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This essay offers a third way of thinking about experience and identity in narrative preaching—a homiletical-theological one in relation to the character of the gospel as promise. I begin by building on a trajectory of research that sees an intimate relationship between biblical narrative and promise, especially the work of Ronald Thiemann, Christopher Morse, and James Kay. With Kay’s help, I then turn to 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 past the liberal/postliberal impasse about experience that has dogged especially white narrative homiletics. One of the most enduring problems of narrative preaching is itself a central homileticaltheological issue: the relationship of gospel to experience. In liberal hands, narrative preaching tends to focus on the movement from experience to gospel by means of narrative form. Following the insight of Stephen Crites’ “The Narrative Quality of Experience” in a Tillichian mode, liberal views often seek 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 hearers.1 In postliberal hands, the focus on narrative preaching bracket matters of form altogether. Biblical narrative— not our human narratives—in deep connection to communities and their practices, is precisely how the gospel re-describes human experience. Biblical narrative exists not to confirm our own worlds or experiences, but to carry hearers into the world of the text in all of its otherness. In doing so, a postliberal view of biblical narrative assumes that the Bible forms identity insofar as it makes Christian faith recognizable. This essay offers a third way of thinking about narrative preaching—a homileticaltheological one in relation to the character of the gospel as promise that complexifies the gospel/experience relationship, as well as identity. I begin by building on a 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 narrative reflections with respect to eschatology. 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 and identity. Helsel, as we will see, relates Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative movement (mimesis) in textual hermeneutics to his view of the transforming self as a 1 Stephen Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 39:3 (Sept. 1971), 291-311. Homiletic Vol. 45, No. 1 (2020) 5 moment of self-recognition (idem>ipse>self-recognition) in his later work.2 In what follows, I will also bring Ricoeur’s work on promise and narrated identity to bear in order to rethink how promissory narration might help narrative preachers work through a course of recognition and transformation of identity in ways that move past the liberal/postliberal impasse over narrative’s relation to experience and gospel that has dogged especially white narrative homiletics. Promising Narrative: A Recent History We begin with a caveat: not all of the figures in the history of scholarship that follows here actually use the phrase “promissory narration.” They do hold in common an interest in drawing on the literature of speech act theory to explain various elements of how the language of promise works in context: distinctions between denotative and constative speech, the identification of difference between language’s locutionary function in relation to its illocutionary and perlocutionary force,3 promise as a “self-involving” speech act,4 and the dual agency of a promise as spoken by one and performed by another.5 The point with what follows is not to reduce the three figures below together without remainder, but to identify that all of these theologians and homileticians see that biblical narrative and promise actually stand in some sort of necessary prior relation. It is this juxtaposition of narrative and promise that distinguishes them from much of the traditional liberal and postliberal ways of understanding biblical narrative in relation to experience and gospel. Ronald Thiemann’s Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise Thiemann’s book aims to describe a non-foundational theology of revelation predicated on the notion of God’s prevenient grace. According to Thiemann, God’s gracious prevenience could once be assumed as a “background” doctrine, but after the Enlightenment the doctrine itself becomes a position which must be justified. Thiemann wishes to argue that the best way to understand revelation is “in use,” but not in a purely functionalist way as Kelsey does.6 Instead, the vision that Thiemann has is of “narrated promise,” where a unified sense of narrative is joined to the external promise of a dual agency in scripture and liturgy. This notion allows revelation to be both “extra nos” and “pro me.” Thiemann writes, “Let all Christian interpretation proceed in a manner which recognizes the absolute primacy of God’s promising grace.”7 2 Ricoeur goes so far in his important work Time and Narrative (vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 53, to speak of three mimetic moments (mimesis 1>mimesis 2>mimesis 3), which seems to stand in some parallel to the three-fold description of the course of recognition. 3 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) and his “Performative Utterances [1956]” (in Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Clarendon, 1961). See also John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 4 Donald Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement: A Philosophical Study of Everyday Language with Special Reference to the Christian Use of Language about God as Creator (London: SCM, 1963). In his later work, Evans walks back some of the extent of his claims about the logic of self-involvement, but, as Richard Briggs notes in Words in Action: Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 2001), 159-66, does not totally abandon its value either. 5 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1995). 6 David Kelsey, Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975). 7 Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 149. The material on Matthew in the subsequent paragraph is summarized from chapter 6 of the same volume. Homiletic Vol. 45, No. 1 (2020) 6 Thiemann’s notion of “narrated promise” is best exemplified in his chapter on Matthew’s designation of Jesus as Son of God. The text narrates Jesus’ unfolding identity as Son of Abraham (heir to national promises), Son of David (heir to kingship promises), the named Jesus who saves (the people from their sins), and in the unfolding narrative of Matthew 4 and beyond “Son of God,” the one who bears God’s intentions. One gets the sense from reading Thiemann that his view of promise in narrative is subtle and reflective of the text’s ambiguity. In fact, Thiemann takes pains to point out that the character of God is absent from the Matthean narrative at crucial points. God does comment that Jesus is God’s Son, the bearer of God’s intentions, at crucial points such as Jesus’ baptism and again at the transfiguration. The middle section of Matthew’s narrative, however, is where Jesus’ identity is disclosed as authoritative healer, forgiver of sins, and in the cross as representing precisely the intention of God for sonship: suffering and resurrection. The end of Matthew’s narrative proves crucial, theologically speaking. God’s raising of Jesus fulfills what God intends (the resurrection prediction is fulfilled in the report in the divine passive in chapter 28; he is raised implies that God did the raising and that God fulfilled promises). The promise/fulfillment motif and its connection to the various visions of sonship earlier on (David, Abraham, etc.) underline God’s reliability in the promise. The notion of gospel appears in the text a few times (unlike the word promise, which is really only narrative embodied, not thematized). The gospel at the beginning is linked to Jesus preaching of the kingdom, but by the end of the gospel is linked to Jesus himself, especially when the universalizing mission is connected with the anonymous woman’s anointment of Jesus before his death, which will be remembered wherever the gospel is preached in all the world. The connection between narrative and promise here becomes important at the very end where the risen Christ is granted all authority and himself gives a promise: Lo, I will be with you until the end of the age. With this narration, the promises of God are not only narratively validated (from the OT on), but carried forward by a Jesus whose identification in divine sonship takes on exalted form in a preview of Trinitarian unity (in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). In my view, Thiemann’s perspective on narrated promise is only of some help for the problem for narrative preaching we have identified above. Thiemann’s book is indeed concerned with narration and identity (and therefore postliberal) with promise as a narrated thematic content and in-use context

Promissory Narration: Toward a Revised Narrative Homiletic in an Age of Identities