IT’S A STORY, FOLKS [10-6-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of A Narrative Theologian—IT’S A STORY, FOLKS [10-6-25]

 

The Bible is not God’s World Book of Facts, or God’s Book of Science History, or God’s Book of Helpful Hints for Easy Living. Definitely not God’s Book of Theological Propositions. It is God’s story book. Not God’s Book of Stories, but God’s Story Book. One story.

The Bible creates all sorts of problems and divisions when we don’t understand that. Well, no. It’s not the Bible that creates those problems. It’s the way we misunderstand God’s purpose for the Bible that is the problem.

I did a lot of counseling throughout my ministry, not because I was good at it, but because people need counselors, and I had credentials, and I was cheap.

Especially in my campus ministry days, the counseling was non-stop. Young people like to talk about their problems.

One girl came to see me because she could not decide between Roy and Stan. I used my best counseling technique, helping her compare and contrast the two. Roy had every attribute a girl could possibly want. Stan was a total loser. She said, “Well, the decision is clear, isn’t it? I felt quite smug; good counseling had brought her there. “Yes, it’s Stan,” she said, with a satisfied sigh.

What? No! It’s not Stan! Weren’t you even here?

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I just watched as she made her dreamy exit out my door to go devote herself to the biggest loser I’d ever heard of.

I don’t think I put it into those words right then, but I began to understand: it’s the story that matters. She was telling herself a story, a story of romance that needed no facts. I was dealing with a list of categories.

I already knew that was true in preaching. I don’t know why it took me so long to understand that story is foundation and center to all the other tasks of ministry, because it is the foundation and center of life.

After campus ministry, I went to the University of Iowa to do a doctorate in theology. I wanted to be a preaching professor in a seminary, and I needed the union card, a PhD.

I quickly ran into trouble. I had already done graduate work in communication theory, and I wanted to concentrate my dissertation on the interface between communication theory and theological methodology. But my professors thought that was frivolous. Theologians had to compare and contrast the soteriology of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard. And then the teleology of Augustine and Kant. And then the Christology of Barth and Bultmann…

But I had begun to read people like Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. And James William McClendon, Biography as Theology. They were putting into words what I already knew: God is telling a story, and the task of preachers and the church is to help people find their place in it.

Fortunately for me, the U of Iowa was in a consortium, “The Schools of Theology in Iowa,” that also included Wartburg [Lutheran], U of Dubuque [Presbyterian], and Aquinas [Roman Catholic]. I was able to find professors who let me write my own narrative theology.

I suppose that in some ways, all those years of graduate work were wasted. I taught in a lot of short education conferences for preachers, but I was never a prof in a seminary. In the process of all that schooling, though, I learned the reality that has centered all my work, and my life. It you want to know it, read the first paragraph again…

John Robert McFarland

"The future belongs not to those who have the best story, but to those who tell their story best."