Reading Scripture Like a Novel

I remember when I first learned that Scripture was a meta narrative—that all the stories contained in the Bible worked together to tell a single larger story.  It was a big shift in my thinking because, for a long time, many Scriptural narratives, poetry, or letters felt disconnected from other books of the Bible.  Much of it felt like a random collection of (often bizarre) stories rather than a unified whole.  Over time, God has led me to the work of others who have opened my eyes to the unifying wholeness of the Scriptural meta narrative.

In many ways, Scripture can feel like a foreign and hard to understand collection of writings.  And this makes sense because it is a collection of ancient, eastern writings embedded in a different time and culture.  And although Scripture is timeless, many of us struggling to read it today are modern westerners, not ancient easterners.  So, there are a lot of challenges for us in trying to understand this ancient collection of scrolls.  The temporal and cultural gap can seem overwhelming.

However, in other ways, Scripture is surprisingly similar to our ingrained expectation of what a good story should look like.  And this type of bridge between the familiar and the unfamiliar can help us read the Bible in a way that’s both more natural to our experience and also truer to how the original writers intended it to be understood.

So, in the next three blog posts, we’ll look at three aspects of storytelling that Scripture provides that fall right into the comfort zone of modern readers: setting, characters, and plot.  And Scripture, like many good novels, introduces key components of the main setting, characters, and plot early on.  In fact, the seed form of what these storytelling devices will develop throughout Scripture are all found in the first three chapters of Genesis. As the meta narrative progresses, a unifying coherence also emerges when we view each individual narrative, poem, and letter within the larger storytelling context introduced at the beginning of the Bible.

And like any good novel, Genesis 1 – 3 provides some things we might expect, and even for many of us already familiar with the story, some things we might not expect.