Bishop Robert E. Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minn., has written this new e-book titled “The Nice Story of Israel.” Bishop Barron is the founding father of the Catholic media apostolate Phrase on Fireplace. (OSV Information photograph courtesy Phrase on Fireplace)

Bishop Robert Barron, “The Nice Story of Israel: Election, Freedom, Holiness”
Phrase on Fireplace, 2022
307 pages
$29.95

“Christian convictions take the type of a narrative,” explains theologian Stanley Hauerwas in his e-book, “The Peaceful Kingdom,” from 1983; “or maybe higher, a set of tales that constitutes a convention, which in flip … varieties a group.”

Hauerwas has taught us that this “narrative” method to Christian theology is in keeping with the way in which our ethical and religious lives are shaped, whatever the custom that varieties them. He explains that we come to know God, and thus our lives as individuals ordered towards God, via the formative tales of Israel, Jesus and the Church. Nor are the tales incidental to our understanding of, and participation in, God’s love and charm. We can not summary God from them and nonetheless know the God of Christian religion. “There isn’t a ‘level’ that may be separated from the story,” contends Hauerwas.

Even when some skilled theologians take subject with Hauerwas’ emphasis on narrative as the first method to know God, he’s absolutely right that that is the way in which that the typical Christian involves know God. Our data of God will not be primarily communicated by doctrines or dogmas, however fairly by tales of the Bible and the nice saints of the Church. And as our data of God is discovered this fashion, so too are our lives as disciples of Christ. “There isn’t a extra elementary method to discuss of God than in a narrative,” Hauerwas contends.

In his wonderful new e-book, “The Nice Story of Israel: Election, Freedom, Holiness,” Bishop Robert Barron by no means invokes Hauerwas by identify however he clearly writes within the spirit of this “narrative” manner of forming our Christian lives and understanding our Christian existence. As early as his 2007 e-book “The Precedence of Christ: Towards a Postliberal Catholicism,” Bishop Barron’s scholarly work has been rooted soundly on this custom. There, he defined that the higher manner of understanding Jesus was not via generalized hypotheses or “supposed common truths,” however fairly “with Jesus Christ in all his specificity.” He didn’t start with “foundationalist assumptions,” however fairly with “the dense particularity and religious complexity of the image of Jesus because it emerges from the New Testomony narratives.”

“The Nice Story of Israel” applies this narrative methodology to look at the great, complicated, paradoxical and sometimes-contradictory story of the chosen individuals of God. Bishop Barron has the uncommon reward of writing accessible theological books on the muse of his scholarly erudition. Whereas “The Precedence of Christ” is written for different theologians, “The Nice Story of Israel” is written for the curious layperson who needs higher to know the background of the tales that make up the Hebrew Bible. Extra importantly, Bishop Barron invitations us to search out our place within the story.

He demonstrates the narrative cohesion of the story of Israel, as it’s ordered towards its function of resulting in the complete revelation of God in Christ. “The Bible is primarily the account of how God acted in historical past, exactly via the individuals of Israel,” he explains. “And the climax of the biblical narrative … is a really explicit Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.” Whereas drawing upon instruments of biblical criticism, Bishop Barron doesn’t enable the narrative to get misplaced in them, and whereas he calls the e-book a “commentary,” it’s totally different from the standard biblical commentary. He proceeds e-book by e-book, however he doesn’t deal with the books as discrete objects of study. Reasonably, Bishop Barron weaves them collectively into the compelling story of an imperfect individuals transferring towards perfection. “The Nice Story of Israel,” the primary of a projected two-volume mission, might be a salutary addition to your theological library.

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Kenneth Craycraft is affiliate professor of ethical theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & College of Theology in Cincinnati.

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