But wasn’t the church God’s Plan A all along? Before Adam was created and placed in Eden, God already planned Abraham, Israel, and Christ. A biblical narrative, then, should see what God planned and actually accomplished in Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Israel – not as imperfect plans that failed and were set aside, but as necessary steps leading to a single destination.

Chris, is this perhaps basically a question of perspective? I don’t see that presumption of overruling purpose on the surface of the narrative in Genesis: the argument simply isn’t there that these were ‘necessary steps leading to a single destination’. Is there anything in the creation narrative that leads us to think that humanity was always intended or expected to disobey? Surely the story culminates in the judgment that the created world was good?

Is there any indication in Genesis 1-11 that God planned to respond to the repeated failure of the creation project by choosing a people for his own possession? I see nothing in the story of Babel to suggest that God foresaw this turn of events, that in judging humanity’s ambitions and forcing a separation of the families into linguistically isolated communities he had it in mind to call Abraham. Maybe he did, but the narrative doesn’t tell us that. In the narrative these look like unforeseen, unexpected developments.

When we come to the New Testament we have statements such as 1 Peter 1:20 which says that Christ was ‘foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for your sake’. But that is not an exegetical statement. It expresses a prophetic conviction and may only really reflect the need to express to a fledgling movement the utter certainty of Christ’s role in the grand scheme of things.

So my argument would be that it is certainly part of the narrative that the early church (including Jesus) retrojected divine intentionality back into the Old Testament narratives. But that intentionality does not always appear in the actual Old Testament texts, and I would suggest that exegetical integrity is still demanded of us. This to my mind is how a narrative theology works: we recognize the significance of the later point of view without feeling obliged (almost as a matter of piety) to misread the earlier texts. Peter simply represents a particular perspective within the narrative structure of biblical thought.

So I would say that your statement ‘Adam and his descendants and Israel were not expected to fulfill a single creational mandate’ may be theologically correct (though I have my doubts), but it does not do justice to the narratives. A postmodern narrative theology ought to be able to resist the need to subsume the whole of scripture under a totalizing theological perspective - which is no less true, I guess, for readings that give the ‘new creation’ motif hermeneutical priority!

From a slightly different angle, we might also ask what questions the stories of Genesis 1-11 were intended to answer. It may be entirely inappropriate to expect them to reveal the sort of salvation-historical logic that you describe - an unfolding of divine purpose culminating in Christ and the church. I would have thought it makes more sense to suppose that these stories were told to account for Israel’s distinctive experience of being amongst and at odds with the nations of the world. But that’s another matter.

Finally, I’m not sure that your nice parable works. What God started with was not a hole in the ground but a good, complete creation. When that went wrong, humanity was thrown out of the garden and had to start from scratch (literally). When humanity become wicked and violent, God destroyed all life in a flood. When they stopped on a plain in Shinar and started to build a tower, he basically gave up again and selected a single family. There is not a progressive building of a structure here. At each stage what went before is rejected, and in the end the creational hope is narrowed down to a very small people group.