How Do Stories Save Us?

Book

How Do Stories Save Us? An Essay on the Question with the Theological Hermeneutics of David Tracy in View. Scott Holland. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.

Reviewer

Keith Graber Miller, Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana

In this erudite, dense, and artful text, Bethany Theological Seminary professor Scott Holland takes the reader – as the back cover says – “on an intellectual adventure through narrative theology, literary criticism, poetics, ritual studies and aesthetics in the composition of a theology of culture.”

Throughout the text, the work of revisionist theologian David Tracy is “in view.” Tracy, a Catholic priest and active professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is the author of well-known texts including The Analogical Imagination and On Naming the Present. Holland’s book concludes with a 10-page bibliography of Tracy’s writings plus a more general bibliography, including 18 books and essays by Paul Ricoeur and 8 articles by Holland.

Holland works particularly with what he refers to as two emerging self-corrective foci in Tracy’s public theology (i.e., theology that is “always involved in complex and interesting relationships with diverse historical and social realities”): “a hermeneutics in which the ‘other’ not the ‘self’ is the dominant focus; and a theological insistence that only a mystical-prophetic model of theology can save us” (35-36).

In terms of narrative theology, Holland casts his lot with Tracy and others representing the University of Chicago narrative school rather than with those representing what might be called the Yale school (e.g., George Lindbeck, Hans Frei). The latter, says Holland, see the church as the sole reference of theology (58). In that schema, the world “becomes an object of theological description and prophetic critique, rarely a rich and mystical source for imaginative and revisionary theological thought and writing” (98).

For Yale-ish narrativists, biblical narratives “catch the reader up into the sacred world of the text,” as the Bible “absorb[s] the world into its unique world” (78). It is this Yale-based form of narrative theology that has been most influential for recent mainstream Anabaptists, as mediated largely through the work of Stanley Hauerwas.

Holland says one might excuse a fundamentalist for advocating for this sort of “sectarian imagination in defense of her tribal gods and goods…. But for a post-critical Christian theorist who values close readings and thick descriptions to retreat from the public square into the world of the text, pretending she has found a separate, autonomous world, is not only bad faith, it is bad fiction” (101).

In contrast, Tracy and others see the world “as a complex source for theology and not simply its object” (58). “While Yale theologians seem most interested in keeping their community’s story straight,” says Holland, “those drawn to the work of David Tracy and the Chicago school are much more interested in doing theology while listening to other people’s stories” (98).

Such a theology will then be pluralistic, interdisciplinary, intertextual (rather than intratextual, as for the Yale theologians), and revisionary. Here the theologian “brings the texts, traditions, and practices of her community into conversation with others, especially communities of difference, in the search for greater insight, understanding, humane presence and connection with the divine” (98-99).

Elsewhere Holland argues the increasingly accepted view that humans are constituted both narratively and performatively, i.e., through ritual (153-78). He sensibly proposes that for Anabaptists and other low-church Protestants to develop a theory of symbol and ritual that might lead their communities toward Ricoeur’s “second naivete” in relation to religious symbolism, such transformation will come not through studying traditional theological arguments of sacramentologists but through discovering how symbolic activity is co-natural with the human person, emerging from ordinary experience (177).

How Do Stories Save Us? will most engage those already immersed in postmodern theological critiques. Illustrating the background one may need, a not atypical selection reads: “Following Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, Tracy’s theological agenda has been to rethink the dialectical relationship between language and experience. His program moves beyond the Schleiermacher – Tillich – Rahner – Lonergan experiential paradigm to an explicitly hermeneutical one” (82).

Some readers may stumble through more complex portions of the book, though most will appreciate Holland’s more accessible commentaries on narrative theology and rituals. His chapter “When Art and Ritual Embrace and Kiss” (179-230) is moving at points, thanks to some embedded autobiographical flourishes and assertions of faith.

Just under half of the 241-page text, which began as Holland’s dissertation at Duquesne University, has been published before as discrete essays in journals or books. The core of Holland’s argument, from “How Do Stories Save Us,” through chapters titled “Theology is a Kind of Writing,” “Even the Postmodern Story Has a Body,” and “Signifying Presence” have appeared in Louvain Studies, Cross Currents, and an edited volume, The Presence of Transcendence (Leuven: Peeters, 2001). A few odd, distracting editing issues have made it into the present text, likely due to its various embodiments over 16 years.

For David Tracy followers, this is an illuminating supplemental text. Those interested more broadly in narrative theology also will benefit from a few of the middle chapters, though they likely will be less engaged with the text’s first 70 pages. Students of postmodernity and aesthetically sensitive readers will be especially appreciative of Holland’s work.