In recent years, the paradigm shift from a rationalistic worldview to a world in motion has shifted attention in biblical studies and preaching away from propositional statements to story. Narrative preaching draws on the Scripture as a story and seeks to communicate through the form of a story.
The Importance of Story
Narrative preaching is story-formed preaching—preaching that takes seriously, in method and form, Clark Pinnock’s suggestion that “the essence of the gospel … is the biblically narrated epic story of salvation through Jesus Christ” (Tracking the Maze [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990], 154). Flowing out of the recent trend in biblical studies, theology, and ethics to make narrative their guiding construct, many contemporary preachers have also made narrative their touchstone. As Edmund Steimle, Morris Niedenthal, and Charles Rice stated in their collaborative work on narrative preaching:
We are trying to find that formative image that could both articulate what preaching is and free people to do it. Is there an image adequate to shape the form, content, and style of preaching? If we had to say, in a word or two or in a picture, what preaching is and how it is done well, what would that phrase or picture be? … Let us consider the storyteller.… If we were pressed to say what Christian faith and life are, we could hardly do better than hearing, telling, and living a story. And if asked for a short definition of preaching, could we do better than a shared story? (Preaching the Story [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979], 12-13, 15)
Narrative preaching is an emerging methodology, and the last word on how narrative preaching should be defined is yet to be written.
A better perspective from which to view narrative preaching is to look at the methodologies of some of its leading practitioners. What one learns, as Thomas Long notes, is that narrative preaching gives foremost attention to the “how” of preaching versus other preaching methods, which may evince greater concern with sermonic content or the preacher’s own ethos (The Witness of Preaching [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 36). As Richard L. Eslinger points out in his book A New Hearing: Living Options in Homiletic Method (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), a review of five narrative preachers (Charles Rice, Henry Mitchell, Eugene Lowery, Fred Craddock, and David Buttrick), preachers of this method intend to shape their sermons after the fashion of the gospel, which for them, with the exception of David Buttrick, is nothing less than narrative. For these preachers, the form of the sermon is narrative, not discursive, evocative not rationalistic, dynamic not static, inductive not deductive, and true to the shape of Scripture, not Aristotelian rhetoric or logic. For them, narrative preaching is narrative both in form and in method, utilizing all aspects of narrative technique (plot, character development, and so on) to bring to the listener’s consciousness the interplay between his or her own story and the biblical story.
Critique
Narrative preaching is not without its critics, as the growing literature makes known this method’s implications. Perhaps the most common critique leveled against narrative preaching is its failure to acknowledge the fact that, while the biblical witness is to the redemptive story of God’s dealings with humanity through Christ, Scripture also contains poetry, proverbs, and extended didactic passages. Only David Buttrick, who advocates both the narrative technique in preaching and faithfulness to the biblical form of the passage being preached, deals with this issue. Thomas Long’s critique of narrative preaching deals with the overemphasis on evaluating a sermon’s effectiveness by whether the sermon evoked a religious experience rather than whether it communicated a propositional truth of Scripture. As Long notes, preachers favoring a more rationalistic preaching methodology have a point when they remind us that God’s revelation may not always move us when we want to be moved, but nonetheless, it is God’s revelation (The Witness of Preaching, 40–41).
Narrative preaching, however, has some very practical benefits. First, no other preaching methodology is as intent on forming sermons to the shape of Scripture. Second, narrative preaching integrates concern for the biblical story, the listener’s story (concerns, needs, experiences), and the preacher’s story in a way few other preaching methodologies can or do. Third, narrative preaching is able to evoke the experiential dimension of faith in the listener in a way that rationalistic and cognitive methodologies, such as expositional preaching, cannot. It is not without reason, then, that Jesus “never taught them without a story.”
The Historical Context for Narrative Preaching’s Emergence
The application of narrative preaching moves along two axes: theology and praxis. From a theological perspective, many preachers, such as Thomas Oden, Clark Pinnock, and others, point to the end of the twentieth century as a transition phase between modernity and postmodernity. Whereas the paradigms of modernity were, according to Oden, rationalism, secularism, and radical individualism, the paradigms of the postmodern era are or will be a metaphor, tradition (i.e., shared story), and community (Agenda for Theology [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979], 48-49). The problem this poses for preaching is that the assumptions of the old homiletic worked out against modernity’s background no longer hold true. Richard Eslinger, commenting on the preaching of David Buttrick, notes:
The old rational homiletics is obsolete. “For nearly three hundred years, preaching has been trapped in a rationalist bind,” observes David Buttrick. But the conditions that made for its viability no longer stand. Every dimension of homiletics—biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, language, theology, the liturgical context, and even human consciousness—has changed radically. (A New Hearing, 133)
Whereas modern preaching has depended on reason, logic, and propositional truth, narrative preaching depends on the metaphor, image, and story—qualities more in tune with a postmodern world. The preacher who is sensitive to the shift in consciousness from a modern to a postmodern world will readily welcome the applied benefits of narrative preaching.