Narrative Apologetics

Sharing the Relevance, Joy, and Wonder of the Christian Faith

By: Alister E. McGrath

Narrated by: Tom Parks

Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

The Bible is a narrative - the story of God's creation, humankind's fall, and God's plan of redemption. And it is filled with countless smaller stories that teach us about people, history, and the nature of God. It's no surprise that God would choose to reveal himself to us in story - after all, he hardwired us for story. Despite this, we so often attempt to share our faith with others not through story but through systems, arguments, and talking points - methods that appeal only to our mind and neglect our imagination and our emotions.

In this groundbreaking book, scholar and author Alister McGrath lays a foundation for narrative apologetics. Exploring four major biblical narratives, enduring stories from our culture such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and personal narratives from people such as Augustine of Hippo and Chuck Colson, McGrath shows how we can both understand and share our faith in terms of story.

©2019 Alister E. McGrath (P)2019 Baker Publishing Group

excellent content and audio presentation

Riveting and well-researched. McGrath has opened a window for me and I believe, many others who have intuitively felt the power of the story in telling the greatest story of all time. The narrator of this audiobook also does an excellent job in his presentation.

Falls short of the topic’s potential

More narrative than apologetics. It’s an interesting topic that could be delved into much more efficiently.

A common audience would find the content of this book quite a bit dry, vague, and never really presents the full and proper narrative of the gospel, which would be the biggest fault of this book.

It avoids any narrative of sin (refers to CS Lewis so many times and never approaches the betrayal of Edmond and the weight of Aslan’s sacrifice - that’s a Huge point of Lewis’ narrative!) and instead puts more emphasis on how to cater the narrative to an intended audience, which is dangerous territory.

I agree that using proper biblical narratives can be highly effective, but not if you change the narrative to what you think your audience would like to hear- there’s using tact, and then there’s false teaching as represented in 2 Timothy 4.

There’s plenty of narrative within scripture itself that tells a consistent story from beginning to end.