LIKE FICTION

Here's a line from Old Testament scholar Michael Heiser which I plan to hold onto:

"Read your Bible like it's fiction."

It's clever, meant to provoke a strong reaction - especially from those who claim to be the most serious about the Bible.

And those are the ones Heiser wants to challenge most.

Far too many evangelicals seem to believe that a "high view of Scripture" is one which requires reading the Bible as woodenly as possible, as if it were a divine textbook and their goal is to discern a handful of doctrines which will appear on the final exam. 

[Side note: Once these readers of wooden Bible verses discover these doctrines, they often use them to clobber each other over the head. Each is certain the doctrines they have discovered are exactly what will appear on the test.]

Heiser suggests a more fruitful approach: something akin to the way we read a good novel.

We seem to understand instinctively when we read fiction that exposition matters, that foreshadowing is meant to keep us guessing, that themes are developed slowly, that settings convey meaning, and that character and motivation need careful attention. 

Scripture is wonderfully rich and it is crafted for maximum impact. 

More impact than we are getting when we pluck verses from here and there to construct a "doctrine" of this or that - or even, I would dare say, merely to discover a "life application".