THE PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE AND BIBLICAL NARRATIVE: STORIES OR HISTORIES OF JESUS?

Abstract

No one Evangelist would have sufficed To tell us of the pains of Jesus Christ, Nor does each tell it as the others do; Nevertheless, what each has said is true … Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Part II sets Ricoeur's narrative theory in the context of contemporary theology. Exegetes and theologians replace poets and historians as Ricoeur's principal conversation partners. Self-understanding and a determination of what is humanly possible are here related to reading the Gospels, for Ricoeur is a philosopher who hearkens to the Christian word. I wager that Ricoeur's narrative theory provides new resources for theology's task of combining a particular historical fate (Jesus' passion) with a universal rational framework (the possibility of freedom). Similarly, Ricoeur's mediation of history and fiction transforms the troublesome dichotomy between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Ricoeur suggests that the indispensability of Jesus for the “Christian possibility” of freedom or “new life” is related to the necessity for the Gospel to be a narrative. But in enlisting the poet as well as the historian to serve the believer, does Ricoeur make Jesus a mere illustration of the Christian possibility rather than its inaugurator? I interpret Ricoeur's philosophy of narrative hope as a “thinking what was left unthought” in existentialist theology.