Christians Telling Stories

Extract

Jesus has a reputation as a story-teller. He is known for his announcement of the Reign of God in stories of a merchant buying a pearl, a traveller being mugged on the road, a woman sweeping her floor. His theology had always the form of fiction. ‘He did not speak to them without a parable’. This was a peculiar theological method. Whatever likenesses there may have been between the people of the Dead Sea scrolls and the first company of disciples, they did not have such a story-teller at their centre. And though there have been several attempts to establish that speaking in parables was an ordinary style of preaching with Jesus’ rabbinic contemporaries, these attempts have resulted rather in some further confirmation of Jesus’ individual distinction. There was no preacher like him. No one telling such stories. Paul, as a youngster, had clearly enjoyed the hebrew Exodus legend about a rolling stone, and the greek fable of Menenius about a talking stomach. But, if he is anywhere near as representative of the pharisee tradition as he claims to be, it must be significant for our view of contemporary jewish teachers that he thought it sufficiently daring in his theologising to elaborate a little allegory from the story of Abraham.

Jesus’ story-telling talent has proved to be as singular in the history of Christian theology. The vaster number of those who have thought it their vocation to articulate the peculiar Christian appreciation of God have been as useless at story-telling as Paul. It may be, confronted by a demand for imaginative narrative, determinedly unfictionalising theologians should have claimed that ‘the logical consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole’ is to be understood, as Leslie Stephen observed in a fine essay on ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’, as ‘an aspect of the imaginative power’ by which we harmonise our strongest and subtlest feelings.