Guidelines for preaching: first get the biblical narrative more or less right
Wed, 07/01/2015 - 16:23
Goaded by a comment
to the effect that my Christmas story “doesn’t preach as well” as
the traditional sentimentalized God-in-a-manger version, I want to try to
develop in a few posts some thoughts about preaching from a
narrative-historical perspective. The basic problem is this: the more we
confine the biblical narrative and its associated theology to its own
historical context, the less direct relevance it has for the modern reader or
congregation.
Usually the historical distance has been overcome by
reducing the complex narrative of scripture to a universal argument about God
and humanity and allegorizing as much of the detail as possible. The basic
error of interpretation made by modern evangelicalism is to think that the
story of scripture can be translated into a sequence of theological abstractions—creation,
fall, redemption, final judgment—which then provides the frame for every
personal story: we are sinners in need of Christ’s atoning death if we are to
escape eternal death or worse.
This allows us to place ourselves in the biblical story,
but at a cost: we have to read scripture as something other than what it really
is; and we forfeit the ability to make sense of our own historical
circumstances in the way that scripture makes sense of the historical
experience of Israel.
The narrative-historical approach, by
contrast, affirms what should really be obvious—that the Bible gives us the
troubled history of a people, running from Abraham through to the crisis of the
New Testament period and whatever future is envisaged beyond that. A central
task of biblical preaching and related activities is simply to tell that story, not as theology dressed
up as narrative but as theologically interpreted history.
We relate to that history now primarily on the basis of
the continuation of the narrative. Scripture is meaningful for us, and
formative for the church, because we are part of the same story—it is our
story. More needs to be said about this, clearly. Here I simply want to outline
the story again. More or less this argument is set out in my book Re:
Mission: Biblical Mission for the Post-Biblical Church (see below).
God is the creator before anything else.
The people of God was brought into existence in Abraham
to be a new-creation-in-microcosm in the midst of
nations, cultures, and civilizations which do not know God, which foolishly
worship creatures rather than the creator. That gives us the fundamental raison
d’être even for the church today.
Almost everything else in scripture is the story of the
historical existence of this new creation people. What we call “theology” is a
form of reflection on the historical narrative.
The story begins in the shadow of the tower of Babel, and
its course is mostly shaped by Israel’s traumatic relationship with the great
powers of the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean—the Egyptians, the Assyrians,
the Babylonians, the Medes, the Greeks, and lastly the Romans.
Reflection on this historical experience gave rise to
something like the following theological narrative: 1) Israel fails to
keep the Law; 2) God punishes Israel by the agency of an imperial power; 3) God
restores his people out of faithfulness to his promises; 4) God will judge and
rule over the nations.
In scripture the final iteration of this pattern during
the period of Rome’s ascendancy is decisive. It will culminate in a final
judgment on pagan empire and the establishment of God’s rule over the nations.
It is essentially the story of how the kingdom of God comes about.
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