Abstract

Narrative Theology's basic premise is that human life is experienced as narrative, and that any individual narrative is rooted in and derivative of community narrative. Alasdair MacIntyre well represents the idea that experience is essentially narrative in form. Experience-as-narrative, however, does not provide useful criteria for discerning when a narrative becomes destructive to those either within or without a specific narrative. In the philosophical terms provided by Jean-Francois Lyotard, there is a "space of forgetting" between experience and narrative that must be acknowledged. A coherent narrative necessarily ignores much experience of those both inside and outside the narrative. Relations of power operate in this "space of forgetting" between experience and narrative. Michel Foucault provides us with a picture of power as inherent to all human relation, as inextricably connected with knowledge, and as requiring resistance. Power, according to Foucault, is not collapsed with domination but is synonymous with the web of human relations marked by a range of ability and possibility. When narrative sees that every relation is a power relation, it has taken the first move in combating its own potential for domination. This tempering of narrative with power provides philosophical groundwork for a "Theology for the Overdog," or theology done from within a narrative of inherited power. This dissertation sets the idea of experience-as-narrative as represented by Alasdair MacIntyre within the spectrum of approaches to and critiques of narrative, and then tempers narrative with insights from Foucault's analysis of power. A Theology for the Overdog then sees power as a communication of efficacy, seeking through power analysis and direction to increase the possibilities and abilities of others, using Jesus as a model of stewardship