Splitting hairs
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Nick Carter has just added a comment to an old article called Jesus, God and narrative theology. He asks about how we deal with the apparent tension between a narrative theology - at least as I described it in that post - and the need to establish and defend doctrinal formulations:
To my mind part of the value of a narrative theology lies in the fact that it restores the autonomy or givenness of the biblical texts. These texts are always subject to interpretation, but it is important in some way to ensure that the theology - the system of beliefs - we derive from them is always subordinate to the texts: we keep returning to what is in effect for us an unchanging literary deposit, and we keep asking new and difficult questions about it. All theological discussion, all interpretation, all doctrinal formulation, is fluid: only the texts - perhaps only the unread texts - remain fundamentally constant. That seems to me at least to relativize the debates we have about, say, the nature of Christ. I would suggest that Christendom (in effect, Christianity as we know it) developed an interpretation of the nature of Christ that served its various political, social, cultural and intellectual interests. By and large that remains the dominant ‘model’ for our understanding today. I don’t think that the Christendom model is fully adequate as a summation of the biblical data, and I would argue that the post-Christendom church will need to develop a different model. At the present moment, however, it seems more important to safeguard the integrity and priority of the biblical narrative and subject our various doctrinal frameworks to thoroughgoing critique. That is not an attempt to disallow arbitration between theologies - I am as anxious to promote a particular reading of the texts as anyone else. But it does help us to maintain a certain (postmodern) self-awareness of how those frameworks potentially mislead the interpreter. The other point to make here is that narrative theology has its own rules and generates its own debates - they are simply different to those that we associate with systematic or dogmatic approaches to theology. We might consider - this would be somewhat paradigmatic - how Jesus both told and interpreted parables in order to convey his sense of what was happening through his presence in the midst of Israel. Or we might consider the difference between faith as belief in a universal myth and faith as trust in God under difficult historical conditions. (It seems to me that the problem with much modern theology is not so much that it is propositional but that it has reduced the biblical narrative to a mythology of personal salvation, not so different from gnosticism, which is then translated into propositional statements in order to prevent its corruption.) Finally, there is indeed a lot of refuting of false teachers and false doctrines in the New Testament, but to some extent that must be regarded as a matter of historical context: the need to define a set of new and quite radical beliefs in the absence of the sort of the deeply instilled doctrinal structures that currently undergird the church’s thinking - and more importantly, the need to maintain the loyalty of the early communities to these teachings - the gospel - when they were under considerable pressure to abandon them. This is not where we are today. Our challenge now, it seems to me, is not primarily to define and defend but to deconstruct and re-read in order to understand anew the vocation of the people of God. |
Comments
Re: Splitting hairs
It is always so interesting to me how I can agree and disagree with you on so many levels.
I agree that narrative rather than doctrinal theology is generally a better way to go about doing Church things. However, I disagree that the collection of Scriptures that compose the Holy Bible are organized around "the Biblical narrative." I disagree with the very presumption that there is One Biblical Narrative.
I am more inclined to say that the Bible is like a compost pile, to use the metaphor suggested by Brueggeman, and from that fertile start any number of narratives can be and historically have been woven.
I agree with you when you say that "we should ask what Jesus did talk about if he did not talk about doctrine." The only record and by far the most authoritative record we have of that talk is in the Gospels. And I agree with you even further that we should see Jesus as talking about "what was happening" when he walked. I would add: just as we should see the Gospel writers as talking about what was happening when they wrote. And I think that we should see ourselves as talking about what is happening in our lives and times. We are all stuck in our context, the incarnate Jesus included, I would argue.
However, I disagree that Jesus "talked about the narrative within which Israel found itself…" Jesus did not stand outside the narrative and talk about the narrative as if it were a thing. Rather, I would argue, the words and signs performed by Jesus wove together from existing scriptural strands a new narrative line that was in competition with other narratives.
Re: Splitting hairs
Nice to be able to agree and disagree with both of you. The NT texts, gospels and letters, are theological through and through - ie they are not simply communicators of narrative; they are all reflections on the meaning of narrative, the historical existence of which lies somewhere behind and before the reflections themselves.
A contemporary reflection on the gospels might be that their meaning resides in a somewhat narrow and historically relative band. Somewhere in this train of thought, meaning is restricted to what can be understood from a conjectured historical viewpoint - history as it might have been understood in the time leading up and within the narratives themselves.
This approach can shed enormous light on the narrative. It also has the significant potential weakness of disallowing the possibility of the development of further levels of meaning within the texts themselves, beyond the conjectured historically derived meanings. Examples of this directly affect our understanding of the person of Jesus and his mission, as in the phrase ‘Son of God’, for instance, or in embryonic formulations of the trinity.
There is a further weakness in the interpretation of texts from a narrowly conjectured historical narrative viewpoint. Enthusiasm for the project can cause significant objections to be overlooked or discarded. One such objection arose recently on this site, in the discussion of the meaning of the phrase ‘Son of Man’ as a title or description of Jesus, and the narrative it is said to invoke. Simply pausing to explore the meaning of the phrase raises questions over a conjectured exclusive linkage between the phrase and its supposed narrative origins, and calls into doubt an entire superstructure of interpretation.
It can seem axiomatic that to understand texts we need to confine our exploration to the texts themselves, and the narratives they contain, and to suspend what appear to be later, theologising additions and interpretations. The problem is that nowhere in either Old or New Testament is there a pure narrative which can be separated from theological reflection. The entire body of the scriptures is theological reflection on a narrative, or if you like, narratives, which are somehow and somewhere antecedent to it.
The question then arises as to which interpretation provides the more convincing understanding of the whole. But on this level, the scriptures never functioned as literature to be explored in isolation. They were and are part of the on-going experience and interpretation of the faith community as a whole, which interprets the texts, and through them their experience of God amongst them. Interpretation is a continuing dialogue between text, tradition and the experience of faith communities. It can never be a question of textual interpretation in isolation. I am therefore suspicious of one interpretation of the scriptures which upholds itself above all others that have preceded it, and dismisses them as inaccurate and untrustworthy.
Re: Splitting hairs
Jesus didn’t really talk about doctrines. Indeed, the very notion of a “doctrine” that can be argued about and used to denounce heretics only emerged during the 14th century.
If Jesus didn’t talk about doctrines and historically could not have been talking about doctrines, why do we insist on talking about doctrines? I fear that some believers spend more time living up to the doctrinal propositions articulated by their denominational creeds than they spend practicing the way of Christ our Lord.
Jesus wasn’t a Southern Baptist or a Lutheran, folks.