I’ve been wrestling with the question why God gave us the scriptures in a collection of stories and letters rather than as a list of propositions. If it’s possible to reduce scriptural teachings to a set of first principles or creedal statements, why didn’t God hand those to us in the first instance? Why leave room for endless debates and schisms over the sorts of things we like to discuss in blogs like this one?
Obviously, I’m not the first to ask these questions. The Biblical Theology movement is one effort to address them, by viewing revelation as a progressive process that culminates in Christ. Liberal theology, too, addresses these questions by giving up on efforts to find any real normative content in the scriptures. And Neoorthodoxy does so as well, with the view that scripture is a witness to God’s self-revelation in Christ.
Evangelicals, like me, who seek to apply the literary-historical-grammatical method of interpretaion and hold to some version of verbal inspiration and inerrancy, recognize the importance of context, but nevertheless historically have tended to view scripture primarily as a source of propositional statements. I have to admit that this approach has been leaving me flat lately. Yet, I’m not satisfied with any of the other dominant views of revelation, which seem to me to give up too much.
This is one reason the “postmodern” or “emerging” church movement’s emphasis on “story” appeals to me. Scripture isn’t merely a set of propositions; it’s also a set of very human stories. Being Christian isn’t merely assenting to a creed; it’s living a life story that’s part of God’s bigger story of redemption. I’m weary of three-point sermons and tidy explanations of how everything clearly fits into “our” system. I want to be more like the Pevensie children caught up in a great, adventurous story and less like a whitewashed tomb.