Topic: In the assigned reading this week, Fee and Stuart discussed the nature and key characteristics of the narrative genre. Throughout chapter 5, they attempt to clarify some of the common problems people experience when interpreting and applying of this genre of Scripture.
From this data and the 10 principles for interpreting narratives (p. 106), summarize these issues. Please begin your original thread by concisely clarifying what narratives are; then, summarize some of the common mistakes that are made as readers engage the biblical narratives.Narratives are meaningful stories that retell past events about specific characters (Fee and Stuart, 2003). Biblical narratives are just like narratives except they are inspired by the Holy Spirit. Biblical narratives tell God's story.
Biblical narratives have three components characters, plot, and plot resolution (Fee and Stuart, 2003). The characters include a protagonist, which is the main person in the story (Fee and Stuart, 2003).An antagonist which is the person that causes the conflict and lastly, agonist which role is to support the main characters in the story. A narrative main function is to retell a story using specific characters.
When interpreting narratives it is easy to make common mistakes associated with interpreting narratives. Although, there are many errors people make when interpreting narratives, I will only list three, which are moralizing, personalizing, and lastly misappropriation. The first, error is moralizing.Moralizing assumes that moral teachings or principles for living can be taught from all scripture (Fee and Stuart, 2003). The second, error is personalizing. Personalizing involves reading a narrative and making it pertain to you, instead of realizing that the narrative tells a story about specific characters in that story (Fee and Stuart).
The third and last error is misappropriation, which means to appropriate the text for purposes that it was not intended for (Fee and Stuart, 2003). There are many principles for interpreting narratives.However, I will only list three principles. The first principle is that narratives record what happened not what could or should have happened; therefore not every narrative has a moral application or teaching (Fee and Stuart, 2003).
The second principle is what people do in narratives is not always a good model for us to follow, in fact, it is usually the other way around (Fee and Stuart, 2003). The third and last principle, is that narratives are not written to answer all of our theological inquires.Narratives have certain, specific, limited purposes and deal with particular issues, allowing for others to be handled elsewhere or in different ways (Fee and Stuart, 2003). In closing, when interpreting a narrative we can make mistakes that hinder us from getting the most out of the story. Therefore these principles for interpreting narratives, when applied, will help us to get what we should out of reading narratives. Works cited, Fee and Stuart, G and D.
(2003). How to Read the All its Worth. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan.
