anderson,
14. Their definition of terms may differ in detail, but the
overall intent is the same.
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Blomberg, 104.
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