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1 A Trial Run: Parable, Poem, and Autobiographical Story Sallie McFague’s first major book, Speaking in Parables (1976) introduces her early concern with exploring theological discourse and how that arises out of various literary forms. She notes at the outset of the book’s introduction, “The purpose of theology is to make it possible for the gospel to be heard in our time” (1). Given that McFague rarely uses such “gospel” language in her later work, this statement sounds surprisingly traditional, even quaint, as does the noninclusive language for both God and humans that marks the book—a decided departure from what is yet to come. Using Sam Keen’s story of the peach-seed monkey to represent autobiographical story is also unusual (she later prefers to highlight figures such as John Woolman and Dorothy Day), but it is interesting that she employs it here as a kind of negative example, demonstrating metaphorical failure. This first chapter of Speaking in Parables nevertheless provides a good précis of her initial concerns, many of which recur in her later works. For instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” makes repeated appearances over the years (including in chapter 18, below). Thus the exploration of metaphor found here remains vital and helpful for understanding her later theological development. Source: 1976:10–25 A trial run is a worthwhile enterprise. Many books use the first five chapters to give historical background, then refute other views, and only in the final chapter (usually called “Prolegomena to Some Theological Directions”) is there a clue given to what the author has been up to. I would rather attempt a trial run, which, full of holes and unsubstantiated assertions, nevertheless gives the reader some clue as to how the theory might shake down in practice. In this brief chapter we will do no more than look in some detail at a few examples of literary genres that have been used for religious reflection. The stress in this 3 chapter . . . is on detail, for the crucial point here is to persuade the reader with a few well-known examples from Christian letters that parabolic theology is not a theory to be applied to literary genres of the Christian tradition but a kind of reflection that arises from them. Such persuasion will be effective only if the details of a parable or a poem can be shown to substantiate, even to demand, such an approach. Theological discourse, and especially “God-talk,” during what has been called the “absence” or the “death” of God, is, as we all know, in trouble. Richard Rubenstein, the Jewish theologian, states the problem this way: Contemporary theology reveals less about God than it does about the kind of men we are. . . . Today’s theologian, be he Jewish or Christian, has more in common with the poet and the creative artist than with the metaphysician and physical scientist. He communicates a very private subjectivity.1 And Sam Keen says that for the moment, at least, we must put all orthodox stories in brackets and suspend whatever remains of our belief-ful attitude. Our starting point must be individual biography and history. If I am to discover the holy, it must be in my biography and not in the history of Israel. If there is a principle which gives unity and meaning to history, it must be something I touch, feel, and experience.2 Several similar chords are struck in these two statements: the insistence that theology be existential, personal, sensuous; the wariness with which both Rubenstein and Keen approach talk about God; an intimation that a way out of the dilemma may be through the language and methods of the poet and storyteller. Their insistence on existential, sensuous, religious reflection that tells stories about human life and only by implication speaks of God is not as radical as it might at first blush seem, for it is an old and vibrant tradition in Western Christendom. We see it everywhere in the Old and New Testaments—in the history of Israel in its covenant with God and the many little stories that reflect that big one (Abraham and Isaac, the exodus from Egypt, Saul and David, and so on) and in the story of Jesus of Nazareth, which again is the central story reflected in many little stories, principally the parables. Worldly stories about human beings in their full personal, historical, bodily reality is also the “way” of Augustine’s Confessions, of Dante’s Divine...

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