The Bible as Story

The scriptures begin with a story about people in a garden and it ends with a story about people in a garden city.

The diagram above has a bar graph that runs along the bottom representing all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

Everything is connected. Like a story.

Storying is short for Chronological Bible Storying (CBS for short). It is used in reference to helping people to understand the sweeping story of the bible. It involves taking a specifically chosen number of stories in the scriptures and working through them in chronological order. The story choice is usually based on pivotal moments, places and people which allows the participants to interact with (rather than being lectured at) to get a grasp of the whole Bible.

“Stories are the most prominent biblical way of helping us see ourselves in “the God story,” which always gets around to the story of God making and saving us. Stories, in contrast to abstract statements of truth, tease us into becoming participants in what is being said. We find ourselves involved in the action. We may start as spectators or critics, but if the story is good (and the biblical stories are very good!), we find ourselves no longer just listening to but inhabiting the story.”-Eugene Peterson

“Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn’t know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”-Eugene Peterson

“Many people think of the Bible as a book of moral teachings with stories sprinkled through to illustrate the teachings. But it’s a lot better than that…the Bible is a single true story with teachings sprinkled through to illustrate the story.”-Tim Keller

“Our lives must find their place in some greater story or they will find their place in some lesser story.”-Stephen Shoemaker

“The scriptures themselves are described as being a sword alone…not our interpretation of them. There is certain power of just telling the stories and letting them work in the human heart.”-Avery Willis

“Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.”
–N.T. Wright

This blog is about understanding the Bible as story. Not just any story that is local to a select people in a select area of a world at a specific time. Instead, it is a Universal Story, a Public Truth, or what’s been called the True Story of the Whole World.

This blog is my attempt to work through a few things:
-Developing a reproducible way of leaning the biblical story in 7 acts (Creation/Fall/Israel/Jesus’ Life/Jesus’ death and resurrection/Church/New Creation) and being able to pass it on.
-Focusing on learning, telling and retelling smaller stories within those 7 acts.
-Book reviews having to do with books that work through understanding the Bible as story.
-Sharing experiences of trying to incorporate this into discipleship, mission and preaching.