A Narrative Approach: Will it Preach?

I have a number of concerns with narrative preaching. First, it does not emanate from those churches, seminaries, and theologians that hold to the doctrine of inerrancy and have a high view of preaching and teaching. It tends to emanate from the more liberal and mainline churches with a low view of the Bible and of Jesus.

Second, the call for narrative preaching can indicate a move away from propositional truth in favor of relativism and perspectivism, as if transformation were possible without information.

The trend today is away from propositional truth: “We don’t need propositional truth. We need narrative truth and embodied truth.” Actually, if we’re going to be multi-perspectival, we need all of it.

Propositional truth tells me who God is, who I am, why I’m here, how I’ve fallen short, who Jesus is, and what he has done. I can’t have a good Christology with a finger painting. You need to tell me something. Someone might say, “I’ve read Wittgenstein, and he said that there are limits to language and words.” I understand that. But God has chosen to speak through his Word and the same Holy Spirit that inspired the words to be written illuminates the understanding of the children of God. We’re not stuck in the cul-de-sac of Wittgenstein. The Holy Spirit is the great variable that makes the Word of God known to the people of God. We believe in the miraculous. We’re not just a natural people relying on the three-pound, fallen brain to make revelation clear. We also have God who loves us. And like John Calvin said, God is willing to stoop down and speak baby-talk, so that we would understand who he is and what he’s trying to say.

That doesn’t mean that we are pure modernists who believe that everything is clear as a bell. Paul says that we see in part and we know in part. Deuteronomy says the secret things belong to the Lord. Isaiah says that God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts. The difference is not that we don’t know, it’s that we don’t know apart from faith. That’s our epistemology. We’re not modern or postmodern, we’re Christian! We believe that God reveals, the Holy Spirit illumines, and by faith we believe. That’s a Christian epistemology.

Those who believe in a modern or postmodern epistemology do great damage to the Bible. The modernists are solely about propositional truth and not embodied or narrative truth. The postmodernists tend to be exclusively communal, participatory, narrative, and dialogical, but they miss the propositional nature of the truth. But if you want a multi-perspectival truth, we say you need it all. That means that your theology leads to your doxology, which results in your biography. What you believe (theology) enables you to worship (doxology), and through worshipping, you become like that which you worship (biography). It goes from proposition, to worship, to transformation. You get to know who God is. You worship him. Then you become like that which you love.

A Narrative Approach: Will it Preach? (from 9Marks)
By Mark Driscoll