The Work
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale was published in 1977 by Harper and Row (San Francisco). It originated as the William Belden Noble Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1976 -- the same prestigious lectureship that later produced The Sacred Journey (1982). The book is approximately 100 pages, divided into four sections: an opening chapter on the preacher's task, and three chapters on the Gospel as Tragedy, as Comedy, and as Fairy Tale. It is the most compressed and theoretically ambitious of Buechner's non-fiction works and has been the most influential on the theory and practice of preaching.
Biblical Engagement
Lamentations 1:1 ("How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!") is the text that grounds Buechner's argument for the gospel as tragedy. The preacher, Buechner insists, must face the darkness of Lamentations before offering the light of Easter: the Sunday-morning pretense that everything is fine, that God has solved the problem of suffering, is a betrayal of the world's actual experience and of the biblical tradition of honest lament.
Luke 15:6 ("Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost") is the text for the gospel as comedy -- not comedy in the trivial sense of jokes, but in the sense of the ancient genre whose defining characteristic is reversal and surprise: the lost found, the dead raised, the prodigal welcomed home. The parables of Luke 15 (the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son) are Buechner's paradigms of divine comedy: stories that move from loss through search to surprising, exuberant restoration.
2 Corinthians 5:17 ("Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new") is the text that grounds Buechner's argument for the gospel as the genre of fairy tale -- the truly impossible become actual. Where comedy achieves a probable reversal (lost and found), fairy tale achieves an impossible one. New creation from old, resurrection from death, divine love incarnate in human flesh: these are the "impossible" elements of the gospel that share the structure of fairy tale.
Revelation 21:5 ("And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful") is the ultimate text for the gospel's fairy-tale dimension: the promise of total renewal, the banishment of death and mourning, the appearance of the New Jerusalem. Buechner reads this not as escapism but as the completion of the tragic-comic-fairy-tale structure of the gospel: what begins in the tragedy of the cross passes through the comedy of the resurrection and ends in the fairy tale of the new creation.
Author and Context
Buechner delivered these lectures in 1976, when he had published several novels and had been wrestling with the relationship between the literary and theological dimensions of his vocation for two decades. The Harvard lectures gave him an opportunity to articulate theoretically what he had been practicing in his fiction and memoirs: a mode of Christian speech that takes seriously the full range of literary form and human experience.
The book's central argument -- that the gospel must be told as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale simultaneously -- is both a theological claim and a homiletical one. Theologically, it insists that the gospel includes genuine darkness (the cross, the cry of dereliction, the suffering of the world) and genuine surprise (resurrection, forgiveness, new creation) and genuine impossibility (divine love for sinners, eternity entered into time). Homiletically, it insists that the preacher who ignores any of these three dimensions distorts the gospel: the preacher who only offers comfort distorts tragedy; the preacher who only offers prophetic denunciation distorts comedy; the preacher who denies the impossible distorts fairy tale.
Critical Reception
The book was immediately recognized as one of the most important works on preaching of its generation. Barbara Brown Taylor called it the book that most shaped her understanding of preaching. Eugene Peterson cited it alongside Barth's Preaching as the two most important modern works on the theology of preaching. Its influence on the narrative homiletics movement -- the turn toward story-based preaching associated with Eugene Lowry, Charles Rice, and Fred Craddock -- was significant.
Theological Significance
Buechner's use of literary genres (tragedy, comedy, fairy tale) as theological categories for the gospel is a form of narrative theology: the claim that the gospel is not primarily a set of propositions but a story with a specific shape, and that the preacher's task is to tell that story in its full complexity. This approach situates Buechner within the broader tradition of narrative theology (represented also by Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Stanley Hauerwas) while maintaining accessibility and literary richness that technical academic theology often lacks.
Legacy
The book has been widely used in homiletics courses in mainline and evangelical seminaries for nearly fifty years. Its framework -- tragedy, comedy, fairy tale -- has become a standard reference point in discussions of the shape of the gospel and the task of preaching. It has influenced not only preachers but novelists, memoirists, and teachers who work with religious material.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Lamentations 1-3 (the tragedy of the gospel's honest engagement with suffering), Luke 15:1-32 (the parables as comedy), the Passion narratives (Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23, John 19 -- the gospel as tragedy), the Resurrection accounts (Matthew 28, Luke 24, John 20-21 -- the gospel as comedy), and Revelation 21-22 (the gospel as fairy tale's impossible ending).
Further Reading
- Eugene Lowry, The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form (1980) -- the definitive statement of narrative homiletics, building on similar convictions to Buechner. - Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (1993) -- a personal account of preaching that reflects Buechner's influence throughout. - Fred Craddock, Preaching (1985) -- the most influential homiletics textbook of the late twentieth century, sharing Buechner's narrative sensibility.