What happened to the stories?
I can remember, every Sunday, going to Church Sunday school. This is where we were regaled with tales of heroics, deception and adventure. Tales of God acting in the lives of simple people. Tales of Seas being parted and Giants being felled by simple shepherd boys.
Attempts were made to teach lessons from these stories. These were either simple moral lessons, exemplification of the characters, or out and out allegories. By and large, as was the norm in those days, the biblical historical thelogical context was ignored.
This was the di riguer approach of the day. Biblical Theolgy has fairly recently started filtering down into the "church on the street".
We have thus realised the error of our ways and are at pains to make sure that when we teach the old testament we get it right.
However, I feel that it has resulted in us not teaching the old testament as much as we probably should. This is partly because we are afraid of getting it wrong, and because we do not see intrinsic value in the story itself. What we fail to realise is the importance of "stories" in the life of a young child.
In every culture there is a vast amount of "lore". The kind of stories which are read to children as bed time stories. Cinderella, Goldilocks and the 3 bears etc. These stories play a role in shaping the thinking and world view of the young soul who encounters them.
Old Testament stories are important for this very reason. They reveal the character of God, they give children heroes, people to aspire to. They give them examples of men of faith, and capture their imagination. Rather than fill their heads with Ugly Duckling and Red Riding hood, let's give children God's heroes. Let's tell them the stories of what God has done. Even if our interpretation might be off, trust God to do his work.
I don't think we give children enough credit. After hearing the story of Gideon and the fleece I wasn't about to go out and put a jersey on the ground to see if it would be dry in the morning in order to know what God wants. For a start, my little world sure didn't need to make such big decisions. Children understand the differences between their world and the world of the old testament. They understand that story was a unique event in God's working with his people.
The most powerful way to change someone is to change their thinking. Let's tell them the story of David and Goliath, or the story of Ehud and the Ox goad - possibly even without an explanation - and trust God that he will use those stories to bring our children to himself.
posted by Michael Wiles at 4:05 pm
5 Comments:
The irony is that while the historical contextual method is all the rage with conservative preachers and some lower level theologians, other theologians have become excited about narrative again, and narrative theology is a strongly emerging
approach. While narrative theology does locate all stories within the One Story of God's love for us it refuses to allow stories to be reduced to simple principles or examples of principles.It also allows each story to tell us about God in its own unique way.
Surely if the best way to tell us something was to give us only propisitions then God would have caused the Bible to be written that way.
Thank God He didn't!
Andrew
I'm not familiar with Narrative theology, must look that one up.
How does the Narrative Theology then link up with Biblical Theology? Are they along the same line? Biblical theology does put the story within it's historical context as does the narrative based approach but then it sounds like Narrative Theology would place greater emphasis on the story.
It sounds to me like Narrative Theology is a maturation of Biblical Theology.
I have come slowly to see the Bible as literature - stories. Biblical Theology helped me a lot to understand the point of those stories in the context of the whole - that they actually portray the nature of God in some way, but seeing it as literature was even more helpful.
I know very very little about Theology to be honest. All I know is that when I go to a Bible Study and we study David killing Goliath and the material says to discuss "Goliaths" in your life I can't help but feel they've got the wrong idea. When I read The Brothers Karamazov or Cry, The Beloved Country, I don't put myself in the place of the protagonist, I learn about him, what he feels, what he does - and this has an effect on what I think, feel and do. The same can be said about Moses who profoundly affected me. Or Jesus, or Jeremiah. I can't place myself in the story, but the story affects me - like any powerful story should and like Bible, which is the story above all other stories, should.
And when you start dissecting Psalms to pieces to try and extract some spiritual truth from it you've also missed the point. A Psalm is like a sonnet by Shakespeare or a poem by Keats. It is to be read and pondered in how it touches your heart. Pulling Shakespeare apart like we did in English is counter-productive to actually realising its meaning to you as an individual. The Psalms are poetry endorsed or inspired by God and should be read as such.
I am probably showing my ignorance since I tend to dislike the overcomplication and intellectualisation that goes on in pulpits.
MX
Narrative Theology is to some extent a reaction to Biblical Theology, since it maintains that all stories are part of The One Story, and you don't need to know Greek, ancient customs,and the history of Jerusalem to be able to understand Acts 2.
That story is part of the greater story of which our own stories are a part.
Peter
The tendency which you are describing is IMNSHO one of the inevitabilities of Modernism .
Because truth can sometimes be expressed as a propisition, Modernism triest to express all truth as propisition.
As you have pointed out not only is this sometimes ludicrous but it kills truth by rendering certain texts less coherent.
Modernism assumes that the best form to render every meaning (as if meaning can somehow be seperated from its expression) is in the form of a statement. This results in attempts to decode the history, narrative, metaphor and poetry of the bible into propisitional statements. Anyone engaged in doing this thus regards his end result, achieved by 'REASON' as superior to scripture itself: this is what the passage 'really' means.
However if propisition were the best way to convey that meaning then God would have conveyed it that way.
This tendency subtly elevates 'REASON' to be the arbiter of all meaning, and that is idolatory.
Now it is possible to go to far and disregard reason and propisitional truth altogether. But none of us, raised in Modern, relatively conservative, bibliocentric churches is really going to do that.
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