We have certainly been taught that the writings of Paul and other New Testament letters are to be understood didactically, as intended to convey instruction to the reader. But as Richard Hays points out in his book, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 2:1-4:11, there is a narrative/story substructure to Paul’s writings. Hays undergirded his belief in the Story-structure of Paul by showing that while we have not thought of Paul as a storyteller, his use of narrative is very important.

We have not thought of Paul as a storyteller, for the Jesus stories of the Gospels are absent from his letters. Yet his use of narrative is very important…, because Paul’s central concern was to use the narrative to form a moral community…. Paul’s most profound bequest to subsequent Christian discourse was his transformation of the reported crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ into a multipurpose metaphor with vast generative and transformative power…. In that gospel story Paul sees revolutionary import for the relationships of power that control human transactions…. Thus Paul’s use of the metaphor of the cross resists its translation into simple slogans. Instead he introduces into the moral language of the new movement a way of seeking after resonance in the basic story for all kinds of relationships of disciples with the world and with one another, so that the event-become-metaphor could become the generative center of almost endless new narratives, yet remain a check and control over those narratives.” (a quote from W.A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Mortality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 196-197. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, xxviii.

Hays, who was educated at Yale in the ‘70s, was influenced by Hans Frei who contended in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics that biblical criticism had gone astray by failing to grasp the narrative sense of Scripture. This prepared the way for Hay’s dissertation and then book entitled The Faith of Jesus Christ, which is a discussion of the phrase “faith of Jesus Christ” as being a subjective or an objective genitive in the original Greek language, but argues that this is set within a narrative framework. It would be fair to say that Hays believes that there is a “story-shaped” character to Paul’s writings. (Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, xxiv-xxv).

Wright tackles the question of what might be called a pure postmodern reading of Scripture’s Story in which there seems to be a lack of need to see the historical by stating:

While history and theology work at their stormy relationship, there is always a danger, particularly in postmodernism, that literary study will get on by itself, without impinging on, or being affected by either of the others [history or theology]. The more we move toward a climate in which ‘my reading of the text’ is what matters, the less pressure there will be to anchor the text in its own historical context or to integrate a wider ‘message’ of the text with other messages, producing an overall theological statement or synthesis. (Bracketed material by present writer.) (N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 13).

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Wright suggests that the writers of the Gospels collected useful and interesting material about Jesus and strung the material together in “what looks for all the world like a continuous narrative, a story.” (N. T. Wright, 15). In the Gospels, according to Wright, it was no surprise that Jesus told and retold the story of Israel as a part of his work. (N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God), 199). He advances an argument in five stages: First, the announcement of the Kingdom by Jesus is best understood as evoking the story of Israel and her identity. Second, the story summoned Israel to follow Jesus in a new way of being the true people of God. Third, the story included a climactic ending. There would be judgment and vindication. Fourth, the story generated a new structure for Israel which put Jesus in conflict with others who had alternative agendas. Fifth, the retelling of the story included a battle behind the rival agenda conflicts in which a real enemy was being faced. (N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 200). Wright seems to see the Gospels as the collection of stories about Jesus within a Story of Jesus. More

The fifteen contributors to The Art of Reading Scripture (2). set a core of nine affirmations when interpreting Scripture. The fourth of the affirmations is as follows:

Texts of Scripture do not have a single meaning limited to the intent of the original author. In accord with Jewish and Christian traditions, we affirm that Scripture has multiple complex senses given by God, the author of the whole drama.

While the authors do not reject historical investigation of biblical texts, they suggest that it should be used in “stimulating the church to undertake new imaginative readings of the texts. (Art of Reading Scripture, 3) This is a move away from authorial intent and debatable. Fee and Stuart hold that, “a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers.” (Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 74). If words had an “original intent” (How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Third Edition, 76). then how do the meanings of those words change their meanings to a different audience? Would not that cause God to be saying one thing at one time and possibly something completely different at another time? If one loses the sense of the author’s intent, then it seems that a text can mean, and usually does, anything the reader wishes to say it means.