Review: Telling God’s Story
John W. Wright, Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007)
If you are mainly interested in continuing to preach the way we always have, only better, you should probably avoid this book. John Wright is not willing to allow us to pursue business as usual, at least not without taking a hard look at what “business as usual” actually is. He believes that preaching has been reduced to the “application of an individualistic, therapeutic biblical language to contemporary concerns or disembodied calls to social justice,” which has very little to do with the actual concerns of the Scripture, and that “the church in North America has become adept at translating the Scriptures into the narratives that already shape the lives of believers and nonbelievers alike.” (p. 19)
As the title would suggest, Wright believes the root of the problem, as well as the solution, lies in the stories we tell, and the stories we challenge. The problem is that our preaching is most often a “comedy,” meaning that in stead of exposing the underlying narratives of our culture and contrasting them with the narrative of the Scriptures, we tend to “fuse the horizons,” leaving our hearers comfortable with the status quo. He calls for preaching that embraces “tragedy,” creating a crisis in which hearers must face the fact that the prevailing narratives by which they live their lives are wrong — or at least incompatible with the narrative of Scripture.
A major part of this book traces the way the Biblical narrative has been “eclipsed” in Western culture in general, and North American preaching in particular. It all began in the Enlightenment, when preachers and theologians lost a sense of the Scriptures as a story in and of itself, and began to see them instead as a “source” for history, Christian experience, and theological systems. The Bible stopped being the narrative framework that provided meaning for all of life, by which the church saw itself as incorporated into God’s story. In stead, it became a source for individuals to “induce inward, personal experiences or rational assent.” (p. 52)
The part of his analysis that could ruffle the most feathers is the role he believes the Puritans played in this “eclipsing of the Biblical narrative.” He believes they proclaimed two major stories that conformed more to the narratives of the Enlightenment than the narrative of the Scriptures. First, the “covenant of grace narrative” played to the enlightenment emphasis on the individual. In the “regular sermons” of Puritan churches, the focus was on the path of the individual from sin to salvation to service. This, he believes, made the individual, rather than creation, the context of redemption and the focus of the biblical narrative.
The “federal covenant narrative,” proclaimed more in the Puritans “occasional sermons,” played more to the enlightenment narrative of the nation state. This story identified the Puritans in particular, but ultimately all European colonists in the new world, as the “New Israel,” on an errand in the wilderness in covenant with God. This ultimately resulted in binding religion and patriotism together. Perhaps even more devastating was the impact on ecclesiology. The church was reduced to the “moral conscience” of the nation which had displaced it as the elect people of God.
Many might react to Wright’s attributing such clay feet to our Puritan heroes, but his research is extensive and his reasoning compelling. We should at least be willing to ask ourselves, “Is American Christianity suffering from an exaggerated individualism and an inappropriate nationalism?” If the answer to these questions is “yes,” can we lay the blame solely at the feet of culture? Might our preaching have been complicit? Wright believes it has.
The solution he proposes is a “homiletic of turning.” In this “tragic” homiletic, the flow of the sermon is from a description of “what we have been taught,” to an exposure of the dissonance and error of the prevailing narrative, to a “moving into God’s story.”
I read this book during the same season as Tim Keller’s Preaching. I couldn’t help but notice the similarities of their approaches to addressing underlying cultural narratives that are incompatible with the Scriptures. Both advocate a sympathetic retelling of the prevailing story, a sensitive exposure of its weaknesses, and a move into the Biblical story as the alternative. These two authors come from very different perspectives within the Evangelical spectrum (Keller is Presbyterian, Wright is Nazarene). Both of them, however, see “story” as the front line of our engagement of the culture with the Gospel.
I will leave you with one final quote that summarizes Wright’s plea:
Society at large lives by different interpretive narrative horizons than the church, narrative horizons that are as powerful as they are pervasive. Churches that accommodate these cultural horizons hang tenuously to the faith. The demise of American Christendom allows us to recognize that such enculturization has damaged the ongoing witness of the church as a visible body of Christ in the world. The church’s visible witness lies in its ability to be distinctively Christian, different from the world for the sake of the world, different because we live out of a different story, God’s story, as embedded in the Scriptures. (104)
