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"If experience has an intrinsically narrative quality about it, then the question of the relation between experience and narrative form is of paramount importance for theology. For example, is the reality of redemption best described theologically by discursive argument or by some form of narrative?"

A Bibliographical Critique
By George W. Stroup, III

RECENTLY a number of theological articles and books have appeared under the rubric of "narrative" or "story." Whether the topic proves to be yet another fad in theological discussion remains to be seen, but there are reasons for withholding judgment, not the least of which is that the discussion returns theology from its recent wandering in the "far country" to its proper home in the biblical text. Although much of the material that has appeared so far might constitute evidence for a negative judgment on the theological usefulness of narrative, some of the more interesting attempts to use narrative theologically suggest new answers to the perennial questions: "What does theology have to do with experience?" "In what sense is the Bible authoritative?" "How does a historical document such as the Bible speak to contemporary men and women?" "Is there any relation between the life, language, and doctrines of Christian faith and the secular world in which we live?"

The theme "theology as narrative" has been used for a bewildering variety of purposes, but for the sake of discussion I will divide the literature into three areas: (1) narrative as "religious" autobiography and biography; (2) narrative as a formal quality of human experience; and (3) narrative as the primary genre in Christian Scripture. After reviewing some of the literature, I want to raise a few questions about the future of narrative as a systematic principle in theology.

I

Much of the discussion of the usefulness of narrative in theology stems from H. Richard Niebuhr's classic book, The Meaning of

George W. Stroup, III, is Assistant Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Rice, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and was an Assistant Professor at the University of the South at Sewanee. Dr. Stroup is presently working on a study of story in theology which he hopes to publish under the title Understanding the Christian Story.

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Revelation.¹ By means of the theme "the story of our life," Niebuhr described how personal identity (what he called "internal history") is altered by an individual's encounter with the story of the Christian community. In the past ten years, the motif of "story" has been developed theologically in two separate but parallel directions: first, for the purpose of religious autobiography, and, secondly, as a means for describing how the Christian faith became a part of the lives of certain "exemplary" individuals, what might be described as a contemporary form of hagiography.

Examples of the development of narrative as religious autobiography are Sam Keen's To a Dancing God, Harvey Cox's The Seduction of the Spirit, Michael Novak's Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove, and John Dunne's A Search for God in Time and Memory.²

All of these proposals share three basic defects. At best they offer a vague description of "story," and then use it as an excuse, rather than as a systematic principle, for the discussion of other themes. Secondly, they ignore the hermencutical question: How diverse and sometimes contradictory standpoints in life are linked in one coherent narrative? Nor do they tell us what hermeneutical principles are at work in the formation of an autobiography.³ Thirdly, they do not identify "autobiography" as a literary genre, and they do not acknowledge the difficult philosophical issues involved in the use of autobiography.⁴ These defects have fueled the widespread suspicion that "story" is only another theological fad, another admission by contemporary theology that it has nothing of significance to say, that theologians cannot "do" theology but can only talk about themselves.

The other path, running parallel to the first, is the theological

¹ H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
² Sam Keen, To a Dancing God (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), especially pp. 52-105; Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), especially pp. 9-111: Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove, (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), especially Chapter Two, "Autobiography and Story," pp. 44-87; John Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1967). Also relevant are Sam Keen and Anne Fox, Telling Your Story (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1973); Novak's attempt to apply narrative to political theory, "Story" in Politics (New York: The Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1970, pp. 9-50; Dunne's other books, The Way of All the Earth (New York: Macmillan, 1972) and Time and Myth (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1973).
³ By "hermeneutic" I do not mean the principles of textual interpretation, but the more inclusive task of describing the process of understanding, a process that must take account of the fact that it occurs within the relativities of history.
⁴ Helpful studies of autobiography in literary criticism are Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); James Olney, Metaphors of Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Francis R. Hart, "Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography," New Literary History, Vol. I (Spring, 1970), pp. 485 511. An interesting treatment of Augustine is David Burell's article, "Reading The Confessions of Augustine: An Exercise in Theological Understanding," Journal of Religion, Vol. 50 (October, 1970), pp. 327-351. For a discussion of intersubjectivc time and memory see William Earle's The Autobiographical Consciousness (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp. 125-174.

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examination of the lives of others, what James McClendon calls "biographical theology."⁵ McClendon describes the proper task of theology as the study of how individuals and communities embody those "convictions" that are at the core of the Christian faith. In order to examine those convictions as lived realities rather than as mere propositions, theology "must be at least biography." As such, the object of theological reflection is the embodiment of the convictions of the Christian community in "singular or striking lives."⁶ To his credit, McClendon does examine specific biographies, and he does attempt a brief explanation of how we should understand the relation between "convictions" and biography. Although his description of this process leaves much to the imagination, at least he recognizes the need to offer some form of hermeneutic as a basis for biographical theology.

There have been a number of other attempts to work with the theological dimensions of "story" which have not concentrated on autobiography or biography.⁷ Two recent examples are Robert Jenson's Story and Promise and Robert Roth's Story and Reality.⁸ Jenson's book is an introduction to Christian theology which does not explicitly discuss "story" but assumes that the gospel is a form Of Story. Roth argues that story provides a "sign and key" to reality, but he, too, fails to tell us what a story is.

II

In the last chapter of his book, McClendon lists several questions that must be answered in the future by biographical theology. The first is whether narrative or story is merely one way of doing theology, or whether it is "a means of expression uniquely suited to theology or at least to Christian theology."⁹ That question suggests a more basic one which McClendon does not ask. "Is there something intrinsic to the structure of human experience that makes narrative (whatever that is) the most appropriate, if not necessary, form of expression?"

In an important article, Stephan Crites proposes that "the formal

⁵ James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Biography as Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974).
⁶ Ibid., p. 37. In an appendix, McClendon distinguishes what he means by hagiography from its traditional Roman Catholic form.
⁷ For example, see Robert McAfee Brown, "Story and Theology," in Philosophy of Religion and Theology: 1974 Proceedings of the American Academy of Religion, edited by James Wm. McClendon, Jr. (Missoula, Montana: Scholars' Press, 1974), pp. 55-72; and Charles E. Winquist, "The Act of Storytelling and the Self's Homecoming," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. XLII (March, 1974), pp. 101-113.
⁸ Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), and Robert P. Roth, Story and Reality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973).
⁹ McClendon, Biography as Theology, p. 188. McClendon mentions Dilthey only twice (pp. 18 1-2, 195), but clearly Dilthey's discussion of the relation between Erlebnis, biography, and autobiography deserves careful attention. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927), Vol. VII , especially Part III, pp. 191-251. A good introduction to Dilthey is Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 98-123.

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quality of experience through time is inherently narrative."¹⁰ What Crites calls "the tensed unity" of the past, present, and future are found in every moment and are the "preconditions" for experience. Consequently, only narrative can unify temporal experience and -contain the tensions, the surprises, the disappointments and reversals and achievements of actual, temporal experience."¹¹ If experience has an intrinsically narrative quality about it, then the question of the relation between experience and narrative form is of paramount importance for theology. For example, is the reality of redemption best described theologically by discursive argument or by some form of narrative?

The relation between narrative and experience is further complicated by the question of the relation of both to history. It might be argued, for example, that "Man is by nature historical."¹² If an intrinsic feature of human experience is its narrative quality, and if experience is bounded by the horizon of history, then the object of understanding in human experience may take the form of a historical narrative. Some philosophers of history have argued precisely that point, that history necessarily assumes the form of narrative. History, contends W. B. Gallic, "is a species of the genus Story," and narrative "is the form that expresses what is basic to and characteristic of historical understanding."¹³ There is also considerable evidence from other quarters that narrative may be intrinsic to our perception of experience. A number of social scientists have suggested that some form of narrative is the appropriate mode for recounting experience.¹⁴

For the theologian, the issue here is whether those narratives that express human experience, particularly "religious experience," are necessarily historical, or whether, as some believe, their significance is

¹⁰ Stephen Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. XXXIX (September, 197 1), p. 291. Also see Crites' article, "Myth, Story, History," in Parable, Myth and Language (Cambridge, Mass.: The Church Society for College Work, 1968), pp. 66-73.
¹¹ Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," p. 306.
¹² Wolfhart Pannenberg, What Is Man? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), p. 139. Also see Pannenberg's essays on the relation between history and hermeneutics in Basic Questions in Theology, Volume One (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), especially essays 2-5. Of particular interest is Pannenberg's interpretation of Gadamer in the essay "Hermeneutic and Universal History," pp. 96-136.
¹³ W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, second edition (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p. 66. The question of the relation between narrative and history has been vigorously disputed by historians and philosophers of history. In addition to Gallie, Arthur C. Danto and Morton G. White also have argued that history is fundamentally narrative. See Danto, Analytic Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), and White, The Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). A dissenting view is that of Maurice Mandelbaum, "A Note on History as Narrative," History and Theory, Vol. 6 (1967), pp.413-419.
¹⁴ For example, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), especially Part V, "Action"; Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963), especially Chapter 3, "Excursus: Alternation and Biography (Or: How to Acquire a Prefabricated Past)," pp. 54-65; Erik Erickson, Childhood and Society, second edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), especially Chapter 7, "Eight Ages of Man," pp. 247 274.

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not their historicity but the reality they depict. Furthermore, it has occurred to some theologians that historical criteria may not be the most appropriate for evaluating every narrative, and that the "truth" of a narrative is not necessarily its historicity. In his article, "Narrative Theology," Harald Weinrich argues a similar point:

There is no particularly obvious reason why theologians should share the historian's fixation on the truth of a story. A factual basis is not a necessary condition for a story to say something to us or move us. Fictional stories can also produce this effect.¹⁵

Of course fictional stories can "move us," but in what sense, if any, is Christian narrative "fictional"? This question becomes especially pertinent when we turn to the written texts of the Christian community. It may be that this question of the relation between narrative, experience, and history can be answered fully only by a structural analysis of narrative and a phenomenological description of storytelling.¹⁶ Obviously there is no consensus on this issue, and important arguments against this emphasis on narrative continue to appear.¹⁷ In any case, before we can evaluate autobiography and biography as theological narrative, we must first determine whether narrative is not only intrinsic to our perception of experience but is also a part of the structure that experience presents to us.

III

The use of narrative has opened new possibilities for an appreciation of the richness and authority of Scripture. The combined effect of form and redaction criticism has been to raise the question of the relation between tile text as a whole and the different genre within the text. One of the most important discussions of the different genre in the Bible is Amos Wilder's The Language of the Gospel. He isolates and examines important features in each literary form and concludes that narrative "is uniquely important in Christianity."¹⁸ He uses story as a synonym for narrative and describes both "the anecdotes about Jesus" and the New Testament parables as "storytypes." Recently,

¹⁵ Harald Weinrich, "Narrative Theology" in The Crisis of Religious Language, edited by Johann Baptist Metz and Jean-Pierre Jossua (New York: Herder and Herder, 1973), p. 55. See also the article by Johann Baptist Metz, "A Short Apology of Narrative," in the same volume, pp. 84-96.
¹⁶ Weinrich suggests a "theory of stories" could be based on the work of Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Karlheinz Stierle. Ibid., p. 55, fn. 13. A good introduction to the possible use of structuralism is Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
¹⁷ For example, see Ted L. Estess, "The Inerarrable Contraption: Reflections on the Metaphor of Story," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. XLII (September, 1974), pp. 415-434. Estess argues that the use of story may "undermine the attitude of wonder toward the relatively chaotic flow of life experiences," and that it threatens to force life to imitate literature rather than allowing literature to imitate life. Of course some Christian theologians believe that the Bible demands that life should attempt to "imitate" the text.
¹⁸ Amos Wilder, The Language of the Gospel: Early Christian Rhetoric (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), P. 64. Also see Wilder's The New Voice (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), especially pp. 19-122.

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however, the discussion of biblical narrative has split into two rival camps: those who hold that the gospel or the structural frame of Scripture is the most important mode of narrative, and those who believe that the parable is the distinctive narrative form.

Those who advocate the primacy of parabolic narrative argue that the parables reveal the metaphoric structure of Christian faith, and that the parable "is the mode of language most appropriate to the incarnation."¹⁹ They insist that the New Testament parables are not allegories, not stories with a moral, but metaphors "which rupture the grip of tradition on man's apprehension of the world in order to permit a glimpse of another world which is not really a different but a strangely familiar world."²⁰ Clearly, though, there are a number of problems with this proposal. Many of those who champion the cause of parable also march under the banner of the New Hermeneutic and interpret the metaphorical quality of parable in term of Heidegger's description of the disclosive power of language.²¹ Surely by now, however, we have learned that Heidegger's hypostatization of word has little to offer Christian theology. Secondly, and more importantly, the parables are not "self-contained." Apart from their setting in the narrative structure of the larger genre "Gospel," the parables are susceptible to whatever strong winds of interpretation happen to be blowing at the moment. Thirdly, taken by themselves the parables are a-historical, and regardless of the exact nature of its relation to history, biblical narrative is not a-historical.

Other New Testament scholars and theologians have focused attention on the Gospel as the most important mode of biblical narrative. Whether the Gospel is a unique literary genre and what precisely are its generic features are difficult questions that have not yet been successfully answered. But that does not alter the significance of the Gospel as a narrative form, "for whether or not it is 'the proper' form of the Gospel, it is the form of the books called Gospels, and we must now gain a better understanding of this particular kind of narrative."²² Work on Mark's Gospel by Norman Perrin, Theodore Weeden, and others has resulted in the conviction that the Gospel as a literary genre "is the unique product of early Christianity and as such must be

¹⁹ Gerhard Ebeling, Emil Fuchs, Robert Funk, and Sallie TeSelle all take the party line on this question. See Robert Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and the Word of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 130, and Funk's article, "Myth and the Literal Non-Literal," in Parable, Myth, and Language (Cambridge, Mass.: The Church Society for College Work, 1968), pp. 57-65. TeSelle's view is summarized in an article appearing under the title, "Parable, Metaphor, and Theology" in Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Vol. XLlI (December, 1974), pp. 630-645.
²⁰ Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and the Word of God, p. 158. See also Dan O. Via, The Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967).
²¹ Although Ebeling, Fuchs, and Funk can be described as standard bearers of the "New Hermeneutic," it is not yet clear that TeSelle belongs in the same camp.
²² William A. Beardslee, Literary Criticism of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), p. 14.

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held to be characteristic of a distinctive element in early Christian faith."²³

One important reason for this renewed interest in biblical narrative has been the enormous influence of Eric Auerbach's Mimesis on textual critics and theologians.²⁴ The most important recent appropriation of Auerbach has been Hans Frei's brilliant examination of the demise of the realistic reading of biblical narrative in eighteenth and nineteenth century hermeneutics.²⁵ Frei is not concerned about the question of the primacy of the Gospel as a narrative form but with the realism of the text. From the perspective of its realism, the narrative is not history, but what Frei describes obscurely as "history-like." The demise of this reading of the text occurred when a distinction was drawn between its literal sense and the question of its historical referent. Once meaning was separated from reference it was no longer possible to read the text realistically. In a more recent book, The Identify of Jesus Christ, Frei attempts, by means of a complex analysis of "identity description," to put Humpty Dumpty together again.²⁶ One cannot help but wonder, though, whether Frei's two models of identity description are the result of a realistic reading of the text or whether they have been imported into the text.

Similar investigations in the field of "canonical criticism" by James Sanders and Brevard Childs have raised questions concerning the form of Old Testament narrative and its function in relation to the New Testament. The Torah, as Sanders describes it, is not a law code but "essentially a story".²⁷ When read as a narrative, and particularly as the narrative of the Christian church, Childs argues that the historical-critical approach to the Old Testament provides only a limited understanding of the text. Rather than concentrating on the historical

²³ Norman Perrin, What Is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), p. 75. Also see Perrin's articles, "The Literary Gattung 'Gospel'-Some Observations," Expository Times, Vol. LXXXII (October, 1970), pp. 4-7, and "Toward an Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark," in Christology and a Modern Pilgrimage: A Discussion with Norman Perrin, edited by Hans Dieter Betz (Missoula, Montana: Scholars' Press, 1971), and Theodore J. Weeden, Mark-Traditions in Conflict (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).
²⁴ Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). Particularly interesting is Auerbach's treatment of Genesis 22 in Chapter 1, and his discussion in Chapter 2 of Mark's description of Peter's denial of Jesus.
²⁵ Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). For Frei, biblical narrative is "realistic" in the sense that its subject matter is inseparable from what the narrative depicts and "subject and social setting belong together, and characters and external circumstances fitly render each other." Ibid., p. 13.
²⁶ Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). Frei develops similar themes in an article, "Theological Reflections on the Accounts of Jesus' Death and Resurrection," The Christian Scholar, Vol. 50 (1967), pp. 263-306. There is considerable ambiguity in the relationship between Frei's historical, descriptive work, The Eclipse, and his constructive proposal in his most recent book. I believe the relationship between the two is implied in a lecture Frei has delivered on several occasions, but, unfortunately, has not yet published, "Karl Barth and the Realistic Interpretation of Narrative."
²⁷ James Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), p. 4.

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development of the text, the reader should first attend to the "shape" of the canon. Read in this manner the shape of the canon becomes the hermeneutical principle for a proper understanding of the text.²⁸

IV

The articles and books I have mentioned only scratch the surface of a remarkable volume of literature that has appeared in the past few years. As is always the case with attempts to move in new directions, the theological appropriation of narrative has not been easy, and at least initially has raised as many questions as it has answered. The following are a few of the questions that future work on theological narrative must attempt to answer.

(1) What is a narrative or a story? Both themes, "narrative" and -story," are elusive and difficult to identify as precise genre, but before the discussion of the usefulness of narrative in theology can proceed an attempt must be made to determine some of the generic features of narrative. For a number of reasons that task is extraordinarily difficult. It is not always clear whether narrative refers to any literary form ordered by a temporal sequence or to a particular form. Usually one gets the impression that a particular form of narrative is the object of discussion (autobiography, biography, parable, realistic narrative, saga, chronicle, etc.), but more often than not the precise features of the form are not specified. Consequently, theological discussions of narrative often lack precision and appear fuzzy. However, help is at hand. Both literary criticism and studies in the philosophy of history offer important contributions to the discussion. The latter, especially the work of Gallie, Danto, and White, may suggest new answers to questions concerning the logical structure of narrative and the relation between narrative and temporal experience. Literary criticism may provide formal criteria for a more exact determination of the nature of narrative.²⁹

(2) What kind of narrative is biblical narrative? Is it "realistic," as

²⁸ Brevard Childs, "The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church," Concordia Monthly Quarterly, Vol. 43 (December, 1972), pp. 709-722. For a different approach, see Bernhard W. Anderson, "The Contemporaneity of the Bible," The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Vol. LXII (Summer, 1969), pp. 38-50.
²⁹ There is a wealth of material here. Particularly helpful are Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966); Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, Third edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1966); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Warner Berthoff, "Fiction, History, Myth: Notes Toward the Discrimination of Narrative Forms," The Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 263-287.

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Auerbach and Frei insist, or is it some form of historical account, or parabolic metaphor? Implicit in this question is a prior one. Which narrative is the biblical narrative or story? There are a number of narratives in the Bible-J's story, P's, those of the prophets, Mark's, Paul's, etc. Does the term "biblical story" refer to one of these or to the sum of them, what might be called the story of the covenant? If the latter, then the biblical story is a large canopy stretching from Genesis to Revelation. But the problem with this proposal is that biblical narrative no longer refers to the text or to some portion of the text (for example, the Heilsgeschichte), but to something in addition to the text, a kind of supra-narrative.

A related problem concerns the interpretation of those genre in the Bible that are clearly non-narrative, for example, Wisdom literature, some of the prophetic material, and the poems, hymns, and parts of the letters in the New Testament. What role do they play in relation to biblical narrative? One solution would be to argue that these genre provide the concepts (such as "glory of God," "justification," "reconciliation") necessary for a proper reading of the text, and in turn are unintelligible apart from their setting in the larger narrative.

The problem is further complicated by the problematic relation between the text's narrative form and the event depicted by it. Is parable the mode of discourse "most appropriate to the incarnation," or does the text's depiction of the incarnation imply a form of narrative more conducive to historical truth claims? Finally, in what sense can biblical narrative be called "history," or is it, as Frei argues, not history but "history-like?"

(3) My division of the literature on "theology as narrative" into three strata is not entirely arbitrary. Is it possible that one form of narrative or a similar formal mode of narrative can be applied to theological interpretations of autobiography and biography, to a description of a mode of perception intrinsic to experience, and to the kinds of narrative we read in Scripture? If it is possible to determine the formal features of this kind of narrative, is this narrative appropriate to the "story of the covenant" and the reality of the incarnation?

(4)In too many instances, those theologians who have attempted to develop a concept of narrative have avoided the unavoidable-the question of how narrative functions hermeneutically. The urgency of the hermeneutical question is twofold. On the one hand, it is incumbent on those who insist that narrative is the primary genre in the biblical text to describe hermeneutically what it means to "understand" the text. If it is the case that a critical understanding of the text from the perspective of form-redaction criticism and the history of re-

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ligions is distinct from an understanding of the text as text, then the question of the relation between these two forms of "understanding" must be answered carefully. Secondly, if there are formal parallels between these three strata of narrative, is it possible to describe hermeneutically how one moves from one level of narrative to the next? How does biblical narrative alter and transform the personal-identity narratives of individuals and communities? It is not sufficient to assert simply that biblical narrative has this remarkable kind of power. A successful and compelling appropriation of narrative by theology demands a description of "the hermeneutics of Christian narrative."

V

Although there are a number of serious difficulties in the future use of narrative by theology, it is also apparent that the theme opens up new vistas to old and tired questions.

By no means the least of these is the new conversation that narrative opens for the fields of biblical studies and doctrinal theology. A hermeneutic of Christian narrative must attend to the biblical text, for in some form Christian narrative is either rooted in or reflects the narrative of Scripture. Biblical studies can provide essential information concerning the form, structure, and function of the text. Then it is the task of theology to demonstrate the relationship between biblical narrative, the formal doctrines of the Christian tradition, and the lived experience of individuals and communities. New developments in canonical criticism and the study of Gospel as a literary genre provide a significant basis for discussion between biblical studies and theology, who, like Jacob and Esau, have too long suffered estrangement.

Secondly, the theological appropriation of narrative may provide a new understanding of the sense in which the biblical text is "authoritative." Admittedly, this use of narrative raises difficult questions, but it may be that the text's true authority is not that it refers to historical events or that it preserves eternal truths; rather, its authority may be that of the world it portrays and the reality it depicts.

Thirdly, narrative may suggest a new understanding of the relation between the doctrines of the Christian faith, Scripture, and experience. For example, it may be that the significance of the doctrine of justification is not exhausted by an exegesis of Galatians, or a study of the historical development of the doctrine in Christian faith, but finally rests on the learned ability of the individual and the community to identify the reality of justification in the life of the Christian community, in the lives of others, and in one's own personal life. By no means does that detract from the important tasks of exegesis, historical study, and the examination of the systematic relation between justification and the other doctrines of the faith, but it does suggest that an equally important "systematic" question is that of the relation between theology, the church's Scripture, and the raw data of

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experience. It may be that an appropriation of narrative as a systematic principle offers theology a way out of the ghetto in which it has been languishing in recent years.

That remains to be seen. As we have noted, serious obstacles first must be overcome, but the present state of the discipline of systematic theology in theological seminaries and in the church demands that the attempt be made. A theology that claims to serve the church cannot afford to turn away from an investigation of the usefulness of narrative.