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The Moral Authority oj Scripture
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able as a cumulative process, “ in which later elements do build upon what
was said and done at an earlier time. As I have argued, the literature is meant
to be read as a story with a beginning and a progression. All ‘acts of God’ and
incidents of the story make sense because a framework of meaning has already
been created by previous acts, remembered in the tradition; they are ‘further
acts of one already known, of one with whom the fathers have already been in
contact and have passed on the tradition of this contact.’ ”48
It is certainly true, as Barr recognizes, that scripture contains much
material that is not narrative in character. But such material, insofar as it is
scripture, gains its intelligibility by being a product of and contribution to a
community that lives through remembering. The narrative of scripture not
only “renders a character”49 but renders a community capable of ordering its
existence appropriate to such stories. Jews and Christians believe this narra
tive does nothing less than render the character of God and in so doing renders
us to be the kind of people appropriate to that character. To say that character
is bound up with our ability to remember witnesses to the fact that our
understanding of God is not inferred from the stories but is the stories.50
One of the virtues of calling attention to the narrative nature of scripture
is the way it releases us from making unsupportable claims about the unity of
scripture or the centrality of the “biblical view of X or Y .” Rather, the
scripture must be seen as one long, “ loosely structured non-fiction novel”
that has subplots that at some points appear minor but later turn out to be
central.51 What is crucial, however, is that the scripture does not try to
suppress those subplots or characters that may challenge, or at least qualify,
the main story line, for without them the story itself would be less than
truthful.52
Through scripture we see that at crucial periods in the life of Israel and
the church, questions about how to remember the stories were not just ques
tions about “ fact” or accuracy, but about what kind of community we must
be to be faithful to Yahweh and his purposes for us. So the question of the
status of the Davidic kingship for Israel now in Exile could not be avoided as
Israel sought to survive as a community without being a “nation.”53 The
issue is not just one of interpretation but of what kind of people can remember
the past and yet know how to go on in a changed world.
Moreover one does not need to be a New Testament scholar to recognize
that questions in the early church about how to tell the life of Jesus were also
issues about the kind of community needed to live in keeping with the signifi
cance of that life. How the story should be told was basically a moral issue,
since it was also a question about what kind of people we ought to be. The
unity of the Gospels is not dependent, therefore, on whether they can be made
to agree on the details of Jesus’ life or even whether various theologies are
compatible; rather, the unity of the Gospels is based on the unquestioned