The Bible as Story (Part 3)
A biblical theology of the Bible? Redundant as that may sound, it’s not. The evangelical academic world has for some time been occupied with grasping and expressing a comprehensive yet concise statement of the metanarrative or storyline of the Bible as a whole. As my previous posts noted, this isn’t really new. There are a variety of approaches to doing biblical theology. The big-picture, wide-angle version of biblical theology is whole-Bible biblical theology.
Whole-Bible Biblical Theology
A biblical theology of the Bible asks what are the major theological themes that dominate the landscape of God’s self-revelation through the divinely selected, Spirit-directed, human authors, and how does the Scripture itself relate those themes to one another.
The Bible is not a random collection of the sacred writings of one predominant people group. The Bible is, from beginning to end, a story. A long story. It is a single, unified message that flows like the river out of Eden, tumbles down through time, and deltas out into distant vistas beyond the book of Revelation. Sometimes rushing headlong, sometimes meandering slow and silent, but always moving, always growing as each narrative along the way, each psalm and sermon, each prophecy and poem, trickle into it like tributaries to swell the stream. It’s not just a true story; it is the true story because it is God’s story.
As I noted in Part 1, referring to the Bible as story does not in any way deny the absolute reality of these themes or the historical accuracy and groundedness of the Scriptures that communicate them. A child may ask his father for a “story” about when he was a boy, or an adult may ask his grandfather for “stories” about when he was in the war; neither is implying their doubt in the factuality of those stories. History is story, and true story is history. God is the one who chose to put so much of his revelation in the form of story and to unfold reality in a way that has a traceable storyline, rather than merely a series of propositional truths and commands, or a disjointed collection of sacred sayings.
Big stories have multiple themes. Even a human creation—like a Dickens novel—can have a highly complex, multi-layered, multi-themed, multi-storylined structure. It would be overly simplistic to say that David Copperfield is “about” David Copperfield, or even that it is “about” Charles Dickens in a semi-autobiographical sense. It is about money, and love, and power, and hypocrisy, and forgiveness, and a dozen other themes, all of which intertwine in the telling of a single, large story. Life is complex and richly textured, and so is good writing that is true to life (even if it’s fictional). Humans derive that creativity from the One who created us in his image and gave us the greatest, complex, multi-layered, multi-themed, true Story of reality.
That’s why there are multiple themes running through Scripture, and multiple ways of summarizing the Bible’s overarching message, identifying its seams, and tracing the progression of its overarching narrative. Because the Bible possesses multiple organizing themes, it can be viewed from a variety of angles.
The Glory of God
Jonathan Edwards’s sermonic essay “The End for Which God Created the World” demonstrates scripturally that the ultimate goal of God through human history—the end for which he made all things—is to show and to share the glories of his attributes and character. So, the Bible can be explored and unfolded by tracing the theme of God’s glory in human history.
Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration
The story of the Bible is the story of God’s creation of a world peopled by creatures like himself in important ways, the fall of that race into sin and rebellion against their Creator (and its ongoing evidences and consequences), and the extraordinary steps God takes to redeem us from the consequences of our fallenness and to restore his original intentions for us. So, the storyline of the Bible can also be summarized as God’s redemption of his fallen creation.
The Covenants
The Bible actually divides itself between the Old Covenant (OT) and the New Covenant (NT). The distinction between these two divisions is not merely chronological, but covenantal. The Old and New Covenants form the intrinsic organizational framework of the theological structure of the Bible (not to be confused with covenant theology, which is something entirely different). In addition, the story of God’s relationship with man can be told in terms of the series of covenantal arrangements recorded in the Bible. So, the division of the Bible into Old and New Covenants is yet another rubric under which one can trace the Bible’s organically progressive storyline.
The Kingdom
Kingdom is one of the major overarching, framing themes in the Bible. If there is a downside to all the freedom and self-determination of modern western civilization, it is that this historically rare and mostly recent social model called democracy has rendered a kingdom mentality very foreign to us. (Witness the bumper sticker, “Elect Jesus King of your life.” You don’t elect kings; you submit to them.) Yet the kingdom model was in place for most of human history.
It is worth noting that the first expression of God’s relationship to man—if we are going by the words that God himself actually uses (as biblical theology must)—does not feature a covenant, but a command (Gen. 2:16-17). There is no agreement, no mutuality. It is the word—the first recorded relational word—of an absolute sovereign to his created subject. (The first reference to “covenant” does not show up until Genesis 6:18.)
The Kingdom theme is one of the most dominant themes that God himself has built into his revelation of reality, and one of the threads woven close to the core of the Bible’s storyline. God has chosen to describe reality in Kingdom terms. It’s the primary model he uses across both testaments to describe his relationship not only to his people but to the world and to human history (Ps. 2:1-12, 10:16, 45:6; Jer. 10:7; Dan. 4:34; Mal. 1:14; Lk. 1:33; 1 Tim. 1:17; 2 Pet. 1:1; Rev. 19:16). So, from beginning to end, the Bible frames the history of the world as the story of the King and his Kingdom.
Plotting a Storyline
These overarching paradigms are not in competition with each other, and none is more right than the others. All of them emerge from Scripture and function like spirographs—overlapping, intersecting, and complementary outlines of redemptive history. Each of them contributes something to our understanding of what is going on in the world and of our place in it. When you read widely in the field, the big-picture themes proposed by biblical theologians tend to gravitate around one of these big ideas:
- Theocentricity: It’s all About God
- A. Being: Presence of God
- B. Nature: Character of God
- Sovereignty: God is Lord alone
- A. Cosmology: Creation & Ownership
- B. Kingdom: Dominion & Rule
- Purpose: God has a plan
- A. Process: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration
- B. Goal: Glory of God
- Revelation: All God reveals is trustworthy truth
- A. Self-Revelation
- B Covenant/Promise/Fulfillment
Can these dominant and recurring themes be combined in a way that not only makes sense but accurately reflects the Bible’s correlation of these themes? Here is one contribution in that direction:
The sovereign God who created and owns all things has revealed His purpose through a series of gracious promissory covenants ultimately designed to restore fallen humanity to His presence and fellowship by judging sin through His self-sacrificial atonement so that we can fulfill our original purpose as vice-regents of God’s kingdom over creation for His ultimate glory and enjoy him forever.
It’s a mouthful; but so is the Bible. And it’s just a start. Where it goes from there is, as far as I can tell, beyond both divine revelation and human comprehension. But it’s a magnificent story—the magnificent Story.
