50 Key Concepts in Theology

Narrative Theology
An approach to theology that sees stories as the basic structure of theological
knowledge.
Narrative theology is often seen as a late-twentieth-century development,
and there has certainly been considerable interest in the theory of narrative in
recent decades. However, the roots of narrative theology can be traced much
further back into Christian tradition.
The Jewish Scriptures valued the practice of story-telling and history-
telling as a form of theology. The Jewish confession of faith was not a creed
but a story: ‘You shall make a response before the Lord: “My father was a
wandering Aramean, he went down into Egypt and sojourned there …”’
(Deut. 26:5). The practice of story-telling was prominent in Jesus’ use of
parables; and the first Christians treasured the stories of Jesus’ life and
teaching as their primary theological asset.
Although the influence of Greek philosophy made early Christian
theology increasingly abstract, a narrative theological approach remained a
powerful dimension in theology. St Augustine’s autobiography, the
Confessions, is a unique example of theological narrative, but stories feature
widely as the medium for special revelations: Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa,
Gregory of Naziansus and Perpetua all had narrative dream-visions by which
they set great store.
Much later in the history of the Church, the case for narrative theology
was argued eloquently by John Bunyan in the verse preface to his Pilgrim’s
Progress:
May I not write in such a style as this?
In such a method too, and yet not miss
Mine end, thy good? Why may it not be done?
By metaphors I speak; was not God’s laws,
His Gospel-laws in olden time held forth
By types, shadows and metaphors?
The twentieth-century interest in narrative theology coincided with the
general interest in theological language that was inspired by the thinking of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Ferdinand de Saussure and others.
There was a growing consensus, which crossed conservative and liberal lines,

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that a consideration of language was not just one subject among others, but
the most important area of theology. This is because all our theological
thinking takes place in language.
The central insight of narrative theology was the idea that both life and
language are structured as stories, making narrative our primary means of
self-understanding. This would mean – as George Lindbeck and others have
suggested – that Christian doctrine must be understood in terms of linguistic
structures.
This marked a significant move away from the established idea that
narrative and myth were secondary to reason. Narrative theology suggested
that stories were a legitimate, and perhaps superior, method of reasoning. In
this way, narrative theology appeared to challenge the liberal–Enlightenment
confidence in human rationality.
In its conservative form (expressed by Stanley Hauerwas and John
Milbank, for example), narrative theology argues that Christianity is in
essence a living story. The Christian task is to live within this narrative and
re-narrate the story for the world.
Liberals (such as David Tracy, for example) question whether there is just
one narrative that holds together all the disparate strands of the Christian
revelation. The Bible itself contains multiple narratives and the history of the
Church shows that the Christian story comes in many versions. For liberals,
narrative theology shows that the Christian revelation is not a ‘master
narrative’ but contains multiple and diffused narrative possibilities.
THINKERS
John Dominic Crossan (1934– ) has emphasised the importance of
subversive parables in Jesus’ theology.
Hans Frei (1922–88): a pioneering theologian of narrative who
established the so-called New Yale School, which also included George
Lindbeck.
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) agreed with J. R. R. Tolkein and the other so-called
‘Inklings’
(a literary society interested in imaginative fiction)
that ‘t
he heart of
Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.’ (See ‘Myth’.)
George Lindbeck (1923– ) used the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein
to offer a cultural-linguistic understanding of doctrine. (See ‘Doctrine’.)
George MacDonald (1824–1905): a Christian fantasy writer who argued
in Phantastes (1858) that the imagination is the true medium of theological

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thinking.
Plato (427–347 bc) suggested that the best that philosophy could hope for
was to tell ‘likely stories’.
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005): a French theologian and philosopher who
argued in Time and Narrative that life must be understood as story/history.
Charles Williams (1886–1945): a novelist who used fiction to explore
theology and spirituality. He was a major influence on C. S. Lewis.
IDEAS
The Dream of the Rood (author unknown): a ninth-century Anglo-Saxon
narrative about a vision of the cross. It is the oldest example in English of a
genre of imaginative Christian narrative which continues in later mystical
poems such as Pearl, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The New Yale School, founded by Hans Frei and sometimes called ‘post-
liberalism’, argued for the importance of language and narrative in orthodox
theology.
Structuralism: an approach to narrative, used notably by Roland Barthes
and Algirdas Greimas, which reduced the essence of stories to basic
diagrammatic structures.
The Christian Mythos: the term used by John Milbank to describe the
defining narrative of Christendom.
Narratology: the study of narrative.
Mythopoesis (‘the making of myths’): a concept put forward by J. R. R.
Tolkein, who believed that Christian truth is best expressed in stories –
principally the narrative of the Gospel, which he saw as ‘the greatest story of
all’.
BOOKS
Don Cupitt, What is a Story? (SCM, 1991)
Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (eds.), Why Narrative? Readings
in Narrative Theology (Wipf & Stock, 1997)

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