scripture and the community of God

The Bible is not one book. It is a library of books--all different kinds of books. There is law, history, poetry, biography, even letters. What unifies the Bible is that it is one story that is being told in as dynamic a way as possible. It is multiple voices, perspectives, and relationships speaking about the truth, who just happens to be a person.


The Bible contains the story of how God created and loved the world, how sin confounded creation, how God overcame sin and is restoring the world through Christ, how God called his people who were first a nation then a multi-national community of faith, how they follow God in the face of all sorts of opposition and challenges, how there is a true hope and coming victory for those who call upon the name of the Lord and serve the true King. 


The shorthand title for this story is: redemption.


Perhaps one of the most troubling and repeated mistakes of the church, though, is that the people of God have failed to appreciate the complexity of the Bible. Instead of hearing it as it was written, we have tried to sum up the entire story of redemption with just one genre of literature. 

And so some Christians have tried to make the Bible a science book or a history book. While those elements are present in scripture, neither are present exhaustively. No matter how badly some want to know the exact age of the planet or what happened to the dinosaurs, the Bible does not contain answers to those questions. But that is okay. It was not written to provide those answers. No one gets mad at the phone book for not containing a chocolate chip recipe or yesterday's news headlines. Scripture contains history and science, but it is not exhaustively either of those things. 


And some have tried to make the Bible a rule book. After all, it is the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, right? There are laws in scripture, but not all of scripture is law. My own tradition has its own spin on this rule book approach in that we have often read scripture as a how-to manual for Sunday morning worship services--the "you cans" and the "you cannots" of how to do church. Imagine our surprise when we realize that almost none of the Bible is really written about Sunday morning alone--it has a lot more to say about life as a whole and the every day lives of God's people. 


What happens is that by focusing on the narrow voice of one part of the story, we miss the richness of the whole story. We get so focused on one instrument, we lose the symphony. We get so focused on one small part of the book that we lose the plot and miss the story. 


The sooner we can embrace the whole of scripture as God's unified story of redemption, the sooner we can adapt our discipleship to more faithfully resemble the faith of Jesus. Jesus did not engage scripture as a science book, a history book, or a law book alone. Jesus saw in scripture a dramatic and dynamic unfolding narrative, and he engaged the story as his story. He interpreted all of Scripture as pointing to him and his kingdom.


For far too long that Bible has been seen as territory to hold onto in a debate between faith and science. Christians have spent too long trying to force the Bible to live up to standards that God never set for it or for us. When we talk about the Bible, we fall into tireless arguments about inerrancy, inspiration, and authority. And there is need for us to understand what we are saying about scripture, but often we seem to care more about winning those arguments about the Bible than actually engaging what it is the Bible is saying. But when we do that, we turn the Bible into something it was never meant to be and we rob it of the chance to do what it is supposed to do. It is not an idol to be worshiped, but a witness to be heard. It is not a good luck charm to ensure our victory, it is collection of voices speaking truth. It is not a smoking gun in the biggest most important game of religious king of the mountain, it is a story to be embraced.


And an amazing thing happens when we engage scripture as a story again--in all of its contours, complexities, and contexts... we find that the story isn't finished. We are engaged, called, captivated, and empowered to hear the Master Storyteller weave our lives into the fascinating plot of redemption. 


Now that is a book worth reading.