A Brief Analysis of Narrative Theology

It is no secret that as you look at my theological history, I am a bit of a mutt.  I grew up Southern Baptist and when I moved north to Michigan, ended up moving around to several different churches until having a charismatic experience and ending up in an Assemblies of God church.  After being asked to leave (essentially) because of my reformed leanings, I ended up churchless for almost three years until I moved to Ashland, Ohio to attend seminary and began working with an Evangelical Free Church Plant.  The seminary that I graduated from is from a Brethren tradition and is an approved seminary for the United Methodist Church.  Indeed, my influences are very diverse.  I have found that this can be both a weakness for me and a strength.  As a weakness, it makes my theology look too ecumenical and flighty, but as a strength, it helps me appreciate the different contributions that theologians have made to the study of God despite my disagreement with them.

            I recently ran across some writings of Scot McKnight, a theologian who has influenced my thinking as I have read some of his writings on his blog.  I have a deep respect for him after hearing him speak at my seminary last fall on the importance of the resurrection and how it needs to be included in presentations of the gospel.  Despite my misgivings about some of his issues on Marian theology (but in all fairness, I have not read the book, just reviews of the book), I am very impressed by his grasp of the whole of the Bible, meaning that he understands that the Bible is telling a story.  This view is called “narrative theology.”  I label this cautiously because I know that some may have a knee-jerk reaction to that label because this type of theology is embraced by emergent church leaders such as Rob Bell.

            I once told a co-worker, who was also a believer, that I liked some of Rob Bell’s stuff.  He said, “Are you serious?”  I said, “Yeah.  I don’t agree with everything [I haven’t ever found a theologian I 100% agree with], but some of his stuff is good.”

“Seriously?” He asked again.  Apparently, he was having a hard time understanding how any good “evangelical” wanna-be pastor could ever embrace anything Rob Bell has written.  A few days later, he gave me a sheet of paper with notes on it, mostly with regard to how to interpret Scripture.  It must have also escaped him that I was very familiar with hermeneutical methods, probably even more familiar that he was, but nevertheless, I accepted the paper and promised to look it over.  I kept my promise, but it was primarily information about a very literal method that I was very already quite familiar with.  As I told him, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”  It always astounds me when people who have very little or no formal theological education want to take on people who have doctorates and are very well-versed in their beliefs and the arguments for them.  I had a professor that I took for the book of Acts that I highly disagreed with who ascribed to some form of modified liberation theology, but he had done his homework and earned his degree and I wasn’t about to disagree with him openly in class.  Ask questions, yes.  Openly debate him…no.  But I digress.

            I think the issue with narrative theology is that while their method is good *as an overall hermeneutic*, they throw the baby out with the bathwater.  It is like a wide-angle camera lens versus a telescopic lens.  Narrative theology and its approach to hermeneutics helps us see the big picture, that God does indeed have a story of redemption that He wants to tell us, the wide-angle lens if you will, but it makes for a very poor telescopic lens.  If you look at every passage closely in the context of narrative theology, you will fail to see that you can systematically see some doctrines in Scripture. You will inevitably get a blurry picture. 

With all due respect to Rob Bell and others, just because the Bible is telling a story does not mean that we cannot learn something concrete in the telling of that story.   I ran across an interesting site that says this very well:

Narrative theology has also been misused when people determine that the narrative does not have an underlying systematic theology, or that its underlying theology cannot be known. In such cases, it is implied that the lessons of narratives can be understood apart from the worldviews of the original writers or           authors of the text itself. Basically, this results in false teaching with some proponents of narrative theology moving straight from story to application and doing away with more reasoned analysis of the Scriptures. But in reality, this can’t be done. Perhaps the most obvious influence of narrative theology is found in the emerging church with its distrust and relatively low regard for systematic theology.

Another point that this article makes (and I am paraphrasing) is that even though loyal followers to systematic theology may cringe at the application of narrative theology, if they do not employ it at some level, they move away from a “more reasoned analysis of the Scriptures.”  Narrative theology has as one of its strengths the belief that there is a unity in the sixty-six books of the Bible and if systematic theologians choose to trumpet a skewed view of one theology presented in a particular area of Scripture at the expense of another passage that might balance that view, they are doing a great disservice.

            In summary, do not throw the baby of the unity of Scripture out with the dirty bathwater of bad hermeneutics.  Use narrative theology, but keep it in its place at a wide angle and do not use the apparent mysteries of some areas of Scriptures as an excuse to not draw a line where Scripture clearly draws a line.