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

Abstract

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.