Concerning biblical language and its interpretation, postliberals underline narrative as an interpretative category for the Bible, and unqualifiedly endorse the hermeneutical primacy of the world created by the biblical narratives over the secular world.
Postliberals’ narrativist understanding of biblical interpretation owes much to Hans Frei’s provocative proposal about the synoptic gospels narratives in his epochal work
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. According to Frei, throughout most of the church
history prior to the developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology, Christians had understood and shaped their self-identity within the overarching story of the Bible that might provide themselves with the basic frame of reference as well as the indispensable resources. In this pre-critical, literal-realistic reading of the Bible, argues Frei (1974:2), the biblical stories meant what they said, and thus they were read literally as depicting the real world. ‘The Bible was,’ Frei (:90) states, ‘a coherent world of discourse in its own right, whose depictions and teachings had a reality of their own, though to be sure, it was the reality into which all men had to fit, and in one way or another did fit.’
However, as the modern era went on, ‘the cohesion between the literal meaning of the biblical narratives and their reference to actual events’ broke down rapidly (Frei 1974:4). The depicted biblical world and the real historical world began to be severed and distanced from each other. The biblical stories were no longer assumed as referring to actual historical events. Increasing detachment of the biblical stories from history brought about ‘the reversal in the direction of interpretation’ (:6). Readers no longer would fit themselves into the depicted biblical world; instead they attempted to fit the biblical stories into ‘a more general framework of meaning’ (:5). To be specific, modern theology, by encompassing Scripture within ‘a larger framework or category of explana-
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tion’ (:220), made interpretation ‘a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story’ (:130). For example, on the one hand, liberals looked for the real meaning of the Bible in transcendent truths about God and humanity, and otherwise deconstructed the canonical text into historical-critical fragments. On the other hand, conservatives sought the Bible’s real meaning in its factual referents and turned the text into source material for propositions. As a consequence, such an accommodation of the Bible to a more determinative framework, as Fodor (2005:235) points out clearly, ‘effectively robs scripture of its own reality-constituting powers, either by transforming it into a source for historical reconstruction of past events or reducing it to simply one more
instantiation of timeless, universal symbols or general qualities of human experience.’
In large parts of Eclipse, Frei, by careful historical survey, explores how and why this pre-critical, literal-realistic way of reading the Bible has dwindled away.
The thrust of Eclipse is to undo the eclipse of biblical narrative and to retrieve a literal- realistic reading of the Bible. Drawing on Karl Barth’s distinctive sensitivity to the biblical narrative and Erich Auerbach’s notion of realistic narrative, Frei develops the category of “realistic narrative”39 that is most faithful to the character of the texts themselves and is the way the Christian community has read biblical texts for most of its history. With the concept of realistic narrative, Frei (1974:280) maintains that biblical meaning and its narrative form are inseparable, and furthermore that the story itself is not ancillary to, but constitutive of, meaning. Put another way, ‘the subject of the narrative cannot be divorced from the narrative because it is the narrative that renders the subject, and precisely because biblical narrative is realistic, there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of reading it’ (Stroup 1981:139). Realist reading, as an appropriate reading strategy, allows ‘the reader to be incorporated and thus located in the world made accessible by the narration’ (Frei 1974:199).40
39 According to Frei (1974:13-14), “realistic narrative” is ‘that kind in which subject and social setting
belong together, and characters and external circumstances fitly render each other. Neither character nor circumstance separately, nor yet their interaction, is a shadow of something else more real or more significant.’
40 What is especially noteworthy is the later shift in Frei’s thinking. In Eclipse, Frei’s grave concern about
the text leads him to argue that the “literal” meaning is exclusively derived from the linguistic patterns in the text itself, namely realistic narrative. From the early 1980s onward, however, Frei’s attention seems
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Following in the wake of Frei’s effective work to undo the modernist eclipse of biblical narrative, postliberal theology attempts to restore the primacy of scriptural narrative. Lindbeck also places the continuity of Christian identity in the biblical narrative when he says (1984:80): ‘The novelty of rule…is that it does not locate the abiding and doctrinally significant aspect of religion in propositionally formulated truths, much less in inner experience, but in the story it tells and in the grammar that informs the way the
story is told and used’ [italics mine]. From Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic view,
“meaning” is not located ‘outside the text or semiotic system,’ as is the case with propositionalists and expressivists, but rather immanent inside the world and idiom of the biblical text (:114). ‘Scripture creates its own domain of meaning’ and claims that this meaning ‘extends over the whole of reality’ (:117). A scriptural world absorbing the universe provides the interpretive framework within which to indwell. Indwelling the scriptural world implies assimilating extra-biblical realities into the scriptural world. The Bible serves as an interpretive medium for the extratextual world. Thus, to read intratextually — or faithfully — means ‘to derive the interpretive framework that designates the theologically controlling sense from the literary structure of the text itself,’ that is, from a realistic narrative form of the Bible (:120). In this way, for postliberal theology, Scripture plays a pivotal role in the process of Christian formation and transformation of life and culture, through redescribing reality and contextualising the modern world within the scriptural framework.
One of the most remarkable values of postliberals’ recovery of the significance of narrative within the discussion of biblical authority is, as Charles Wood (1987:13) notes, ‘its potential for a reconception of the nature of biblical authority.’ If the biblical text to shift to the account of the role of the community in the emergence of the meaning. This shift of his concern — from an issue of the role of the text to an issue of the role of the community — is presented more clearly in his widely-known paper entitled The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the
Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break? In this paper, Frei (1986:64-65) criticises his early
commitment to the distinction between truth and meaning; and between text and reader. Concerning this shift or development of Frei’s argument, I would like to part company with those who read the later argument of Frei as granting meaning-determinative status to the present community (e g Wolterstorff 1995:218-220,230-236). A shift of Frei’s argument should be thought of neither as “an abandonment of his earlier thought,” nor as “the ratification of the determinative role of the reader” (Craigo-Snell 2000:487-489; Bowald 2007:102). Rather, it may be said that in Literal Frei seeks to incorporate the life of the community into the realistic narrative of the Bible rather than flatly states that meaning is located firmly in the text. For a helpful comparative explanation of the early and the later Hans Frei, see Bowald (2007:48-58,95-107).
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functions “narratively,” that is, in such a way as to disclose a world for readers to be invited to dwell, then the authorisation of the biblical text would proceed not from simply reading meanings off the text and accepting them, but from creating meanings
through the engagement of the readers with the text. For postliberalism, truth cannot be
adequately expressed in either propositional or experiential-expressive language; rather, truth is best grasped analogically, as a “lived” reality. Thus, Lindbeck (1984:51) states: ‘It is a true proposition to the extent that its objectivities are interiorized and exercised by groups and individuals in such a way as to conform them in some measure in the various dimensions of their existence to the ultimate reality and goodness that lies at the heart of things. It is a false proposition to the extent that this does not happen.’ At this point, the notion of proposition is not negated, but qualified by embodying it in forms of life. Whether a doctrine is propositionally true or false depends on the success or failure of a community internalising, embodying, or living it.
According to George Hunsinger (2003:46-47), while propositionalism — literalism, in his revised terms — regards the mode of textual reference as strongly univocal and experiential-expressivism as equivocal, postliberalism sees it as analogical. The Bible’s analogical force ‘allows for significant elements of both similarity and dissimilarity between word and object, text and referent, whether the textual referent is God or historical events or some combination of the two’ (:47). In a postliberal analogical view of language, the text addresses readers in not merely “cognitive” or “emotive” but also “self-involving” fashion. Hunsinger contends that the false polarisation of modernity can be overcome by the postliberal analogical understanding of language. That is to say, ‘instead of divine availability at the expense of irreducible transcendence (literalism), or divine transcendence at the expense of real availability (expressivism),’ the postliberal emphasis on narrative as analogical language about God and reality ‘recovers the historic ecumenical conviction of divine availability to true predication in the midst of transcendent ineffability’ (:47).
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