‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ said a little child.
‘Listen to the voice of innocence!’ exclaimed her father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
‘But he has nothing on at all!’ at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he felt that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now. And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
Hans Christian Anderson1
This encounter is the first story among many stories contained in this book – principally the stories of homeless people who, with a mixture of courage, determination, hesitation and hope, have recounted their lives to me. They have exposed their weakness and vulnerability and, with a few modifications, have allowed their stories to become public. This is also the story of this writer and his responses to hearing the stories of others. Some of this story is set down here as well. By placing these stories out there, in the public domain, they become fixed as new stories, resonating and conflicting with other stories, part of the ebb and flow of our desire to make sense of the world through narrative. I now invite you, the reader, to reflect on your story as you read and react to the stories told here, and so perhaps form another story which honours the reception of this material.
Part I of this book, therefore, sets out to construct a theology of story, including the methodological and practical implications of collecting lifestories of homeless people. Chapter 1 introduces some general themes concerning narrative before focusing on the claim of liberation theologians that the poor are especially privileged as storytellers for God, and on the nature of story as a holy conversation. Chapter 2 concentrates on the place of God in the story: the loving relationship between God and humanity played out in the narrative of holy scripture in which we participate as covenantal partners. Chapter 3 looks at the collection of stories of everyday life and how a qualitative method is best suited to their analysis. There is an overview of important themes and of the ethical implications of this research, including the position of the writer/researcher. A second project of Contextual Bible Reading with homeless people is also described.
Part II (Chapter 4) opens with a return to the significance of context, and situates these stories within various frames. A brief history of housing and homelessness takes the reader up to some of the changes intended by the Conservative–Liberal Coalition Government; an international perspective is provided by situating these comments within the social and economic crisis of 2008 and onwards, which originated in the American housing market. Theologies of place and space, and theologies of equality give further contextual lenses through which to hear, read and interpret what homeless people have recounted. Chapters 5 to 8 analyse these stories of homeless people from various perspectives: short biographies of each interviewee (and biographical details of this writer); common biographical themes under the headings of Causes of Crisis and Results of Crisis; responses centred around emotions and feelings; responses about spirituality and religious experiences. Chapter 9 is an account of how homeless people read and interpreted particular biblical passages, with certain striking results.
Part III offers conclusions by returning to the starting point, and asks in Chapter 10 whether the preceding analysis of the stories of homeless people supports the methodologies described earlier. Chapter 11 examines in more detail Church policy and practice towards homeless people, and what Christian scriptures have said in this regard. Chapter 12 seeks to reconcile these various elements by outlining a theological approach which gives value to the stories which homeless people tell. The central symbol of the Trinity is envisioned not simply as a God of homelessness but as a homeless God who shares the storied experience of the marginalised, while also providing hope of transformation. A theology of story therefore is the crucial access point which uncovers the paucity of our theological and ecclesial response to homelessness, as well as pointing towards a richer and more inclusive future.
Telling stories of the self is dangerous – from an academic point of view, experience tends to be mistrusted and religious experience the more so; there is some personal risk too.2 However, Jürgen Moltmann uses experience to locate his personal theological existence and to answer the question ‘Where do we think theologically?’ In Experiences in Theology, he describes his reluctant use of the pronoun ‘I’ in his theological writing, recognising that ‘readers of a book want to know not only what the author has to say, but also how he or she arrived at it, and why they put it as they do’.3 He admits that having studied academic theology, he is now interested in ‘the theology of the people’ where men and women struggle to bring up families, worry about their children and remember their dead. He begins almost every chapter of the book with a personal introduction: ‘My personal access to black theology’, ‘The beginnings of my personal sensitivity to feminist theology’, and so on. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a similar piece of spiritual autobiography in Barth’s Church Dogmatics, where he reflects on the hymns which he sang as a child:
… as these songs were sung in the everyday language we were then beginning to hear and speak, and as we joined in singing, we took our mother’s hand, as it were, and went to the stall in Bethlehem, and to the streets of Jerusalem, where, greeted by children of a similar age, the Saviour made His entry, and to the dark hill of Golgotha, as the sun rose to the garden of Joseph.4
In explicating a theological route map I want first to place this pastoral encounter with Simon (and others like him) into the broad theoretical framework of practical theology. The themes I develop are based on an understanding of this encounter as an event of narrative or story, which whether consciously or not, is always theological. My first purpose is therefore to produce a theology of story which comes out of this pastoral experience, and which opens up further possibilities in the exploration of specific stories of homeless people. My ultimate aim is towards a theology of homelessness, which includes analysis of these homeless stories in dialogue with Christian scriptures, Church tradition and other theologies, with the stories of this writer and this reader also under scrutiny, but secondary to the main data.
Practical theology includes a number of key characteristics which thread their way through this book: individual and communal experience of the contemporary world in dialogue with traditional texts; a postmodern approach which ‘retrieves from the margins the repressed and hidden “Others” of Western modernity’; the assumption of a ‘criterion of love’, by which theology and the theologian are themselves transformed by a spirituality which involves participation of heart and mind.5
I have used the word story or narrative as a descriptive term for recording what happened in a chance meeting with Simon, the drug-user, with the clarification that in the recording of it we are now in fact dealing with two stories – his and mine. A more complex analysis of the encounter soon sees two other constituents, so that the process begins to look like this: a storyteller tells her story to a listener or a reader and at this point the story itself takes on some independent life. Some or all of these elements may be in conversation with the Bible, as the normative text of Christianity, and with Christian theology. Some parts of the story are communicated by words, others by body language, silence and so on.
There are a variety of roles or agents here. The first is the role of the storyteller: liberation theology underscores why special attention should be paid to the stories told by poor people. The second area focuses on the story itself, so I explain how a conversation may be described as holy or sacred, give some ground rules for the reading of texts, and then look beyond the individual to the community nature of stories. The third area is the place of God and scripture in the telling of stories. In Chapter 2 God’s Story I take a broad narrative view of the Bible to include the insights of Karl Barth and other theologians, and then concentrate on the stories told by Jesus. The role of listener/reader threads its way throughout this book, especially in references to the reciprocal relationship with text. The significance of this writer’s role is recognised by a snapshot of his own life history.
Finally, let me now turn to some introductory remarks about story, and why stories are always theological. ‘Narrative as a primary act of mind’ is the title of an essay by Barbara Hardy in a collection about children’s literature. Her argument is that narrative is not an aesthetic invention of artists but a primary act of mind transferred from life to art. In other words, we function at a fundamental level as human beings through the medium of story:
For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future.6
It is not simply children who move between the world of the fairy story and ‘real’ life but all human beings who inhabit both the world of fantasy and the one of raw events. It is by means of narrative that we impose some order on the unceasing flow of happenings.
From a theological perspective a similar point about the foundational quality of narrative is made by Bernard Lonergan:
Without stories, there is no knowledge of the world, of ourselves, of others, and of God. Our narrative consciousness is our power for comprehending ourselves in our coherence with the world and other selves; it expresses our existential reality as storytelling and storylistening animals, acting and reacting within our particular world context, overcoming the incoherence of the unexamined life. One man’s story is another man’s point of departure. We live on stories; we shape our lives through stories, mastering the complexity of our experience through the dynamic of our structured knowing …7
What is a Story? also suggests that it is story which gives form to life, but stresses the presence of emotion – what Cupitt calls ‘the production of desire’. Human beings construct lifestories in both these aspects, borrowing magpie-like from any other fiction we can get hold of, often in competition with the stories of others around us.8 Stories always remain theological because they promise that life can be meaningful; they contain a message or moral imperative; they are value-inducing; and they help in maintaining individual identity.9 More bleakly, Cupitt describes storytelling as equivalent to Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights: simply ‘putting off death by telling tales through the night’. In How Our Lives Become Stories Paul John Eakin writes that the autobiographical self is not a single, static entity, but plural, embodied and relational. Narrative form (or story) is not just an appropriate vehicle to express such identity, it is a constituent part of the self, an identity content.10 Anything which affects our ability to tell the story will touch our identity too. In extreme cases, an inability to narrate (for example, stroke patients and those severely abused in childhood) or an excess of narration (living entirely in a fantasy world) alters our sense of an ‘automatic narrative pilot’ and consequently damages our identity.11 This broad understanding of what is meant by story or narrative forms a working definition for this theological route map. It remains to be seen, under the impact of the specific lifestories of homeless people, whether such fundamental assertions are justified.
How is it possible that poor, vulnerable or marginalised people become significant storytellers? Liberation theology places the poor at the centre of God’s plan for salvation, and explains how telling a story is part of the process of freedom.
Liberation theologians speak of the concept of a preferential option for the poor, a theology from the poor themselves, and a theology which recognises the context in which it is being written. Gustavo Gutiérrez in his introduction to A Theology of Liberation refers to the poor having a prior but not exclusive claim on God. He bases this claim not on social analysis, nor human compassion, but on a Christian interpretation of how God operates in human history as recorded by scripture, especially in Matthew 25.12 Gutiérrez describes two strands of poverty found in the Bible – poverty as a scandalous condition against which to be indignant, and poverty as spiritual childhood, humility before God. The Old Testament prophets Job, Isaiah and Amos all protest against those who ‘thrust the poor off the road’, ‘turn aside the needy from justice’, and ‘trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth’.13 The Levitical and Deuteronomical Laws stand to prevent the injustices of poverty by the provision, for example, of jubilee years. By contrast, the privileged condition of poverty interpreted as abandonment to and trust in God (for example in the Psalms) receives its highest expression in Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes and in the imitation of Christ in Philippians 2: ‘Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped …’.
Juan Luis Segundo uses the concept of priority as a way into reading the gospel, what he calls a ‘pre-understanding’, so that the option for the poor is not a theme of liberation theology but ‘an epistemological premise for an interpretation of the word of God’.14 The reason and need for this pre-understanding of the gospel is that in Latin America ‘literally millions of people are dying because for five centuries the gospel has been interpreted in a particular way’. So the option for the poor becomes a hermeneutical key – or rather a wager on which he stakes himself, his Christian faith and theological work, for he takes the risk of affirming that five centuries of theology in Latin America have been wrong.15 The option for the poor in concrete terms is to be realised with those who suffer most from material poverty. Segundo moves forward the critical example of the (Lucan) Beatitudes by reminding us that the hungry are not blessed because of their hunger, but because they will cease to be hungry, and so on.
In the Black Theology of Basil Moore and James Cone which focuses on liberation and ‘race’, the identification of God with the oppressed is such that Christian theology must take the colour of the victims of oppression: ‘God’s salvation breaks through like a ray of “blackness” upon the “whiteness” of the condition of the oppressed’. The ultimate conclusion of a preferential option for the poor is the complete identification of God with those who are oppressed. For Cone, this is to see the incarnation of the Word in the particular reality of Jesus himself as a black man, but one who would still suffer at the hands of a white Church:
Christians
what welcome would they give God’s son
confronted with the classification board
and identification card stating race
then consigned to his proper place
would he be banned for his message
that love has no colour connotation
that the brotherhood of man is all-embracing?
Christians
who deport priests for performing God’s work
will not hesitate to proclaim an order
declaring the son of God an agitator.16
A theology or a Church from the poor was not the dominant trend of Latin American thinking. The first development of liberation theology sought principally to reveal the ideological weakness of an expression of Christianity which gave support to the ruling classes, and was largely successful among middle-class people (university students and staff in particular); the second, marking a shift around the 1970s and given a different political climate, aimed much more to learn from poor people themselves. This second development was encouraged by the relative failure of the first to find support among precisely those people whom its pastoral practice was designed in the long term to help, largely because this theology was suspicious of popular (Catholic) religious practice. So a painful conversion to be a learner rather than a teacher was the lot of the intellectual including the theologian at this period. Segundo writes:
It appeared then that if theologians were still to be the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the common people – that is to say, useful as intellectuals charged with the understanding of popular faith – they were obliged to learn how oppressed people lived their faith.17
However, he is quick to point out that there may be an inherent difficulty in evangelising the theologian with an understanding of God which is flawed – ‘passive and fatalistic’ – one which leaves the poor with no more real hope than before.
To involve poor people themselves, Segundo’s second strand of theology is followed when commitment to the poor leads to a realisation that they in turn are a means of evangelising the Church. Gutiérrez writes:
Commitment to the poor and oppressed and the rise of grassroots communities have helped the Church to discover the evangelising potential of the poor. For the poor challenge the Church at all times, summoning it to conversion; and many of the poor incarnate in their lives the evangelical values of solidarity, service, simplicity and openness to accepting the gifts of God.18
The extent to which this challenges the thinking and practice of the Church is illustrated by Samuel Rayan who writes about a theology of the Dalit people in India. His expectation is that all struggle against injustice and brutality is interpreted as a theological event, which is ‘provoked and energized by the Holy Spirit, the Father/Mother of the poor’. But such theology is latent and requires the theologian to articulate it, not least so that all are sustained by ‘the hope of God’s reign on our earth’. Having made this interpretation the Church is then faced with ‘the imperative of solidarity and participation’.19 Rayan re-interprets Hebrews 13: 11–1320 as a challenge to go with Jesus outside the camp; he sees the essence of Christian spirituality and the identity of the Church in this solidarity with outsiders.
Paulo Freire writes from the perspective of education, both theoretically and from his observations of peasants, urban workers, and the middle-classes. He is concerned with the restoration of humanity to those from whom it has been ‘stolen’, and also to those who are ‘thieves’. Paradoxically, it is the oppressed who will restore the humanity of both themselves and of the oppressor in ‘an act of love’ on the part of the oppressed.21 This will restore to both parties the basic vocation of ‘becoming more fully human’. By giving back humanity to the oppressor, those who have been victims resist the temptation of becoming oppressors themselves, and cast off a false model of what it is to be human. Yet such liberation is as painful as childbirth since those who suffer injustice have often internalised their role:
One of the greatest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge men’s consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.22
The role of the pedagogue (or theologian) is to work with, and not for, the oppressed, to encourage reflection upon and engagement with the world of oppressive reality.
Liberation theologies are contextual theologies. Gutiérrez asks how can we talk about God given the oppression in Latin America? How can we tell the poor that God loves them in these conditions? Thus there is a movement to favour a particular theological reading as opposed to a universal one, whether the context is Latin America or Black South Africa. Theo Witvliet describes this as a suspicion of the universal:
Liberation theology is liberation of that theology which supposes itself to be universalist and as such passes over the diversity of human situations and human needs, social tensions and conflicts, and the causes of poverty and wretchedness. It disparages the old association of this pseudo-universality with the dominant cultures, social classes and races. The epistemological break is the condition for a new form of universality which makes room for these experiences of faith and reflections on faith which are excluded by the dominant traditions of theology and teaching authority.23
Moore is pungent in his rewriting of the question:
What is the meaning of the Gospel for those living not with their white bums in the butter but with their black backs to the wall?24
Black Theology, says Moore, ‘is situational theology. And the situation is that of the black man in South Africa’.25 He contrasts this starting point of fear, oppression and hunger with classical Western theology which he describes as ‘top-down and doctrinaire’. Gutiérrez situates his theology of sin and redemption firmly in the context of the lives he observes, so that the individual, private or internal dimension of sin gives way to sin as the socio-historical fact of the absence of fellowship and love amongst persons.26 He contrasts post-Enlightenment European theology with that done in Latin America; the first is concerned with non-believers, the second with non-persons.27
Beginning with the role of storyteller, liberation theology discloses how the poor are in a special position to tell stories of God. The stories which they tell of their lives, especially the struggle against injustice and brutality, are seen to be privileged moments with a latent theology awaiting critical articulation. Yet the listener, theologian or pedagogue, is not destined to remain passive. They are called to a variety of different responses. Solidarity and protest in the face of such poverty leads the theologian to a new hermeneutical question in respect of the Bible: who is Jesus for the poor and homeless? This challenge extends uncomfortably to the way in which the Church has lived the gospel for many centuries. In a particularly striking image, theologians are called to go outside the camp and join the poor, to become one of the homeless, who alone are able to set them free from their own oppressive instincts. Yet, the theologian is also called to contest beliefs and practices, which though originating from poor people, are nevertheless instrumental in maintaining unjust structures.
If marginalised people are effective storytellers for God, then perhaps the interviews with homeless people described in later chapters are a kind of holy conversation, one which takes a different form when it is written down, and changes again as it becomes autobiographical. This conversation-story reforms when it is told in public, now sharing ownership as a community possession. God’s place in the story is assured by reading the particular text of the Bible, and thereby creating a theology of story in which to place the narratives of homeless people.
Martin Buber comes close to affirming that all conversations have the potential to be holy. He defines two different relationships which he calls I–Thou and I–It: I–Thou establishes the world of relations with nature, with other humans and with spiritual beings, whereas I–It is about relations with objects. The building up of the relationship I–Thou with another human is not about sustaining life but helping us ‘to glimpse eternity’. The model for this is Jesus as the exemplar of the I of unconditional relationship with the Thou of the Father. Human beings often harden a Thou into an It in their interactions. Conversations with homeless people can be holy when they begin to fashion a discourse which mirrors this I–Thou relationship, allowing free space for exploration by both parties, and with a growing understanding that both I’s are affected. For example, in one interview both nervousness and relief were communicated to the interviewer during and after the telling of a painful story. There was also no question of objectivising the interviewee, reducing him to the I–It position, as might have been the case with a quantitative survey.
Conversations are holy too when taken together they become a series of I–Thou relationships which point to a closer relationship with God. Buber does not say that human beings know more about the eternal Thou, simply that they draw closer, the Thou itself remaining a mystery. Indeed, any attempt to define the mystery is in danger of reducing a relationship with God to an I–It position. The mystery turns into paradox when the conversation is with God:
There is a tale that a man inspired by God once went out from the creaturely realms into the vast waste. There he wandered till he came to the gates of the mystery. He knocked. From within came the cry, ‘What do you want here?’ He said, ‘I have proclaimed your praise in the ears of mortals, but they were deaf to me. So I came back to you that you yourself may hear me and reply’. ‘Turn back,’ came the reply from within. ‘Here is no ear for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals’. True address from God directs man into the place of lived speech, where the voices of the creatures grope past one another, and in their very missing of one another succeed in reaching the eternal partner.28
Human beings are forced back to the world in which they live if they are to have any chance of finding the God who is speaking. God’s speech demands response but they are highly likely to be deaf to it. The semi-structured conversations which make up these interviews are an attempt to remove wax from the ears, a theological syringe wielded to the sense of hearing the divine. And although fully conscious that talk is imperfect and encounters fail to connect, yet still in that failure, as in Buber’s story, God may be touched.
The adoption here of a critical-realist reading of texts, including raw transcriptions of interviews, implies some both/and statements: that homeless people do reveal some true facts about their lives, and that they also modify their stories for the interview; that the interviewer does operate objectively and that the kind of conversation they have is affected by his stance and ideas; and in a similar vein in the process of transcribing, analysing and reading.29 This means that while the transcriptions and the analysis will have, to some extent, lives of their own, the interviewer, transcriber and author have an important impact on the final result, the more so when these three roles are held by the same person. This is acknowledged by the inclusion of significant amounts of verbatim text and of the reactions of this author; but to go further, I insist that instead of interpreting this as a weakness, I include the interviewer/transcriber/author as a key storyteller in the theological enterprise around these events. However, by reading a text with a hermeneutic of love, the author will resist the solipsistic temptation simply to reduce it to their own issues.
Love needs to be balanced by suspicion in an analysis of any personal writing. At the root of religious autobiography, the subject (I) is always a literary invention, ‘reporting the supreme fiction of memory as fact’.30 For example, Augustine’s Confessions begins from early childhood and charts a path through adolescence into adulthood, yet there is a conscious style which draws heavily on the Bible, reflecting the faith of the mature Augustine, the writer. There is a dense interlocking of stories and texts here, further complicated by the realisation of the kind of literary fiction in which there are at least two Augustines, ‘the wise narrator and the foolish protagonist’. In other words, the ironic distance between the I of childhood thieving and adolescent lust, and the I of Augustine, monk and bishop is underscored.31 Similarly, this author suspects that the I of experiential or ‘confessional’ mode differs in this text from the I of academic writer and interlocutor, and questions the subsequent implications.
The ‘rougher’ data of transcriptions are not literary texts, and yet there are sometimes obvious attempts to make sense of the past, to give order to lives which may otherwise appear chaotic. The identity which narrative reveals is thus understood as ‘dynamic, changing and plural’. In response to these lifestories, a ‘criterion of love’ is balanced by a hermeneutic of suspicion: talk of ourselves is less transparent that we would like to think it.
Turning from the individual or private dimension of narrative, the central feature of Stanley Hauerwas’ A Community of Character is that stories form and develop communities, and that the viability of a community lies in its ability to tell and re-tell the story of its founder. He uses the novel Watership Down by Richard Adams to illustrate his argument, suggesting that the effectiveness of various communities is to be judged by how they maintain the narratives that define them, in this case as rabbits. For example, Part I of Watership Down contains ‘The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah’. El-ahrairah is the founder of the rabbit world, a quasi-mythical figure around whom significant legends are told. This story recalls the way in which Frith (God) has blessed the rabbits with special gifts, but is not to be taken for granted or mocked. Dandelion begins the story in this way:
Long ago, Frith made the world. He made all the stars too and the world is one of the stars. He made them by scattering his droppings over the sky and this is why the grass and the trees grow so thick on the world. Frith made the brooks flow. They follow him as he goes through the sky and when he leaves the sky they look for him all night.32
The story is narrated at a crucial early moment when the rabbits escape the danger posed to their original burrow, and exhausted, are in danger of losing courage. They are all familiar with the tale but it is effective in giving them enough strength to hide from immediate danger.
By extension, faith communities are built and formed through the telling and re-telling of foundation stories. Christians learn their parts in the story; they situate themselves within the timeframe of the story, and they begin to understand how story works. The best way of doing this, Hauerwas implies in his use of Watership Down, is through the medium of story itself. Scripture as performance, however, does not capture sharply enough the ‘risk and radical contingency’ of the play being enacted. For the Christian, the play is not one she is able to step out of, because it claims to be about a comprehensive interpretation of her identity and future.33 These stories include the dimension of time since the interpretation of past and present with an eye to the future is also a function of narrative. In the context of Christian ethics, Hauerwas sees narrative as giving the necessary framework for the acquisition of freedom, providing it is a narrative which can ‘make sense’ of the whole of our lives, including past mistakes:
we need a story that not only provides the means to acknowledge the blunders as part of our own story, but to see ourselves in a story where even our blunders are part of our on-going grace, that is, are forgiven, and transformed for ‘our good and the good of all the church’.34
The loss of such narrative is highly significant for the community.
Within a dynamic which moves from private to public I have considered here some aspects of story which pertain to the narratives of homeless people. The sense in which careful listening honours and validates the account of vulnerable lives mirrors the perspective of an I–Thou relationship which Buber describes; but it also points to the paradox of the presence of God. Unless such a conversation, humanly speaking, is to remain in this relatively private domain, the recording and textualising of these sacred encounters is a prerequisite for an exploration of the theology of the stories which homeless people tell. Such texts bring with them the issue of their construction and how we read them. In choosing a critical-realist approach I have sought to combine the holiness of I–Thou with the need for academic rigour, focusing on a twin hermeneutic of love and suspicion, in which love is primary. The possibility of setting these texts before strangers points to the social and moral dimension of storytelling. While the ethics of this enterprise will be viewed in a following chapter, here the focus has been on how stories are the building blocks of community wellbeing and identity, especially in the formation of faith communities. The circle has been closed, as it were, at the end of this section by realising that story can be its own best pedagogue. Entry to the circle is facilitated by a criterion of love, but once there, learning about the significance of story is enabled by our own listening and telling.
1 Hans Christian Anderson, The Emperor’s New Clothes (London, Blackie: no date), pp. 109–10.
2 Brett Smith writes bravely of his depression in ‘The Abyss’, recognising professionally both advantages and disadvantages of a confessional account. Qualitative Inquiry 5/2 (1999): 264–79.
3 Jürgen Moltmann, Experiences in Theology (English translation. London: SCM, 2000), p. xix.
4 David Ford, Barth and God’s Story (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1981), p. 16.
5 James Woodward and Stephen Pattison (eds), The Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 113, 201 and 204.
6 Barbara Hardy, ‘Narrative as a Primary Act of Mind’ in Margaret Meek, Aidan Warlow and Griselda Barton (eds), The Cool Web (London: Bodley Head, 1977), p. 13.
7 John Navone, Towards a Theology of Story (Slough: St. Paul Publications, 1977), p. 18.
8 Don Cupitt, What is a Story? (London: SCM, 1991), p. 67.
9 Cupitt, Story, p. 77.
10 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 100.
11 Eakin, Stories, p. 124.
12 Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (London: SCM, 1988), p. 115.
13 Job 24: 2–14; Isaiah 10: 1–2; Amos 2: 6–7.
14 Juan Luis Segundo, Signs of the Times (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), p. 122.
15 Segundo, Signs, pp. 125 and 126.
16 Basil Moore (ed.), Black Theology: The South African Voice (London: Hurst, 1973), pp. 55 and 56. The verses are from James Matthew’s ‘Christians’, p. 64.
17 Segundo, Signs, p. 74.
18 Gutiérrez, Liberation, p. xlii.
19 Samuel Rayan, ‘The Challenge of the Dalit Issue: Some Theological Perspectives’ in V. Devasahayam (ed.), Dalits and Women (The Gurkukul Summer Institute, 1992), p. 120.
20 For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp, and bear the abuse he endured.
21 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 21 and 32.
22 Freire, Pedagogy, p. 28.
23 Theo Witvliet, A Place in the Sun (English translation. London: SCM, 1985), p. 36.
24 Moore, Black Theology, p. x.
25 Ibid., p. 6.
26 Gutiérrez, Liberation, chapter 9 ‘Liberation and Salvation’.
27 Ibid., Liberation, p. xxix.
28 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (English translation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1947), p. 15. See also Martin Buber, I and Thou (English translation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958).
29 See N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992).
30 Eakin, Stories, p. 98.
31 T.R. Wright, Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 95–100. See also Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 66–76. His analysis of Confessions Book vi.8 (Alypius at the gladiatorial games) insists that Augustine is breaking new ground in his writing by abandoning the rule of separated styles and reflecting profoundly on the nature of faith within an earthy and emotional human reality.
32 Richard Adams, Watership Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 37.
33 Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 134.
34 Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 147.