Promissory narration: revisiting promise, narrative, and identity in the work of Carolyn Helsel and Paul Ricoeur
Files
First author draft
Date
2018-12-07
DOI
Authors
Jacobsen, David
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
David Jacobsen. 2018. "“Promissory Narration: Revisiting Promise, Narrative, and Identity in the Work of Carolyn Helsel and Paul Ricoeur"."
Abstract
One of the most enduring problems of narrative preaching is itself a homiletical theological one. In liberal hands, narrative preaching tends to focus on the relationship of
experience to gospel. Following the insight of Stephen Crites’ “The Narrative Shape of
Experience” in a Tillichian mode, it seeks to correlate the shape or form of Biblical narrative
with human narratives in order to evoke some sense of the gospel in the retelling. In postliberal
hands, a focus on narrative preaching eschews human experience and is indeed willing to bracket
matters of form altogether. Biblical narrative, in deep connection to communities and their
practices, is precisely what redescribes human experience. Biblical narrative exists to draw us
not into our own worlds or experiences, but the world of the text in all of its otherness. In doing
so, Biblical narrative forms identity insofar as it makes Christian faith recognizable.
This essay offers a third way of thinking about narrative preaching—a homiletical theological one in relation to the character of the gospel as promise. I begin by building on a
recent trajectory of research that sees an intimate relationship between Biblical narrative and
promise: especially Ronald Thiemann, Christopher Morse, and James Kay. I will, in the course
of this essay, retrace some of that history so as to locate my reflections. For my part, I see an
especially rich opportunity for revising what Morse first called promissory narration by means of
Carolyn Helsel’s appropriation of Paul Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition in relation to the
problem of white racism. In the process, I will also bring Ricoeur’s work on promise and
narrated identity to help rethink how promissory narration might help narrative preachers work
through a course of recognition and transformation of identity in ways that move pass the
liberal/postliberal impasse that has dogged especially white narrative homiletics.
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License
© 2018 David Schnasa Jacobsen