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The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story

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The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story is one of the best introductions to narrative theology in print. Yes, this is the same Crossan associated with the search for the historical Jesus - but avoiding that strain of contemporary theology is no excuse to miss this gem.

Crossan is widely educated and very comfortably draws from a number of literary, philosophical and theological sources. His argument on the relationship between limit, game, and narrative is especially thought provoking. His analysis of parables as cross-expectations is one of the more interesting and thought-provoking studies of parables.

The net result of his line of thought is that the reader gains a pratical rather than strictly theorectical understanding of narrative theology ... and comes to see it as a natural tool of interpretation of life - one's own or Christ's/

I had read this book when I was in college and Crossan's model of story had struck me as very insightful. Re-reading it now, I find it less illuminating. In part, it's because some of Crossan's ideas strike me as conventional wisdom (at least among the group of people who think about epistemology -- and, in fact it may be, as the book's first edition is now more than thirty years old).

My larger criticism, though, is that while quite accessible, this brief book feels more like an extended gloss on a thesis than a fully-developed work. The author spends too much time establishing his premise of parable as one type of story, but too little examining the implications of the model. I would have preferred a significantly deeper discussion of the stories Jesus told and why they should be seen as subversive, particularly in the historical context of his time. (A point of illustration: he recast the story of the Good Samaritan in terms of the Vietnam War. In my head, I substituted Iraq and al-Qaeda for similarly jarring effect.) Indeed, the most powerful chapter of the book is the brief epilogue that discusses the ways in which Jesus' parables were defanged, or at least recast as apologues, to fit the early church's eschatology of the cross.