Part Two: The Bible as Drama, Doctrine, and Directions

Last week we asked, Is the Bible a book of doctrine, drama, or directions? I’ve discovered that the answer is yes.  Here’s how I believe all three of these approaches to the Bible work together:

The Bible is a story book in which God describes the drama that helps us love the Story of Jesus.  The Bible is a theology book in which God inscribes doctrine that helps us learn the Story of Jesus.  The Bible is a guide book in which God prescribes directions that help us live in the Story of Jesus.

The Bible as drama
We must first understand the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as a drama.  The Bible is primarily a narrative that describes the account of the relationship between God, people, and creation.  Michael D. Williams’ Far As The Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption is a valuable resource on this subject:

Indeed, the Bible as a whole is best understood as a story or drama.  To be sure, the Bible does more than tell a story.  Scripture includes psalms and proverbs, songs and prayers, moral instruction and doctrinal reflection. But what holds all of it together, what makes it a unified revelation is the storyline, what theologians often call the drama of redemption.  The nonnarrative pieces fit into and make sense only within their appropriate contexts in the biblical storyline . . .

Dr. Williams goes on to say that “every good story has at least four fundamental elements:

1. A Prologue, an introduction to the principal characters and their starting relationships…sets the stage for the unfolding drama, the context within which the story will transpire.
2. A Conflict that arises and that the characters must face…forms the dramatic problem of the story.
3. A Resolution, the conflict must be resolved or dealt with in some way.
4. A summing up or Conclusion in which the reader or listener is told how the original relationships were modified by the dramatic problem and its resolution.

In its most basic structure, the Bible follows this dramatic pattern.  It has an introduction, a dramatic problem that arises, a resolution to the problem, and a summing up or conclusion.  We might refer to these four elements within the Biblical storyline as creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. This creation-fall-redemption-consummation storyline is the central theme of Scripture, and it forms the Bible’s overarching literary structure.

Just as well-told stories grab our hearts and draw us into the drama, so the drama of Scripture helps us to love the Story of Jesus.

The Bible as doctrine
As doctrine, the Bible inscribes answers to questions that reveal more about God, people, and creation so that we might gain a better understanding of the Story God is telling.  As Dr. Williams observed, the Bible is more than a story, it contains quite a bit of factual information about who and what sort of being God is, who and what sort of creatures people are, and how creation is the stage on which these characters carry out the unfolding drama of God.

On my bookshelves I still have the worn out paperback Lord of the Rings trilogy I read in high school.  Right beside those thick narrative volumes sits a non-narrative paperback called A Guide to Middle Earth.  I bought that extra encyclopedic resource because I found it enabled me to better understand the rich, deep, and complex narrative of Tolkien’s trilogy.  A quick search on Amazon.com uncovers myriad volumes of dictionaries, guides, encyclopedias, and atlases, all written to help readers dig deeper into the story of Middle Earth by answering questions about the creator, characters, and the cosmos of Tolkein’s imaginary world.  A lecture by Tim Keller helped me understand that this is what Biblical doctrine does for Bible readers.

Suppose I’m reading the opening chapters of the Rings trilogy and I want to know who Gandalf is.  My Guide to Middle Earth and all of those thousands of other resources will draw from the totality of Tolkien’s narratives to answer the question “Who is Gandalf?”  Because these encyclopedic collections have equipped me with the facts about Gandalf, I am better able to understand and appreciate any smaller part of the story in which he is mentioned.

That’s what Paul’s letters and other doctrinal parts of the Bible do for Bible readers.  Paul draws from his Spirit-granted knowledge of God’s narrative to explain, sometimes in densely packed sentences, who Jesus is so that we can more fully appreciate the Story He’s unfolding.  Just as the Guide to Middle Earth illumines our minds to better understand Tolkien’s stories, so the doctrinal passages of Scripture help us to learn the Story of Jesus.

The Bible as directions
As a book of directions, the Bible prescribes the attitudes and actions necessary for people to properly relate to God of the Story, the other people in God’s Story, and to the creation that serves as the Story’s setting.

All of the commands that have to do with having a right relationship with God, people, and all that God has made are given to guide us into a participation in the Story that God has revealed in His Word.

While Keller’s Lord of the Rings analogy has been helpful to me, it only explained the purpose of doctrine to me and not the purpose of the Bible’s directions.  After all, there is no book I can buy that tells me how I can become a part of Tolkein’s story.  (From the looks of some of the costumed folks I’ve seen at the Lord of the Rings movies, I’d say there are those who think they live in Middle Earth and play some role in Tolkein’s tale, but that is not the norm for most of us!)  There’s simply no book that can tell me how to live in Tolkein’s story.  I can love his story and learn more about it, but I don’t play a part in the plot.

But I can and must live in God’s Story, and He has provided in His book a number of directions for how to do that.  Paul David Tripp explains:

The way the Bible is organized is that the main body of the content is the unfolding drama of the story of redemption. But . . . it is a story with notes. On one side of the narrative are propositions. In the propositions, the great themes of the story are distilled down into universal truth statements. The purpose of these statements is to help you understand the plot of the story.  On the other side of the narrative are principles. The principles apply the story to the situations and relationships of everyday life. The purpose of the principles is to help you know what it looks like to live within the plot of God’s story.

This is where it all began to fall together for me.  The Bible is a drama that also has notes of doctrine (what Tripp calls “propositions”)  that help us interpret the Story and notes of direction (what Tripp calls “principles”) that help us get involved in the Story.  Having discovered this final puzzle piece in Tripp’s work, I began to envision the Bible this way:

Now that we know what this bread from heaven is, what do we do with it?  We have discovered the Bible is how we love, learn, and live in the Story of Jesus, but how do we use the Bible to love, learn, and live in the Jesus of the Story?  Next week we'll begin to answer the question What do I do with the Bible?

JIMMY DAVIS is an Associate Pastor at Metrocrest Presbyterian Church in Carrollton, TX, an Associate Editor for the Worldview Church, and maintains the Cruciform Life Blog and @cruciformlife Twitter account.

For more insight to this topic, get the book, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, from our online store.

Or read the article, “Review: The ESV Study Bible,” by Jimmy Davis.