As we have seen, in Frei’s account the shift is construed as one in which the meaning of the stories shifted from the stories themselves to their historical referents: the meaning – or point- of the stories changed.

The crucial factor in the account I am offering is that the meaning of the stories remained basically the same.

Rather, what changed in the wake of the ‘steady increase’ in the ‘logical distinction and reflective distance’ between narrative and reality was this: the belief that the biblical stories referred to and described actual historical occurrences changed from being a basic belief to being a non-basic belief. A belief that did not, indeed could not, be justified, became one that obliged evidence of one kind or another.

Neil B. MacDonald, “Illocutionary Stance in Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative,” p. 326.

I told my wife and many others after that episode that I was deeply disappointed in the bungle that the show had made, and wondered if I would continue with it. (If you have not got this far yet in the show, then the rest will be a SPOILER, so I would stop reading at this point.)

John Starke has a response to all the deluded fans, specifically concerning fallen heroes and how this is a fact of life. I would love to get your thoughts on it especially as it relates to what we watch.

Emily Nussbaum, writing in The New Yorker, describes the PBS Masterpiece series Downton Abbey as “scarfing handfuls of carmel corn while swigging champagne.” It goes down easy.

That is an apt description. The dialogue seems almost perfectly crafted at times, but the drama and scandal could almost fit daytime television . . . almost. Nussbaum continues, “Downton Abbey is situated precisely on the Venn diagram where ‘prestige’ meets ‘guilty pleasure’: it’s as much cake as it is bread. And, sue me, I like cake.”

Downton Abbey may be a poor man’s Pride and Prejudice, but I’ll take Maggie Smith’s character Lady Grantham over Mrs. Bennet any day of the week. I’ve probably quoted Lady Grantham more then C. S. Lewis the past six months, and I don’t regret it.

The show has redeemed television for many evangelicals—that is, until recently. At first, the mischievous characters were all easily identified and properly hated. The rest were highly regarded with honor and virtue. Lord Grantham is probably the most highly regarded of all. He is wise, kind, and always knows the right decision when the right decision ought to be made.

Spoiler Alert

But you could almost hear the disapproving hiss a few weeks back when **SPOILER ALERT** Lord Grantham failed morally by kissing one of the maids and pulling her into his bedroom. Lord Grantham ended the encounter in a fit of guilt just short of sleeping with her, but the damage was already done.

Suddenly, Twitter and Facebook woke up to the fact that Downton Abbey is filled not only with with sex and scandal but also elitism, strife, backstabbing, and jealousy. I suppose we all expected this sort of behavior from Lady Edith and Lady Mary. But if we can’t trust in Lord Grantham, then whom can we trust?

And just like that, many evangelicals have stopped watching the show and encouraged others to proceed only with caution.

I’d like to challenge this thinking with a reverse warning: if you choose to discontinue watching, do so with caution.

Steve Turner shows in his book Imagine that this sort of response is typical for evangelicals. Since the Reformation and the iconoclastic response to Roman Catholic veneration, Christians have been liberated to explore history, behavior, and morality in art without the need to create work that was recognizably religious. But when this freedom showed itself in theater, literature, and later in films, many Christians responded with disapproval. For some Puritans, it was sinful for two individuals to act out the sin of adultery, and those who watched also took part in the sin.

While I think this response to theater, fiction, and film is wrong, surely there are bounds to this freedom. Any Christian should beware of watching or reading anything that will arouse desires or ambitions contrary to the Bible. While sex is a topic in Downton Abbey, the action is assumed, rather than watched. There has been one exception, though it’s tame compared to other primetime television.

Think on These Things

However, concerned viewers seem more worried that the drama revolves around jealousy, pride, the love of money, and any number of sinful ambitions. And doesn’t Paul tell us to think about whatever is lovely, whatever is right, whatever is admirable, whatever is pure (Phil. 4:8)?

But as Scripture interprets Scripture, this verse must fit with the Old Testament. The best of the Old Testament heroes let us down with prideful ambition, adultery, and even incest. Turner writes, “David’s life would have to be read in abridged version. Could we dwell on Job or Revelation? How could we deal with the negativity in Ecclesiastes?”

Sin is no abstract notion in the Bible. It has flesh-and-blood consequences. These dark moments reveal our acute need of repentance. To expect our literature or film to display only the flattering side of human nature is not simply a war with culture, but also with reality. As Cardinal Newman once observed, “It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man.”

Knot in the Stomach

Christians who care about virtue, truth, and even aesthetics should be delighted in Downton Abbey. Aside from being critically acclaimed, there is no confusion as to right and wrong, virtue and vice. We are never tempted to root for the adulterer. Meanwhile, those who make tempered, wise, and kind decisions are vindicated. Traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism is reviled, but thoughtless rebellion is never warranted.

So when Lord Grantham failed, we were supposed to get a knot in our stomach. His high virtue tempted us to believe in the human potential. But when our heroes fall, so also fall our hopes in the human potential.

If Lord Grantham can’t do it, then who can?

But Christians know how to watch our heroes fail; always mourning, always rejoicing. We don’t despair at the sight of the best of us failing, but rejoice knowing that there was One who never failed. The Lord Granthams and King Davids of the world disappoint us. But there is a Lord who never abandoned his bride and a King who never had to write Psalm 51.

Trends come and go in our culture and the church seems to follow. BASIC is a seven-part series of short films that challenges us to reclaim the church as Scripture describes it to be. This series speaks to those who have questions about the church and to those who may have lost interest in the church.

He answers questions such as:

• What does it mean to fear God?
• What does it mean when he tells us to follow him?
• How do we join the Spirit in what he is doing?
• Is church a place where individuals gather once a week to sing songs and listen to someone talk about God, or does church refer to the people themselves, who share a common mission in the world?
• Why does it seem like reading the Bible is more of a duty than a privilege?
• Is it possible that our prayers go unanswered because we are praying out of a sense of obligation or maybe for the wrong things?
• Why was the first Communion an intimate gathering with Jesus’ twelve disciples, instead of the multitudes following Him?

Introduction

When it comes to a book like Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative there have been so many reviews[1], that reviewers should despair of spending most of their time on summary, and focus more on interaction. In fact there have been so many summaries that my father told me, “I never bothered to read the book, because every other book I pick up has a summary of it.” So in light of the above, I intend to focus more on interaction.

Summary

Most simply, Frei argues that there has been an undue focus in eighteenth and nineteenth century hermeneutics on referential meaning, which also lead to ideal reference. Both of these concepts are initially somewhat abstract, however another way to say it is that scholars began to focus on what is “behind the text,” or to think that the Scriptures only communicate general truths about God and man.

Frei asserts that what scholars overlooked was the text itself. For most of Christian History, before the modern era, scholars and students of Scriptures saw the narrative as realistic, but in the 18^th century this changed. Frei traces this change from Spinoza to Schleiermacher, and asserts that this turn in hermeneutics has misinterpreted the story, primarily because they have misconstrued its genre.

Frei’s proposal is to place the meaning in the story. “The meaning emerges from the story form, rather than being merely illustrated by it.”[2] Therefore the meaning is in the narrative itself, not behind it, not in the consciousness of Scripture, or in the author’s intention.

Interaction

The essence of Frei’s argument hovers around the topic of “the true meaning” of Scripture. He demonstrated that both conservative and liberal theologians have separated the biblical words and narrative from the “real meaning” of Scripture. Liberal theologians took the “myth approach” and virtually dispensed of the narrative trying to get beneath it. But conservatives did a very similar thing, although they emerged with different conclusions. They transferred the “true meaning” to objective historical events, and the timeless truths which it taught.

To put it another way, Frei is arguing that conservatives accepted the “critical method” but simply came out with different results. Frei desires to flip the book upside down and give it a good shake; to start over, with a focus on the narrative itself.

The responses to Frei’s proposal have varied, but all have been affected by his proposal.  It birthed a whole movement called “post-liberal theology.” Post-liberal theology (or narrative theology) sought to go beyond liberal theology by rejecting the enlightenment emphasis on human reason. Instead, they sought to locate truth in the narrative of Scripture and the presence of Jesus Christ. As Carl Henry says:

Champions of narrative hermeneutics emphasize that the techniques of literary analysis are more appropriate than those of historical criticism for understanding the Bible. Questions of pre-canonical sources and of historical investigation and factuality do not illume textual meaning as significantly, they stress, as the shape and function of the biblical narrative.[4]

And not only those who identify themselves as post-liberals grew out of his work. Rather there has been a whole literary turn to studying the Gospels. Recent works on the Gospels tend to be more literary in nature than historical.

Evangelicals affirmed the return to Scripture, but were wary of post-liberals and their view of history. Henry thinks that a narrative approach “suspends the question of ontological truth and historical factuality.”[5]  But Frei responded to Henry by saying that evangelicals were not his audience, rather he wrote the book “with liberals in mind.”[6] Although this comment is revealing, and might put Frei’s book in some perspective, Henry is right to look at his methodology and see where it leads. Frei went on to say that he “of course believes in the ‘historical reality’ of Christ’s death and resurrection.”[7] However he also says,

There really is an analogy between the Bible and a novel writer who says something like this: I mean what I say whether or not anything took place. I mean what I say. It’s as simply as that: the text means what it says.[8]

Frei seems to think that the “truth” question is an unfortunate category misunderstanding.   In other words, stories are not meant to make assertions about the world.

But to me it is not as simple as that. It does matter if a story is true. It matters a great deal if I say “I jumped off the Sears tower and lived.” To separate words completely from reference seems to empty words of significance altogether. As J. Gresham Machen says:

The Bible contains a record of something that has happened, something that puts a new face upon life…The authority of the Bible should be tested here at the central point. Is the Bible right about Jesus?…If it is wrong here, then its authority is gone…if the Bible were false, your faith would go. You cannot, therefore, be indifferent to Bible criticism. Let us not deceive ourselves. The Bible is at the foundation of the Church. Undermine that foundation, and the Church will fall. It will fall, and great will be the fall of it.[9]

So where can we go from here?

Like Brevard Childs, I find a lot of good in narrative theology. I am thankful for the literary turn in scholarship. But it is also disconcerting. It is helpful because it stops the train from continuing down the track of historical referentiality, but disconcerting because of the lack of nuance in regards to historical reference.[10] If we take narrative theology at face value, the empty tomb is emptied of significance. But to ignore narrative theology, we again start to focus on what is “behind the text” and what “actually happened” without ever hearing the voice of Scripture.

It seems that Frei has identified a hole in modern hermeneutics, but I think he did not go so far as to close that hole. He pinpointed it, but his proposal was brief and lacking. To say that the meaning is the story form, seems as reductionist as saying meaning is only referential.

Moving Forward with Testimony

My proposal is not new, but I think it binds narrative, history and meaning together. It is the idea of testimony, which has been put forward by people like Richard Bauckham and Iain Provan.[11]

How does testimony bridge this gap between history, narrative, and meaning? In regards to history and meaning, the idea of testimony rejects that storytelling should be held to the same standards as scientific hypotheses. This was the modern turn. But post-moderns are convinced that scientific history is impossible, if only for the fact of our presuppositions, situadedness, and lack of God’s eye view. Therefore there should be an epistemological openness to what others are telling us. And this is how Scripture has always been interpreted until the critical age arose. The pre-criticals took the biblical narrative at face value.

This epistemological openness is really the way we live everyday in regards to knowledge. We take what people tell us, and generally believe it. As Iain Provan says, “we are in short, reliant upon what other tell us when it comes what we call knowledge.” This recovers an essential part of Christianity, tradition, but also neatly merges it with epistemological factors.

How does the idea of testimony contribute to the idea of narrative and meaning? Testimony respects the way in which something is told, and considers the narrative shape to contribute to or highlight the meaning. Testimony involves interpretation, presuppositions, and point of view. If I say, “I read Carl Henry’s article while eating lunch,” it is different from saying, “While eating white chili, I read Carl Henry’s analysis of Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, and was exposed to some glaring weaknesses of narrative theology.” Both of the previous statements speak about the same event. Both happened in “history,” but the narrative structure of one of them informs meaning. The text itself conveys meaning.

Testimony respects both the way it is told, but also concedes that the biblical narrative reflects historical occurrences. Testimony combines the importance of Luke reporting accurately what happened (Lk 1:1-4), yet also views the way he told it as conveying meaning. With testimony we have can a healthy dose of all these approaches and yet discard waste, and oversimplification.

Hans Frei did biblical scholarship a great favor by pointing out what was lacking in modern hermeneutics. He rightly wanted to get back to the text as it stands. But in so doing he may have overreacted, and meaning as reference was spurned. With the concept of testimony reemerging, we can have the best of both worlds. To sum up, as Tolkien says:

The Christian joy, the Gloria, is…pre-eminently…high and joyous. Because the story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified…Legend and History have met and fused.[12]

In short, the tension between faith and history has too often been seen as destructive of good history. On the contrary, however, it is the recognition that Jesus can be perceived only through the impact he made on his first disciples (that is, their faith) which is the key to historical recognition (and assessment) of that impact.

James Dunn, Jesus Remembered, (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids: 2003), 132.

I wish I could like Ron Paul more, really I do. But libertarian narcissism is as banal as any other strain. Ten years of desultory, inconclusive, transnationally, constrained warmongering is certainly a problem. But know-nothing parochial delusion is not the solution.

Mark Steyn in an article for National Review called “Paul the Parochial”