In an intriguing and ambitious book, Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination, Colin Greene (the book is written with Martin Robinson) argues that ‘the primary way the Bible was understood up until the modern period was as a unified narrative that narrates the identity of its primary agents and tells the story of God’s interaction with the cosmos’ (101). In a post-Christendom and now post-postmodern context, for which the authors use the rather opaque term ‘metavista’, the church needs to learn again ‘how to indwell this story and be fundamentally transformed by its perspicacity’.

This argument about narrative seems to me to be esssentially correct. It is backed up, moreover, by a careful analysis of the breakdown of the Christendom paradigm, the impact of postmodernism, and the cautious emergence of a new paradigm. I’m not persuaded that Christendom was as severely vitiated as Greene’s polemic suggests, but I find convincing his general argument that ‘the church requires a new "fiduciary framework" that abandons erroneous Enlightenment categories of certitude and Christendom models of power’. He continues:

The church is being called to reimagine itself, to find a way to articulate its central defining story among the "metavista" refugees who no longer believe that the church ecumenical and catholic today is being sustained by a credible vision of the true, the good and the beautiful. Where are the contemporary prophets, artists and storytellers who can retell our defining story with vigor, passion and persuasiveness? (53-54)

Post-postmodern narrative theology

Greene suggests that the understanding of the Bible as a unified narrative goes back in the modern era to Karl Barth’s classification of the early Genesis stories as ‘saga’. It is Erich Auerbach, however, who provided the substantial impetus for a narrative theology, with the argument - as Greene summarizes it - that the biblical story ‘takes over all other stories and incorporates their limited schemas into its own vision of universal history’ (103). These insights were developed by Hans Frei in The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: scripture is an all-encompassing story about reality, to the extent that ‘all other stories must be inscribed into the biblical story, rather than the biblical story into any of them. Insofar as we allow the biblical story to become our story, it overcomes our reality.’

This imperializing narrative naturally came into conflict with the equally overweening narrative of modernity. Modernity won the fight, and scripture was reduced to ‘a series of isolated micro-narratives and pericopes with no thematic tension and no eschatological resolution’. Postmodernity sought to deconstruct the victorious modern narrative, claiming that it is as much the product of ‘contested micro-narratives’ as the Christendom narrative whose place it usurped. Greene’s contention is then that the post-postmodern church is ‘seeking to re-engage with the textual world of the Bible and reimagine the community that reads such texts’ (104).

But how does the Bible include the history of the ‘other’ without again becoming an imperializing text? The answer is to be found, somewhat unexpectedly, in the much maligned allegorizing method of the medieval exegesis, which becomes in Frei’s analysis a method of figuration by which scripture both acquires internal coherence and extends its narrative reach to assimilate extra-biblical stories into its world of meaning. So, for example, the writers of the New Testament create a unified narrative by interpreting new circumstances by means of typologies drawn from the Jewish scriptures: Jesus is the new Adam, the Son of man, Melchizedek, high priest, etc. More importantly, the story about Christ reconfigures the narrative as a whole, bringing unity to a ‘multitude of narratives’.

Frei also understood the biblical texts to be ‘realistic narratives’: ‘By this he meant that within the biblical texts the identity of an agent was revealed through the combination of contingency, character, intention and circumstance’ (107). This has implications not least for how we understand Jesus:

Biblical characters are not stereotypical or literary types such as tragic heroes; they are active agents and therefore unique irreplaceable persons who, like all people, exhibit an "intentional-action" pattern. What they do is what they are, embroiled as they also are in the plot that is unfolding behind, within and in front of them. "Thus the identity of Jesus is given by his intention to enact the good of men on their behalf in obedience to God."

Having sketched the development of a modern narrative theology in this way, Greene then asks how we are now, as readers of the text or as Jesus’ disciples, to ‘indwell the story and so find ourselves within the world that the text opens up before us’ (110). The question is a crucial one, which has been highlighted already - and in a rather more acute fashion, I think - by my attempt to develop a consistent narrative-historical reading of the New Testament. The more we realize that the New Testament tells a historically and politically contextualized story, the harder it becomes to feel that the church today has any real connection to it.

Narrative and the historical-critical project

Greene does not entirely dismiss the historical-critical reading of the New Testament and, indeed, gives some consideration to Wright’s ‘five-act drama’ model. But he thinks that the problem with this approach is that ‘it remains fundamentally a historical project and not a literary narrative description of a multidimensional story’. It is possible for the reader to enter imaginatively into the ‘narratival worldviews’ of the text, but ‘they remain projects of the past and the story and its various subplots cannot be performed, lived or enacted again’.

This seems to me, however, to beg the question: Why should we suppose that the biblical story has this multidimensional, literary character, that it is meant to be re-enacted? What is the hermeneutical basis for this claim? It cannot lie simply in the historical character of the text: the Bible does not itself expressly prescribe or authorize a subsequent indwelling of the narrative in the way that Greene appears to recommend. He argues that the essential difference between history and narrative is that narrative ‘allows the contemporary reader to indwell the whole story, because each episode of the story is recapitulated, expropriated and reconfigured in the event of the reading and in the collision of the narrative with the context of the reader’ (110-111). But on what basis do we choose to designate scripture as narrative in this sense rather than as history?

There is the danger, moreover, that the expropriation of the narrative in the interests of contemporary relevance will eclipse (to reverse Frei’s metaphor) or distort the historical reading - as indeed has happened in countless ways throughout the history of interpretation. If you are retelling the story analogically in order to assimilate other stories, you are no longer telling the biblical story as such: some degree of abstraction has inevitably taken place, the text has been rewritten as metaphor, and its historical particularity has been left behind.

Greene appears rather to contradict himself at this point. He wants to argue, on the one hand, that the biblical story ‘develops and reaches out to others not by way of universal significance but by way of covenant and election’ - that is, by way of a particular narrative about the God who dwells with his people. On the other hand, taking his cue from Gadamer, he insists, that ‘the world of the text is loosed from the confines and restrictions of history as it engages our text, our world, our culture, our identity…’. But to be ‘loosed’ from history is to be loosed precisely from the particularity of the narrative - just as the modern evangelical mythology of personal salvation took on a life of its own largely detached from the original historical context of the Gospel stories.

From history to narrative and back again

The challenge, therefore, is to determine how we may live in the present as the people of God in continuity with a critically-formed biblical narrative. The solution that Greene proposes entails, in effect, a shift from history to narrative, so that once the historians have exposed and grasped the essential plot (112), history can be safely set aside and a more creative literary methodology adopted. This seems to me to be a mistake, for two main reasons:

i) It is likely to undermine the essential historical character of the community, which will find itself anchored in scripture as metaphor rather than in scripture as historical text. I would argue that what principally ensures the continuing relevance of scripture is not the text itself but the historical existence of the people that defines itself with reference to the text. We are in the first place a people that has been called into being by God, which interprets its existence through the production, transmission and interpretation of texts, not a people that must conform itself to a pre-existing text. We connect with the defining and transformative moments in the story in the first place along a diachronic or historical axis: so I would argue that the Son of man story, for example, is necessarily distant from us, situated in an ancient plot line, but that we are bound to it by election and covenant.

ii) It will have the tendency of discouraging or marginalizing the work of critical interpretation. A hermeneutic that aims to liberate and reconfigure the original story will have the converse outcome: the historical narrative will become ensnared in the interpretive present; it will be subjected to the limited perspective of the interpreter; it will be subordinated to a culturally conditioned missional agenda.

This is not to say that the analogical or figurative re-reading of scripture is wrong or unusable. It is certainly the case that types and images and narratives are expropriated intratextually in order to make sense of new circumstances; and there is no reason why the church should not continue this process. But this is not done - and should not be done - at the expense of the historicality of the texts. It is always into the critically interpreted historical narrative that we reach in search of the analogical means of redescribing our own context. We may wish to say that the story about Jesus reconfigures the entire narrative, but that reconfiguration does not negate or render irrelevant the historical condition of the story of Israel in transition.