2. The Theological Foundations of Narrative Apologetics
2.
The Theological Foundations of Narrative Apologetics
The whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world.
N. T. Wright
The Christian faith is ultimately based on a narrative, set out in the Bible, dealing with a God who chose to enter into and be disclosed within the historical process. We can speak of the story of God in that the character of God can be seen as rendered or performed through defining narratives that both disclose the character of God and shape the identity of God’s people. A narrative is not some kind of literary embellishment of the basic ideas of Christian theology; rather, it is generally the primary form of disclosure of God’s identity and character, which gives rise to those ideas.
The biblical account of the exodus from Egypt can be seen as one such disclosing and defining narrative (see “The Story of the Exodus: The Hope of Deliverance” in chap. 4); the most important, of course, is the story of Jesus Christ, which lies at the heart of Christian theology, worship, and ethics. This story is then correlated with individual human stories, as individuals try to work out how their individual story might be illuminated by this “story of God” or how they might find their own place within this greater narrative. The human quest for understanding and meaning can thus be framed in terms of this process of the “correlation of narratives.”
Yet we cannot see the apologetic potential of stories simply as a piece of good luck, a fortunate accident that offers the church important possibilities for communicating beyond its boundaries. Christianity offers us a way of seeing ourselves and our world that helps us realize that we are meant to use stories in this way. For this reason, this chapter will explore the theological foundations of narrative apologetics, which parallels a growing interest in narratives in Christian theology and ethics within the academic community.
H. Richard Niebuhr on the Retrieval of Narrative
Many scholars trace the origins of the growing interest in narrative theology back to 1941, when H. Richard Niebuhr published The Meaning of Revelation, which included a pivotal chapter titled “The Story of Our Lives.” In it Niebuhr argues that Christians should focus on the “irreplaceable and untranslatable” narrative of faith that straddles the borderlands of history, parable, and myth. The narrative of faith is “untranslatable” in that it cannot be converted to concepts or ideas without diminishment or distortion. The original narrative captures reality in such a way that any attempt to convert this to the abstract ideas favored by rationalism leads to a dilution of its power. As C. S. Lewis pointed out around the same time, it is impossible to convert mythos to logos without imaginative loss.
Niebuhr’s Meaning of Revelation began a productive conversation about the significance of the “irreplaceable and untranslatable” narrative that lies at the heart of Christianity. For Niebuhr, the preaching of the early church did not take the form of arguments for the existence of God but was “primarily a simple recital of the great events connected with the historical appearance of Jesus Christ and a confession of what had happened to the community of disciples.” The church relates its experience in the form of story as an “internal compulsion” that “arises out of its need—since it is a living church—to say what it stands for and out of its inability to do so otherwise than by telling the story of its life.”
Niebuhr invites his readers to reflect on the challenge faced by early Christian preachers as they tried to communicate the gospel truths about God, salvation, and revelation. In the end, Niebuhr suggests, their most effective approach was to tell their personal stories and show how these connected with something greater. Narratives relate what happened to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the past, just as they express what has happened to us in the present. We exist in history and cannot escape from its limiting conditions nor avoid using the medium of history to explain what we have found—including using narrative as a tool to describe what we have encountered and experienced and its impact upon us. “What we mean is this event which happened among us and to us.”
Niebuhr draws a distinction between an “observed” and a “lived” history. An external spectator will see history in a disinterested and analytical manner, whereas a participant will see and experience things in an engaged and involved way. Niebuhr thus notes the importance of autobiography as a narrative of “lived” history, in which what happened is related, interpreted, and incorporated into the business of living. Niebuhr illustrates this point through a comparison of two different narratives of healing: a “scientific case history” of a man who had been blind, and who can now see, which focuses on changes in his optic nerve; and an “inner history” of someone who “had lived in darkness and now saw again trees and the sunrise, children’s faces and the eyes of a friend.” The Christian faith is enfolded in a narrative of inner history of individuals and communities—the “story of what happened to us, the living memory of the community.”
For Niebuhr, this story focuses on Jesus Christ as an “intelligible event which makes all other events intelligible.” This is one of the most significant themes in Niebuhr’s theology of revelation: an event that is both intelligible in itself and capable of making sense of other aspects of our experience.
By revelation in our history, then, we mean that special occasion which provides us with an image by means of which all the occasions of personal and common life become intelligible. What concerns us at this point is not the fact that the revelatory moment shines by its own light, but rather that it illuminates other events and enables us to understand them.
Niebuhr’s line of argument is that the narrative of Jesus Christ is thus able to disclose the otherwise hidden or opaque intelligibility of other narratives—such as the history of Israel or of Greek philosophy, both of which can be interpreted as anticipations of the Christian faith. The narrative of Christ makes sense of other narratives—such as our own personal narratives, or that of the church. “We need a larger pattern, a more inclusive hypothesis through which to understand each other’s and our own memories. Such a pattern we have in the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
The story of Christ, for Niebuhr, thus offers us a “revelatory moment” that illuminates our own actions and sufferings and serves as the basis for further conceptual exploration. From this narrative, we “abstract general ideas of an impersonal character,” such as original sin, the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, and the true meaning of suffering. Niebuhr’s approach maintains the centrality of the focal narrative of Jesus Christ, recognizing that this gives rise to abstract, generalized theological conceptions. Yet these “concepts of great generality” cannot be entirely separated from the narrative of Christ. “Despite repeated efforts to state theological ideas abstractly it has been necessary for the church to return again and again to statements about historical actuality.”
While Niebuhr has little to say about the apologetic potential of his approach, there are sufficient hints in his analysis to indicate how it might be developed in this way. Niebuhr is clear that the “justification” of the Christian gospel is necessary, on account of both external attacks on faith and internal doubts about faith. Nevertheless, while he resists such moves, concerned that these might amount to a self-justification of Christian communities or theologians, the seeds of a Christian apologetic can be discerned within his approach. Niebuhr’s emphasis on the narrative of Christ as an “intelligible event which makes all other events intelligible” suggests that the quality of the intellectual rendering of reality offered by that narrative can be seen as an indicator of its wider appeal and reliability—a point to which we shall return later in this work (see “Criteria of Relevance for Narrative Apologetics” in chap. 5), in exploring what we might call an “inference to the best narrative.”
The Consolidation of Narrative Theology
The resurgence of theological interest in narrative since the late 1970s reflects many intertwined insights. Perhaps the most important is the realization that theologians and biblical interpreters who allowed themselves to be unduly influenced by the ideology of the Enlightenment suppressed what is actually the dominant and most characteristic literary form of the Christian Bible: the narrative. The Enlightenment’s suspicion of narrative, linked with its controlling assumption that history could not disclose the necessary and universal truths that were alone acceptable to reason, led it to marginalize biblical narratives, seeing them as at best contingent vehicles for a rational truth that could be more reliably obtained by pure reason. Stories thus gave way to intellectual systems—a timeless set of ideas that stood in contrast to the transient and shifting world of human experience expressed in narratives.
Although a proper appreciation of the theological role of narratives eventually began to reemerge in the German-speaking world in 1973, it is widely agreed that this movement has had its greatest impact in the English-speaking world. Yale theologian Hans Frei has argued that the dominant Enlightenment approaches to interpreting the Bible failed to respect or appreciate the importance of its core narrative structures. The Bible, he argues, ought to be read as a realistic, unified story that invites its readers to participate in its view of reality by reenacting and retelling its stories. Frei concedes that the Bible includes genres beyond “realistic narratives,” such as prophetic works and the Wisdom Literature. Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and the Pauline Letters are clearly not realistic narratives, as Frei understands this term. Yet Frei’s point is that even the theological conceptualizations of the New Testament—such as those of the Pauline Letters—are ultimately grounded in the story of Jesus Christ. There is thus a “narrative substructure” to some key Pauline ideas.
Stanley Hauerwas has developed this point further, arguing that while it is true that the Christian Bible “contains much material that is not narrative in character,” this material nevertheless “gains its intelligibility by being a product of and contribution to a community that lives through remembering.” And what is being remembered? The story of Jesus Christ, which is recalled through the reading of the Bible and using bread and wine in remembrance of him.
Some legitimate concerns have been raised about narrative approaches to theology and apologetics. Of these, the most important is the relation of the literary genre of narrative and the idea of divine revelation. The critical issue is the theological framework within which the narrative is located and interpreted—a framework that the narrative itself may suggest or support but cannot itself independently substantiate. Evangelical theologian Donald Bloesch has noted the importance of this point: “The Bible is not wholly narrational, for it also contains ongoing reflection upon the narratives of biblical history.” The interconnection of narrative exposition and theological interpretation within the New Testament is widely accepted, allowing evangelicals to affirm the importance of narratives while still reiterating the need to establish a secure biblical theological framework for the interpretation of such narratives.
As has often been pointed out, there are significant differences between narrative theologians on various issues. One such difference is highlighted by C. S. Lewis’s famous assertion that while “reason is the natural organ of truth, imagination is the organ of meaning.” If we accept Lewis’s distinction, does the “realistic narrative” at the heart of the Christian faith concern truth or meaning? Frei seems preoccupied with the latter, whereas the philosopher Paul Ricoeur recognizes the importance of the former. Yet if Lewis is right, we must reflect on the possibility that biblical narratives may engage with both human reason and imagination, with important apologetic implications.
Yet here we encounter what initially seems to be a paradox—that those theologians who have done so much to retrieve the importance of narrative for theology have resisted its application to apologetics. For example, Frei and Ricoeur made landmark contributions to the renewal of narrative theology during the late 1970s and early 1980s; both, however, contested the apologetic role of narratives. Frei argued that the “realistic narratives” of the Christian faith do not invite readers to assess the truth of each of their sentences (as if they were histories), nor do they invite an assessment of their logical coherence (as if they were philosophical arguments).
In part, however, this disinclination to develop the apologetic significance of narratives rests on an excessively rationalist understanding of apologetics, which leads to apologetics being seen as an inappropriate attempt to prove the existence of God on the basis of rational criteria that are not ultimately Christian but rather rest on the axioms of some philosophical system. The Christian apologist must rightly be expected to offer reasons for showing why the biblical narrative is either to be preferred to others or at least has a rightful and distinctive place among others. What reasons may be given for adopting this defining and informing narrative, whether as an exclusive account of reality or as a significant informing element within a group of narratives?
The problem is familiar to any reader of Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues that the Enlightenment notion of a universal human rationality could not be defended on the basis of the historical evidence: “There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other.” There is no neutral, tradition-independent way in which to assess the epistemic status of a theory or belief. The intellectual adequacy of any such concept of rationality must therefore be the extent to which it is able to account for the existence of rival or alternative rationalities.
MacIntyre’s point can be restated in narrative terms: if actions or beliefs are to be intelligible, they require location within a coherent tradition—and such traditions are sustained by their own distinct metanarratives. We thus need to determine what “grand story” can both explain the human propensity to tell stories in the first place and identify and fulfill what underlies them in the second. Christian theologians from the second century onward have recognized the importance of showing how a Christian metanarrative is able to account for the existence of other religious traditions, as well as presenting Christianity as their fulfillment.
Yet some readers might raise a concern here, pointing out that the movement loosely known as “postmodernity” advocates what Jean-François Lyotard has termed an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” While this is true, it does not, however, mean that all forms of metanarrative have been discredited, or even that they have been shown to be inadequately grounded. Lyotard’s familiar statement is actually about the rejection of a specific kind of metanarrative, through which modernity has tried to give legitimacy to its absolutist discourse and attempted to ground it in an allegedly autonomous human reason.
I see nothing in Lyotard’s analysis that can be seen as a legitimate criticism of a Christian recognition of the importance of narrative in the first place, or the capacity of the Christian narrative to provide a persuasive rendering of our world and history in the second. Such criticism has merit when directed against a modernist interpretation of Christianity, yet the classic patristic understandings of faith were not framed in such an intellectual or cultural context. Indeed, during the early fifth century, Augustine of Hippo anticipated many postmodernist criticisms of modernity, without losing sight of Christianity’s core belief that God was the ultimate referent of its narratives and signs. As James K. A. Smith rightly points out, Lyotard is thus best seen as inviting us to recover “the narrative character of Christian faith, rather than understanding it as a collection of ideas.” Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition can legitimately be read as a defense of narrative knowledge in the face of the increasing dominance of scientific knowledge.
Throughout this work, I shall retain the term “metanarrative,” understood in the sense of a satisfyingly capacious “grand story,” a “story of a larger kind” that is capable of explaining and positioning other stories, embraced because of its beauty and truth, not on account of some base desire to dominate. I have no modernist agenda whatsoever in doing so; indeed, I am critical of modernism’s core assumption of a universal human rationality that all thinking persons must acknowledge. The Christian faith offers its own grand narrative, which it affirms to be liberating—a truth that sets us free (John 8:32)—and unfolds a vision of how that freedom is attained and what form it takes. It is neither in intention nor in substance a master narrative—a “hegemonic discourse” that seeks to dominate or enslave—although it is capable of being distorted by individuals or institutions in the service of such agendas. (A metanarrative developed to serve the vested interests and privilege of some social or political group is in any case better described as an “ideology.”)
We need to be clear on why the term “master narrative” is so inappropriate and unhelpful as a way of conceptualizing the Christian story. First, it is not intended to master other people—to bludgeon them into submission. This is one of the most unattractive aspects of the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’s master narrative depicts religious believers as intellectually backward, socially regressive, and totally out of place in the modern world. And, second, the term “master narrative” suggests—but does not explicitly state—that God can be mastered by any conceptual system or narrative. A core axiom of Christian theology is that God transcends any such system or narrative.
There are other appropriate and helpful ways of thinking of Christianity as a “grand story.” Reformed theologian Michael Horton, for example, uses the term “meganarrative” to designate this “grand narrative,” which he rightly discerns as being of critical importance to Christian theology.
The prophets and apostles were fully conscious of the fact that they were interpreting reality within the framework of a particular narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, as told to a particular people (Israel) for the benefit of the world. The biblical faith claims that its story is the one that God is telling, which relativizes and judges the other stories about God, us, and the world.
So how might this metanarrative—this story that God is telling, rather than one that we have made up—explain the origin of other stories that human beings tell about themselves and their world? Or our natural instinct to want to tell stories in the first place?
The “Image of God”: A Theological Interpretation of Storytelling
As hinted at earlier (see “Christianity as a ‘Story of a Larger Kind’” in chap. 1), one of the most suggestive and interesting explorations of this question is that of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose anthropological studies, particularly in the field of Nordic culture and literature, led him to conclude that “myths”—that is, narrated accounts of reality, appealing primarily to the imagination and secondarily to reason—were ubiquitous. So what theological explanation might be given for this? As we noted earlier, Tolkien located an explanation in the notion of the image of God, which he held to function as a narrative template. Since human beings were created in the image of God, they possess a capacity to create stories that in some way reflects the divine rationality that remains embedded within humanity, despite the fall.
This theology of “sub-creation”—set out especially in his 1931 poem “Mythopoeia”—led Tolkien to develop a sophisticated yet subtle theology of religion, grounded in the Christian metanarrative’s capacity to accommodate pagan myths, in terms of both their literary form and their existential yearnings. By offering “a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world,” Tolkien suggested, pagan myths could elicit wonder and longing, thus creating both an appetite and an opening for the discovery of the deeper truth that underlies all truth, however fragmentary and veiled its natural forms might take.
For Tolkien, the Christian “myth” thus created intellectual and imaginative space for other stories. Tolkien’s advocation of this idea proved critically important in persuading C. S. Lewis to move from a generalized theism to a specific embrace of Christianity, conceived not primarily as a set of doctrines or moral principles but rather as a controlling and informing grand narrative that generated and sustained such ideas and values. Like Tolkien, Lewis came to hold that myths offered a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on the human imagination. Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus to be seen as representing the fulfillment of all myths—the “true myth” toward which all other myths merely point. Christianity thus tells a true story about humanity that makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself.
Lewis rightly saw that this distinction between “God’s myth” and “human myths” offered an intellectual and imaginative framework that allowed him to see the great myths of ancient Greece or Nordic legend as echoes or anticipations of the full truth, which was made known only in and through the Christian faith. The Christian narrative brings to fulfillment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture, suggesting that similarities between Christianity and pagan religions “ought to be there.” In fact, problems would arise if such similarities did not exist, as this would be to imply that “God’s myth” left “human myths” untouched. The great pagan myths, Lewis suggested, were “dim dreams or premonitions” of the greater and fuller truth of the Christian gospel.
Lewis argued that the Christian narrative thus gives rise to a clearer and fuller vision of things, which allows shadows, dreams, and rumors to be seen as premonitions and hints of a greater truth—but a truth they were unable to formulate, disclose, or embody. “It is like watching something come gradually into focus.” Seeing the full picture helps us make sense of what might otherwise seem hazy, fuzzy, confused, and fragmentary. It allows these fragments to be integrated within a larger vision of things, so that the fragments are joined together in a greater whole. What seemed to be disconnected, random, or even meaningless is shown to fit into a bigger picture—a picture disclosed by God, not invented by human beings.
The patristic period made extensive use of the notion of logos spermatikos—a “seed-bearing reason,” interpreted as God’s implanting, through the act of creation, rational tendencies, and intuitions that were capable of leading individuals to discover God. This important notion, however, is framed primarily in terms of an appeal to reason and might be considered deficient imaginatively. A new interest has recently emerged in the related notion of a mythos spermatikos as a way of making sense of the human use of stories to convey meaning and identity. The idea of mythos spermatikos helps us grasp that this created capacity to intuit the divine is to be seen in terms of creating and telling stories, not simply in terms of developing arguments or rational concepts.
Dorothy L. Sayers has developed a similar approach in her Mind of the Maker, which expresses her own distinct view of the image of God in humanity as a kind of imaginative template, which predisposes human beings to think and imagine in certain ways. The same “pattern of the creative mind” is evident in both theology and art. Sayers maintains that the pattern of human creative processes “corresponds to the actual structure of the living universe,” so that the “pattern of the creative mind” is an “eternal Idea” that is rooted in the being of God. Stories thus express something profound about who we are—which in turn expresses something of the God who created us in this manner. There are hints of such an approach in the later writings of C. S. Lewis, who remarked that God “is related to the universe more as an author is related to a play than as one object in the universe is related to another.”
These reflections give us reason to believe that stories are a God-given means of telling people about God, making sense of their worlds, and ultimately allowing them to grasp something of the relevance of God for life and thought. Even from this very brief reflection, it will be clear that a good case can be made for using narratives in Christian reflection—whether theological, ethical, or apologetic.
Understanding or Coping? The Question of Suffering
Many have noted the capacity of stories to help us come to terms with personal difficulties and cope with ambiguous experiences, such as loss and bereavement. This opens up the question of how a narrative approach to apologetics might engage the “problem of suffering.” Why does a good God allow suffering? Many Christian writers have written on this theme, without necessarily providing the kind of decisive intellectual resolution of the issue that some might have hoped for. Yet there is a helpful distinction that needs to be made here, between trying to understand the intellectual riddle of suffering and learning to cope with suffering and perhaps even growing through it.
The central place of the narrative of the crucified Christ within the Christian narrative helps us engage with suffering as both an existential and an intellectual issue. Christian theologians have, since the earliest times, argued that the presence of suffering in the world does not constitute a challenge to its rationality nor to the notions of meaning and purpose that are embedded within the Christian narrative. Augustine of Hippo (358–430), for example, set out an approach to the presence of evil within the world that affirmed the original integrity, goodness, and rationality of the world. Evil and suffering arose from a misuse of freedom, the effects of which are being remedied and transformed through redemption. Augustine argued that the believer is enabled to make sense of the enigmas of suffering and evil in the world by recalling its original goodness and looking forward to its final renewal and restoration in heaven.
Other Christian writers have developed different explanations to account for the origins of evil and suffering and their persistence within the world. Such approaches are essentially concerned to resolve the mental enigmas and intellectual puzzles arising from suffering. Yet many regard such approaches as inadequate to deal with the real problem caused by suffering and evil, which is better understood as existential rather than rational. How does the story of Christ’s suffering and death help us cope with life’s enigmas and traumas?
Early Christian spirituality, particularly during the extended period when Christianity was marginalized and sporadically persecuted, stressed the alignment of the individual believer’s personal narrative with that of Christ, especially in relation to suffering and hardship. The wall paintings of the Roman catacombs expressed this visually—for example, through depicting Christ as the good shepherd who carried his weary and fearful sheep through a dangerous world.
Approaches of this kind also dominated Christian spirituality during the Middle Ages, when there was a widespread acceptance that suffering was simply a fact of life that did not require explanation; it did, however, need to be engaged. Many writers of the age explored the question of how someone can grow in wisdom and maturity through suffering, often using images of the crucified Christ as an imaginative gateway to reflection. Whereas academic theologians of the Middle Ages wrote about the cognitive tensions arising from suffering, most writers of this period focused on how believers could cope with such pain and perplexity, using them as stepping-stones to wisdom and maturity.
C. S. Lewis wrote about suffering in two of his works. In his 1940 work, The Problem of Pain, Lewis argues that belief in God is consistent with the existence of pain in the world. Pain, he famously argues, is God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Yet Lewis’s reconciliation of faith and experience in this work is rational, not existential. It deals with abstract ideas, not the harsh, brutal realities of suffering and death. To its critics, Lewis’s approach in The Problem of Pain amounts to an evasion of the reality of evil and suffering as experienced realities; instead, they are reduced to abstract ideas, which must be fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of faith.
Two decades later, Lewis published (initially under a pseudonym) a powerful book titled A Grief Observed. This moving work consisted of the painful and brutally honest reflections of a man whose wife has died, slowly and painfully, from cancer. One of the most moving and memorable features of this work is Lewis’s description of his dawning realization that his rational, cerebral faith has taken something of a battering from the emotional crisis that has overwhelmed him. The slow death of Lewis’s wife did not lead him to unbelief; it did, however, reveal the precarious nature of an intellectual faith that was disconnected from the harsh realities of life.
Lewis’s solution came when he reflected on the narrative of Christ’s suffering and death. Lewis had been preoccupied with his desire to be able to suffer in the place of his dying wife: “If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.” The mark of the true lover was, for Lewis, a willingness to take on pain and suffering, in order that the beloved might be spared its worst. It was then that Lewis made the connection with the Christian narrative: that this is precisely what God did on the cross. Is it allowed, he “babbles,” to take on suffering on behalf of someone else, so that the person is spared at least something of its pain and sense of dereliction? The answer lies in the crucified Christ. “It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’”
Ultimately, the issue raised by the existence of evil, suffering, and pain focuses on the question of meaning. Is the world merely a random, meaningless accumulation of accidental events? Or may a deeper picture be discerned, one that enables the issues of human existence to be brought into sharper focus? Resilience in the face of illness, suffering, or trauma is widely agreed to be enhanced if it is seen as purposeful, intentional, or productive. The Christian narrative, which has at its core a crucified Savior, provides a framework of meaning that allows this kind of interpretation to be placed on these events, thus helping individual believers cope with their distress and anxiety. It invites us to enter a narrative that speaks of the violent, painful, and seemingly meaningless death of Christ and explores how this is shown to be meaningful in itself and capable of conferring meaning on others who suffer.
The Christian narrative frames illness and suffering in such a manner as to allow them to be seen as coherent, meaningful, and potentially positive, allowing them to foster personal growth and development. This narrative invites us to imagine ourselves as passing through a world of darkness and sorrow in the presence of a journeying God who is with us even when we pass through the “valley of the shadow of death.” As pastor Timothy Keller remarks, “Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.” The New Testament frequently affirms that the Christian hope of eternal life in the future is linked with the experience of suffering in the present and sees this link as expressed in the story of Christ’s passion and crucifixion: “We share in [Christ’s] sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (Rom. 8:17 NIV).
This brief reflection on how narratives can communicate and commend the richly textured account of reality offered by the Christian faith leads us to reflect more thoroughly and systematically on the place of narratives in Christian apologetics. In the next chapter, we shall focus on the three core tasks of apologetics we noted earlier (see “Why Apologetics Matters” in chap. 1) and consider how narratives can help us engage with these.