What Is Narrative Apologetics? And Why Does It Matter?
Revealing the relevance, joy, and wonder of the Christian story by showing the shortcomings of every other story
I’m currently writing and editing a book that compares five different methodological approaches to apologetics. Each author will present his or her preferred method and then critique the others. One of the approaches I did not include in this volume is “narrative apologetics.”
That’s mostly because every scholar I wanted to write this section had already committed to other projects during the time frame when my book would be in development.
(Sometimes, it’s not the editor’s lofty ideals that determine a book’s final contents; it’s the availability of the right writers.)
In the end, however, I’m very pleased with how the book is taking shape. I can’t yet tell you what methods are being covered or by whom they’re being presented, but I will do so as soon as I can. And, in some sense, it may have been for the best that narrative apologetics didn’t make an appearance as a separate chapter.
Narrative apologetics is not, after all, really a discrete or distinct approach to apologetics. Narrative apologetics can work well within almost any of the existing methodological structures. At its best, narrative apologetics is treated not as a separate apologetics method but as a practice of apologetics that supplements other approaches, as Alister McGrath acknowledges in his book Narrative Apologetics (8). Some of the best recent works that are relevant to the practice of narrative apologetics are Telling a Better Story and The Augustine Way by Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen, along with Alister McGrath’s Narrative Apologetics and Engaging Unbelief by Curtis Chang. Each one of these books presents, in its own way, a narrative approach to apologetics that can be woven into a wide array of practical defenses of the Christian faith.
What Is Narrative Apologetics?
So what is it that I’m trying to describe when I talk about “narrative apologetics”?
Alister McGrath defines apologetics as “a principled attempt to communicate the vitality of the Christian gospel faithfully and effectively to our culture” (Narrative Apologetics, 17). Although I might define apologetics more as a defense than as a principled attempt, McGrath’s definition provides us with a useful starting place for a narrative perspective on apologetics. This principled attempt to communicate the gospel requires—according to McGrath—(1) cultural empathy, (2) evangelical depth, and (3) effective translation into contemporary ways of communicating (18–19).
Narrative apologetics communicates and defends the gospel by showing that the Christian story provides a better and more satisfying framework for our individual stories than any other narrative. Viewed in this way, apologetics is not primarily about persuading people that a certain set of ideas is correct, although the demonstration of the trustworthiness of the Christian faith is still important. Narrative apologetics is more about depicting its world of beauty, goodness, and truth faithfully and vividly, so that people will be drawn by the richness and depth of its vision of things.
Simply put, apologetics is all about telling a better story.
Why Do Narratives Matter?
Proponents of narrative apologetics rightly recognize that human beings do not make sense of anything in their lives apart from narratives. “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” Ursula Le Guin has pointed out, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Aristotle said that rhetoric is shaped by logos, ethos, and pathos; Alister McGrath rightly notes that the ideas that compel us are also formed by mythos, the narrative framework within which logos, ethos, and pathos find their places.
The narratives by which we make sense of our lives equip us—sometimes effectively, sometimes not so effectively—to face four unavoidable dilemmas:
Identity: Who am I?
Value: Do I matter?
Purpose: Why am I here?
Agency: Can I make a difference?
But there is only one narrative that can provide satisfying answers to all of these questions, and this narrative is one in which we submit to our Creator.
Because we are looking for a narrative that can satisfy our longings without submitting to our sovereign Creator, humanity lives with a deep sense of dislocation and alienation. We live with a sense of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), in the words of Martin Heidegger. When we do encounter something apparently transcendent or sublime, this sense feeds an unsatiable craving for eternal joy (sometimes described as Sehnsucht) that drives us into deeper despair when our cravings are unfulfilled.
Viewed from a Christian point of view, this sense of alienation arises in part because the human soul was formed for a narrative that no terrestrial or timebound story can fulfill. If Christianity is all that it claims to be, the Christian story is the sole narrative that can provide meaningful and lasting satisfaction. “The whole point of Christianity,” N.T. Wright has said, “is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world.”
Apart from the Christian story, humanity cannot escape a sense of perpetual Geworfenheit and unresolved Sehnsucht. This is not, however, a cause for despair for Christians. Instead, it is an indication that directs us to the greater narrative for which our Creator shaped our souls. According to Gilbert Meilaender,
The human creature, made for fellowship with God, can touch the Eternal but cannot (within history) rest in it. For our experience is inherently narratival, relentlessly temporal. We are given no rest. The story moves on. And hence, the creature who is made to rest in God is in this life best understood as a pilgrim whose world is depicted in terms of the Christian story.
C.S. Lewis was building on this recognition when he noted that “nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses.” There is an empty chair, so to speak, in every human soul. “If nature makes nothing in vain,” Lewis said elsewhere, “the One who can sit in this chair must exist.” G.K. Chesterton made much the same point when he noted, “We have come to the wrong star. That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange…. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.”
How Does Narrative Apologetics Work?
Narrative apologetics is not the forceful imposition of a master narrative that flattens out the complexity of each human being’s individual story. In the words of Alister McGrath,
Postmodernism unquestionably has a point when it protests against the imposition of a master narrative on the complexities of experience, which is then used to control our understandings of the world. It is, however, difficult to see a legitimate objection to the discernment of a metanarrative as a means of colligating and coordinating multiple stories into a coherent whole (Narrative Apologetics, 10).
Narrative apologetics discerns and declares a metanarrative which is able to make better sense of human experience than any other narrative. This doesn’t imply that our own individual and communal narratives must be discarded or suppressed. “Those who affirm the primacy of one master narrative still find themselves drawing on others, whether implicitly or explicitly, to provide detail, texture, and color for their rendering of reality,” McGrath recognizes (Narrative Apologetics, 13).
In many cases, Christian apologetics limits itself to building a case for the truth of Christianity on the basis of evidential phenomena from science and history. Narrative apologetics approaches the apologetic task from another angle, seeking to show how Christianity explains the phenomena of our own existence. G.K. Chesterton’s words resonate well with such an approach: “The phenomenon does not prove religion, but religion explains the phenomenon.”
The goal of narrative apologetics is to show that Christianity alone can explain and satisfy humanity’s universal dis-ease. The Christian’s present entrance into this story provides a proleptic and partial participation in a satisfaction that will occur wholly at the end of time. Narrative apologetics accomplishes this goal by showing that the Christian story is better and more beautiful than any alternative. The narrative of Christ is the one “intelligible event which makes all other events intelligible,” according to H. Richard Niebuhr. “The revelatory moment… illuminates other events and enables us to understand them.” In the words of C.S. Lewis, “to break a spell, you have to weave a better spell”—you have to tell a better story that makes better sense of the world and offers a better sense of one’s place, purpose, and destiny within it.
One way to weave a better spell is to re-narrate the stories of our culture or of ourselves in ways that reveal their deficiencies apart from God’s story. Then, the spell-weaver shows how these cultural and personal stories can only make complete sense within God’s greater story. That’s part of what Augustine of Hippo did in The City of God Against the Pagans. The first ten books of The City of God reveal the deficiencies that afflicted the story of Rome from its inception while the latter twelve books of Augustine’s masterwork re-narrate Rome’s story from the perspective of God’s greater story.
Apologetics, Narratives, and Theology
One of the reasons why narrative apologetics should resonate with Christian thinking is because Christian theology is inescapably embedded in a narrative. Christianity is not a set of isolated propositions, after all. It’s a story, and the theological propositions of Christian faith only have meaning inasmuch as they are tied to the metanarrative of creation, fall and law, redemption, and new creation. As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out, even the portions of Scripture that are not stories gain their “intelligibility by being a product of and a contribution to a community that lives” by rehearsing and remembering a particular set of constitutive narratives. Because Christianity is so bound up in narrative, you cannot—as C.S. Lewis noted—reduce mythos to logos without losing something.
Karl Barth once declared that the best apologetics is good dogmatics. As with many of Barth’s aphorisms, this is certainly an overstatement, but it’s also an overstatement that includes enough truth to take it seriously. At the same time, one might also declare that the best apologetics is a good story. Dogmatics is the story of Christianity systematically articulated to the church while apologetics is the story of Christianity defensively articulated to the world. Narrative apologetics equips us to make this defense in a way that takes seriously the narrative structure of human reality.