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Narrative Character of Christian Social Mtlilcs
coherent account of scripture. Put differently, one reason the church has had
to be content with the notion of a canon rather than some more intellectually
satisfying summary of the content of scripture is that only through the means
of a canon can the church adequately manifest the kind of tension with which
it must live. The canon marks off as scripture those texts that are necessary for
the life of the church without trying to resolve their obvious diversity and/or
even disagreements.
Still, it may be asked, why these texts? My answer is simply: these texts
have been accepted as scripture because they and they alone satisfy what
Reynolds Price has called our craving for a perfect story which we feel to be
true. Put briefly, that story is: “History is the will of a just God who knows
us.”45 Therefore the status of the Bible as scripture “ separated both from
other written works and from the continuous accretion of oral tradition, repre
sents a fundamental decision to assign a special status to the material it
contains and to recognize it as the classic model for the understanding of
God.”46 We continue to honor that decision made by the ancient church,
however, because it is a decision that makes sense “ in relation to the basic
nature of Christian faith. Faith is Christian because it relates itself to
classically-expressed models. This is much the same as what people mean
when they say, rather vaguely and ambiguously, that ‘Christianity is a histori
cal religion.’ Christian faith is not whatever a modem Christian may happen
to believe, on any grounds at all, but faith related to Jesus and to the God of
Israel. The centrality of the Bible is the recognition of the classic sources for
the expression of Jesus and of God.”47
The scripture functions as an authority for Christians precisely because
by trying to live, think, and feel faithful to its witness they find they are more
nearly able to live faithful to the truth. For the scripture forms a society and
sets an agenda for its life that requires nothing less than trusting its existence
to the God found through the stories of Israel and Jesus. The moral use of
scripture, therefore, lies precisely in its power to help us remember the stories
of God for the continual guidance of our community and individual lives. To
be a community which lives by remembering is a genuine achievement, as too
often we assume that we can insure our existence only by freeing ourselves
from the past.
5. The Morality of Remembering: The Scripture as Narrative
Obviously I am convinced that the most appropriate image—or as
Kelsey insists,
discrimen
—for characterizing scripture, for the use of the
church as well as morally, is that of a narrative or a story. James Barr rightly
points out that the dealings of God with man in the Bible are indeed describ-