I am reading up on postliberal Theology (sometimes known as Narrative Theology) for my review of Hans Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.
If you want a brief history and a good explanation of what has been happening with postliberal theology and evangelicals see Roger Olson’s article in Christianity Today.
Evangelicals and postliberals find much in common when they meet as they did at the Wheaton Theology Conference in April 1995. Above all else, they affirm one another’s devotion to Scripture; thus, they are both “back to the Bible” movements in theology. Many postliberal theologians, however, see the majority of evangelicals as “premodern” in their attachments to objective, propositional revelation and literal historicity of Scripture’s stories. They fear that this leads inevitably to a divorce between Scripture and the explanatory schemes and theories that get built up into systematic theologies and rational apologetics based on propositional truth claims that end up replacing the literary form of Scripture.
Evangelicals, on the other hand, are uneasy about postliberal theology’s general disinterest in Christianity’s “objective truth” and the Bible’s “space-and-time historicity.” To most of us, the Yale theologians seem to go too far with postmodernism’s “incredulity toward metanarratives.” That is, they appear ambiguous and ambivalent regarding the question of Christianity’s universal truth status relative to competing accounts of “the ultimate nature of reality.”
