Towards a Christocentric Hermeneutic Part 3: The Advantages of Reading the Bible Like a Novel

At this point, my step-by-step method for teaching Joe and Mary church-goer how to read the Bible christocentrically is still in the analytical stage. In part 1 of the project, I asserted that the method that most evangelicals use to interpret the Bible—principlizing—has significant shortcomings. While it may warrant a slot in our hermeneutical toolbox, reducing everything in the Bible to easily-applicable propositional truths has too many pitfalls to be the primary method of interpreting the Bible.

In part 2, I addressed the assumption held by some scholars that evangelicals are so steeped in scientism that they cannot get their heads around how a narrative could be authoritative. In contrast to these scholars (but still bowing and scraping before their brilliance), I tried to demonstrate that evangelicals (in fact, most people) know “in their bones” that narratives can be authoritative.

In this post, I want to take a look at a few of the advantages of reading the Bible primarily as a narrative.

Several months ago, Roger Olson provided a very helpful explanation of narrative theology on his blog. Here’s my summary of what he said:

• The Bible is a narrative that reveals God’s character through His activity and interaction with men
• The Bible contains propositions, but those propositions are not superior to the narrative
• The Bible defines propositions such as “God is love” through actions. In other words, propositions are clarified by the narrative
• The Bible contains other genres (such as letters, poetry, proverbs, etc), but these genres are to be understood in light of how they fit into the story and its climax-—the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ
• Narrative is the primary way of understanding God. Doctrines may be necessary, but they are secondary and can be revised if needed
• The task of the church is to be so steeped in the worldview of the story that it can “improvise the rest of the story” in its own cultural context.

I want to make clear that I am not (nor, do I think, is Olson) advocating the more extreme brand of narrative theology that allows the faith community to decide what truth is. I still believe that scripture's "meaning" is what the original author intended it to mean. But I think that Olson aptly describes what it means to respect the fact that God gave His truth to us in a particular form. We can best understand what God wants us to understand, not by fighting against the Bible's genre, but by embracing it.

As far as what the Bible’s story actually looks like, several scholars have proposed various narrative frameworks to help the reader get a handle on things. In The Blue Parakeet, Scot McKnight proposes a four-act structure beginning with (1) creation, then moving through (2) fall, (3) covenant community (Israel), and (4) redemption. In Scripture and the Authority of God, N.T. Wright suggests a five-act structure beginning again with (1) creation and (2) the fall, but moving from there to (3) Israel, (4) Jesus, and (5) the church. In Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology, Christopher Wright (one of my favorite theologians) also describes the Bible as having four major plot points within the narrative: (1) creation, (2) fall, (3) redemption, and (4) new creation. In this model, “new creation” begins at Pentacost and continues through the return of Christ.

However my favorite paradigm for illustrating the Bible’s story is the humble plot diagram many of us learned in high school.  

In this diagram, Creation is the exposition of the story, while the expulsion from the Garden introduces the primary conflict.  The rising action includes God’s choosing of Israel as the covenant community, and the climax—the moment in which God succeeds in redeeming His people—is the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

What matters, however, is not which specific structure one uses to chart the narrative of God’s story (because they all basically tell the same tale), but how reading the Bible as narrative transforms the reader’s view of scripture. Rather than being a flattened-out repository of timeless truths—all of which apply to me right now—narrative theology forces the reader to experience the story of redemption as something that either has happened or will happen. And with the death and resurrection of Jesus, what has gone before is drastically different than what comes after.

Reading the Bible as God’s story of redemption greatly reduces the self-centeredness inherent in the principlizing method. No longer does everything have to apply to the reader or have a “practical” application. If the Bible is God’s story, then the purpose of reading it is to become intimate with God and how He works, not how He can fix my life.  Reading the Bible as narrative will greatly reduce the probability that the reader will wonder, as someone in one of my Bible studies once asked, “why put it in the Bible if it doesn’t apply to me?”

Another benefit of reading the Bible as narrative is that we don’t have to wonder what to “do” with the Old Testament. Most people who have attended a Bible study for more than a few months can provide at least one example of the quirky things people do to force whatever Old Testament passage they're reading to produce a “timeless truth.” Once freed from the expectation that every story must be directly applicable to the reader’s life, the Old Testament can tell the story it wants to tell—a much more powerful story of God's relationship with Israel, and through Israel, the world.

Finally, thinking of the Bible as a story allows it to become “authoritative” in a way that a set of propositional truths can never be. It is the nature of narrative to inhabit us so completely that we do not have to wonder what our heroes would do in particular situation. We know what Superman…or Harry Potter…or Buffy Summers…or Aragorn…or King Arthur would do. Allowing the Bible to come to life in this way releases the inherent power of story to shape the way we see the world. 

Thinking of the Bible as a narrative shows the reader in no uncertain terms that something earth-shattering and paradigm-shifting happened with the death and resurrection of Jesus. It changed not only what came after, but also transforms how we understand what came before. When we go back and read the story again, the beginning of the story will have a deeper meaning than it did the first time we read it. Not different, but deeper. The original events still mean what they meant, but they also become the foundation upon which the writer has spread another level of meaning—a meaning we only get because we know how the story ends. 


This then, is where we finally get the faintest glimmer of what a christocentric hermeneutic might begin to look like.