Abstract
The theological conversation about Christian practices emerged amid the convergence of two streams of theory—the social practices theory of Alasdair MacIntyre and narrative approaches to biblical hermeneutics. This essay argues that, as a result, something of a narrativist consensus, more tacit than explicit, about the hermeneutical relationship between a community's reading of the Bible and the assessment of its practices tended to be assumed under the surface of scholarship on Christian practices. Today, however, as we attend increasingly to the lived practices of particular Christian communities, we are discovering that lingering narrativist hermeneutical assumptions can mask the real complexity of the Scripture-practice interface.
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