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5. Rowan Williams identifies parables not only as the designated gospel ‘parables’ but also narratives that are ‘effective images of a new world like the parables of Christ’. Williams, Rowan, On Christian Theology, in Gareth Jones and Lewis Ayres (eds.), Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), p. 27.Google Scholar

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9. Williams, On Christian Theology, p. xvi. However, Nancy Murphy and Brad Kallenberger view Williams as a postmodern theologian due to Williams being ‘indebted to Wittgenstein’. Murphy, N. and Kallenberger, B., ‘Anglo-American Postmodernity: A Theology of Communal Practice’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 26–41 (40).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See Ryken, Leland, How to Read the Bible as Literature (Grand Rapids: Academic Books, 1984). Another overview on hermeneutical practices is found in Robert J. Plummer, ‘Parables in the Gospels: History of Interpretation and Hermeneutical Guidelines’, Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13.3 (2009), pp. 4–11.Google Scholar

11. Narrative criticism discerns a theological, or ideational, viewpoint that may enhance the story's structure. Rhoads points out the unifying dominant point of view in tension with the ideology of the characters and a close reading of other narrative elements has the potential to reduce the narrative to an ordinary story. Rhoads, David, ‘Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark’, JAAR 50 (1982) pp. 411–434 (413). Narrative criticism also is critiqued because the influence of secular literary theory on biblical narratives has led to concern whether ‘this privileges against any kind of scrutiny that does not come from within the traditions of the faith community claiming the book as its own’. David Gunn, ‘Narrative Criticism’, in Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes (eds.), To Each its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticism and their Application (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp. 171–95 (193).Google Scholar

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21. A postmodern view of history moves away from totalizing narratives and the notion that any historical period has a single point of view. On the other hand, biblical scholarship in whatever method has confronted the accuracy, objectivity, evidentiary sources, intentionality of how history shapes or does not shape the written text. J. Maxwell Miller helpfully describes two extremes of reading the Bible historically: At one extreme are those who insist that the Bible is literally accurate in all historical details, including the chronological data provided in Genesis–2 Kings that place the creation of the world approximately 6000 years ago. … At opposite extreme are those who regard the biblical accounts as being so theologically and nationalistically tendentious … that any attempt to reconstruct the history of ancient Israel is fruitless … an essentially ahistorical approach to the text. ‘Reading the Bible Historically: The Historian's Approach’, in Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes (eds.), To Each its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticism and their Application (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp. 11–28 (15). Williams says of his position about historical and critical inquiry: ‘I am not happy with either an apologetic colonizing of historical study or a theologically dictated indifference to history’. On Christian Theology, p. 194.Google Scholar

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36. Williams, On Christian Theology, p. 105. Williams cites Jacques Pohier (God: In Fragments [London: SCM Press, 1985], p. 295) on the meaning of Christ: ‘The central and perhaps (paradoxically) “universal” meaning of Christ is in Christ's revelation, over against all religious totalities of interpretation of a God who is authentically creator of a world because this God does not wish to be everything.’ Williams links eschatological tribalism with ideological violence: ‘the third Reich's assault on the Jewish people in the urge to bring a kind of finality into history has rightly become the paradigm of ideological violence’ (On Christian Theology, p. 102).Google Scholar

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51. Williams cites Old Testament narratives such as the reforms of Ezra that conflict with the contemporeity of Ruth's mixed marriage and the tension between James’ letter and Paul's soteriology. These two reading strategies Williams does not view as false modern polarizations, but these ways enable a Christian community to articulate itself as a point of reference, given competing interpretations emerging from the intratextual tensions in the Church's diverse texts (On Christian Theology, pp. 53, 55).Google Scholar

52. Williams notes that synchronic reading or the non-literal will always be less influential than unfolding diachronic reading, because as TeSelle points out, ‘we love stories because our lives are stories’. TeSelle, Sallie, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 138 quoted in On Christian Theology, pp. 48–49, n. 15.Google Scholar

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