The Concept of Story and Theological Discourse
Biblical scholars and theologians have sometimes suggested that the concept of story or narration may be used to avoid or even resolve certain long-standing problems in theology. The context of such a suggestion appears to be not only the gradual filtering of ideas from the social sciences into theological awareness but also a much improved understanding of the nature and transmission of the biblical traditions. For instance, literary criticism had tried to tell the story of the making of the Bible as a story of writing and editing. With its analytic interest, form criticism penetrated deeper, concentrating on the crucial role of oral tradition and on the power of communities to shape certain forms. Depending on these prior analytical activities, tradition criticism (or ‘redaction criticism’ in New Testament studies) felt free to seek larger unities in the material before it. That is, whereas form criticism's interest lay in describing separately the variety of ‘;scenes’ that later took their respective places in the story, tradition criticism concentrated on telling the whole story of the making of the Bible.2