Narrative Theology from an Evangelical Perspective

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Abstract Observation on the many meanings of “narrative” are a commonplace of narratology. And with reason. The variety of disciplines and fields of interest from which commentary on it now rises is striking, as is the diversity of points of view within each discipline and field. The extent to which the various perspectives have or have not taken one another into account makes a good story in itself. “Narrative theology,” a subset of the larger narrative discussion, has the same variety and diversity. With it has come a predictable interest in sorting out its types and models. A current typology is the division of narrative theology into the views of Hans Frei and Paul Ricoeur, “biblical narrative” and “story theology,” “pure narrative” and “impure narrative,” or against the background of larger questions of theological method, the cultural-linguistic versus the experiential-expressivist approaches (also identified as the “post-liberal” and “revisionist” options).1 One of the characteristics of current typology-making-including this one-is the absence of a tradition that has been the mother of narrative sensibility for large sections of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century church. I am referring to what I shall call “evangelical narrative.” One of the ironies of this absence, incidentally, is the prominent role C. S. Lewis, a mentor to many evangelicals, plays in the larger literary discussion of narrative.