Andrew Perriman’s Narrative-Historical Hermeneutic

For some years now Andrew Perriman at his blog and in his books has been forming and re-forming what he calls a “narrative-historical” hermeneutic or approach to interpreting the Bible. His chief concern is to extend an N T Wright-type of approach to read the NT in a fully historical manner rather than stop at the end of the 1^st century a.d.  As he puts it, “What I say is: a narrative theology ought to be able to account for the whole experience of the people of God, not just the beginning, middle, and end of it. We may give some sort of priority to the early biblical sections of the narrative, but the story doesn’t stop with the events of the New Testament—even those future events which are foreseen in the New Testament. We are still part of that story, and so is our future” (https://www.postost.net/2019/03/testing-times-narrative-framework-renewal-western-church?fbclid=IwAR28U5wmrfCodsjrYIXyFUUpiJn-dWG3vUPAz-5QnR6Ej6RNkNB0IRBuiUI). So far as I’m aware Perriman’s suggestive and provocative ideas have received little attention beyond his blog. I am wrong I would like to know so I may look them up.

He proposes understanding narrative as a complex “series of historical tests.” As a story is told, such as that that began with God’s call to Abraham and Sarah, it is shaped, re-shaped, and extended because “it is challenged, threatened, put under pressure, tested. If these tests are not passed, however, the story comes to a grinding halt. There will be no people of Abraham and Sarah to serve as God’s instrument to bless his wayward creatures.

Assuming these tests are passed in some way, shape, or fashion peculiar to the story being told, the story goes on changed, and deepened, and “most importantly, adapted to new historical circumstances. Both aspects determine the shape of the “good news” that emerges at each stage, with each test.”

The first test in this story is about creation and is set against the religious background of the Ancient Near East. Perriman summarizes

“The Atra-hasis myth says that after the creation of the world the lower gods (the Igigi) protested against having to do all the hard work for the high gods (the Anunnaki), and threatened to go on strike. Humans were created as slaves to do the work of the lower gods (“Create primeval man, that he may bear the yoke!”), but they disturbed the peace of the gods with their noise, and the god Enlil, after several failed attempts to solve the problem, decided to destroy humanity in a great flood. The plan was leaked, however, to Atra-hasis, who built a boat to save humanity. The gods accept the situation but measures are put in place to keep the noise levels down: miscarriages, high infant mortality, and a large number of cultic virgins.

“The descendants of Abraham are bearers of a radically different version of that story—essentially a monotheist-ethical retelling that emphasises, on the one hand, the goodness of the one creator God (or the unity of the great God in divine council), who creates humanity in his own image to rule over and manage the earth, and on the other, the defiance and wickedness of humanity. God calls Abraham from the shadow of proto-Babylonian empire to be the beginning of a new creation in microcosm in the Land that he will give to his descendants.?

This test continues on in many different though related ways until the exile. Here we meet the full-scale historical outcome of the people’s disobedience foreshadowed in Adam and Eve’s expulsi0on from the Garden yet still bearing the divine promise of a land to serve as a new creation (Isa.51:1-3; 52:7-10).

The narrow escape by God’s grace brings the story to a new chapter, one dominated by the conquests of Alexander in the late 4th century b.c. and the through-going Hellenization of the region. If the Land as a sign of the presence of the one, true God was at issue in the first test, the question of its governance was at issue in the second. Roman rule of the land is the second test.

This test the people fail. An ill-fated revolt against the empire in the name of God from 66-60 a.d. leads to catastrophe. The city and the temple are destroyed, with horrendous loss of life, and enormous despair. One small group of Jews believed that a prophet from Galilee named Jesus warned against just this judgment and announced another way of being Israel, a narrow path, that offered his life for the new life for the Abrahamic covenant family beyond this crisis.  That God works his purposes out through the suffering of (at least one of) his people is a chief learning of this period.

This redemptive work of Jesus leads his being seated at the right hand of God as judge and world ruler over Israel and also the Greco-Roman world. This is realistic political thought and hope. According to Perriman:

“So the descendants of Abraham pass the second test, but only because the Son sent to the vineyard of Israel was faithful unto death, even death on a Roman cross. This is how YHWH brings down the mighty from their thrones and exalts those of humble estate in their place (cf. Lk. 1:52). Through the faithfulness of Jesus and the imperfect but ultimately faithful witness of his followers, the satanically inspired kingdom of idolatrous pagan Rome is overthrown, and the kingdom of the world becomes the “kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15; cf. 12:10). That was the “good news” (cf. Rev. 14:6-11) that emerged out of the second great historical test of the witness of the people of God.”

The third test occurs with the spread of the gospel into the Hellenistic world with the need to develop of “Christian” worldview, way of life, and a way of being God’s people for life in “Christian” empire. This, according to Perriman, takes us “beyond the prophetic-apocalyptic outlook of the Bible here, so this becomes a different type of exercise in story-telling.”

The necessary and daunting task the church accomplished more or less and with highly ambiguous results. The Jewish narrative about God’s kingdom and the rule of the resurrected Jesus we just sketched was accommodated the Hellenistic story told throughout the empire about the rational God of the philosophers. Perriman concludes: “The doctrine of the Trinity, as I see it, was an intellectually outrageous collapsing of the biblical story into a rational metaphysics, but it was necessary, right and good under the circumstances.”

Here the people pass the test again, though without stellar results. They built Christendom, a 1500 year complex of institutions and history that shaped Europe and beyond (through trade and colonialism) . “At the time it seemed like a good idea. But then it began to be devoured by its own offspring.”

So what do we do now that the Western phenomenon of Christendom no longer carries conviction? This brings us to the people of God confronting what is “probably its most severe test”: to discover a faithful witness to the generative story of this tradition now that it is but a marginal  blip on the secular-humanist map of culture. The existence, and certainly the social usefulness, of the one creator God, whose Son ruled over the nations for 1500 years, is now very much in doubt,” as Perriman sees it.

We must begin with the biblical conviction that the priestly people God has chosen to bear faithful witness to him, God will sustain for the sake of his “glory” (reputation). The faith sustaining this struggle  into the future is the “faith by which we will be justified.”

This article (cited above) which I have excerpted and summarized is the most recent expression of Perriman’s overall approach to interpreting the biblical story. Below I have put forth some of my reflections on Perriman’s work for your consideration.

Reflection

1.       I think his notion that the biblical story does not stop with the close of the biblical era is crucially important. Of course, all Christians agree that the church continues God’s story and that God will bring that story to its intended end. But few have drawn the conclusion from that truth that in the same way the Exodus and Exile and the Hellenizing program unleashed by Alexander the Great fundamentally influenced and set the context for the witness to the biblical story, so too the events from the close of the New Testament to today similarly influence and set the context for witnessing to that story today. This is germinal conviction that allows Perriman to make several other moves.

2.       By reading the New Testament primarily as a witness to the victory and installation of Christ as the Lord of all nations and the establishment of the kingdom of God he is able to read the Constantinian turn in the 4^th century not as an irredeemably faithless turn away from God but rather as an opportunity presented  it by Christ’s victory which the church was not wrong to seize though the way in which it seized that opportunity (largely exercising power in the model of Constantine rather than Christ) is now chief among the reasons many in the West reject or consider Christianity no longer tenable. But according to Perriman’s paradigm it didn’t have to be that way. And who knows what the history of the West might have been had the church embraced this opportunity through the model of Christ’s suffering, sacrificial, servanthood?

3.       But that history went the way it did. And at the end of its run, bereft of a cultural foothold, and heirs of a way of witness compromised with white supremacy, male chauvinism, and materialism it is in many respects a new day for the church to reassess and readdress its way and way of life in world already both inoculated against and experience resistant to what it knows as Christian faith. This is the bad news – good news of the context in which ministry and theology must be done today.

4.       Perriman’s approach opens the way to read the gospel texts about the end coming within the present generation and the like in a natural way as referring to the coming and destructive  conflagration with Rome in 66-70 a.d. rather than the absolute end of time (which Jews had no concept of anyway). In the longer range, Perriman understands the apostolic message of God’s victory over the nations, prominent in the preaching in Acts, to have its farthest horizon in the 4^th century when Rome, itself the acknowledged Lord of the world, took on Christian faith and in so doing acknowledged Israel’s God as its own. Only by way of analogy and pattern are scenarios of a further and final end envisioned and imagined.