Brisbane School of Theology, Australian College of Theology
The Narratives of Change
More recently the narrative mode has been increasingly identified as a means of healing for the one suffering. White, one of the founders of Narrative Therapy, posits that people tell and live out of stories:
If we accept that persons organise and give meaning to their experience through the storying of experience, and that in the performance of these stories they express selected aspects of their lived experience, then it follows that these stories are constitutive — shaping lives and relationships.
From a practical viewpoint, various Christian authors have articulated approaches influenced by Narrative Therapy in Christian counselling, ministry and pastoral care from a Christian worldview. This interweaving of the Christian worldview and Narrative Therapy practices suggests the possibility that elements of the biblical story reflect ideas acknowledged in the narrative therapeutic process. There has been some attempt to apply the narrative therapeutic process to the biblical presentation, yet this oft-stated alliance by narrative therapists has not yet been explored from a textual point of view with great depth. A shared history in literary critical approaches provides a basis for interaction between a textual approach and narrative therapy concepts. Drawing on the work of White and Epston alongside various Narrative Critical concepts, this paper will explore how the narrative form provides resources for change for the one suffering in light of the biblical narrative text. A dialogue between narrative critical methods and a narrative therapeutic approach will provide further insight into the conversation already at work in the Christian appropriation of Narrative Therapy; that the biblical story offers change for the one suffering. It will add to it from a narrative critical point of view which has been thus far neglected in the literature.