The Value of the Narrative

The Bible is filled with narratives, stories about events set in time and place. There are other things in there as well. You have poetry and you have propositional statements -- statements of what is true. You have doctrine and wisdom passages. You have prophecy and parable. There are a lot of different literary styles in the Bible, but a good portion is narrative.

One might think that it would be to our advantage if God didn't put that in there. After all, if the writers of the Bible had just made truth claims, we could just run with those. It's those pesky details of narratives that cause a lot of people problems. Take, for instance, the sequence of events outlined in the Genesis account of Creation. Now we're at odds with science because every good scientist knows that you can't have "day" (Gen 1:5) without "sun" (Gen 1:16) and you can't have vegetation (Gen 1:11) without the sun (Gen 1:16) and, oh, it's all wrong! You see, in this case, it seems, the devil is in the details.

Nice, well-meaning folk come along and try to smooth over the problem. "No, no," they assure us, "God never intended that to be taken literally. That's a problem of the literalists. Us wiser folk can see that it was myth, legend, metaphor. It wasn't actual." And they run roughshod over the narrative to spare themselves the problem.

So why did God include narrative in the Bible? I mean, couldn't He have just had Moses write, "Look, people, God created the world." End of story. Why all this stuff about Abraham? Moses put in details like places (like Canaan, Shechem, Haran, and so on) and people (Ishmael, Melchizedek, king of Salem, and Abimelech, king of Gerar, etc.) that are subject to investigation. Did the Hittites ever exist? (As it turns out, they did.) Was Israel ever really enslaved in Egypt? All these pesky details spelled out in these narratives ... wouldn't it have been better just to make declarative statements and be done with it? You know ... "God made everything", "God chose Abraham", "God promised Israel a particular land", that sort of thing.

I would hope that anyone who is a writer and anyone who is an avid reader would be rather irritated with me by this time. They know the value of the narrative. Or, at least, they have a sense of it. Most of us don't really think about it, but there is substance in narrative that is not found in the simple declarative. Let me give you a simple example. I tell you, "Bill is strong." Easy. Declarative. Now you know something about Bill. On the other hand, I go to the narrative approach and try it this way: "Bill saw the young boy pinned beneath the car and picked up the car to free the child." What do you know about Bill now? Well, you certainly know that he's strong. You also know something of the magnitude of his strength and a bit about how he uses that strength. You know much more about Bill because of the narrative. Now, obviously, it would seem that the best choice would be to combine the two. In this version, I would tell you, "Bill is strong. One time Bill saw a young boy pinned beneath a car and he picked up the car to free the child." I've given you a declarative statement and an example to make my statement clear.

This, as it turns out, is what we find in the biblical narrative. Remember, the Bible is God's Word, His Story. It is about God and His work, culminating in His Son. We find declaratives (i.e., "God is love" (1 John 4:8).). By going through the narratives, the Bible fills out what that concept means. We see it "fleshed out" in the choice of Israel (Deut 7:7-8). (God chose to set His love on Israel because He chose to set His love on Israel.) We see it illustrated in the chastisement of Israel. We see it portrayed in the restoration of Israel. And we see it laid out in glowing imagery in the arrival, life, death, and resurrection of His Son. In other words, it is possible to read the declarative "God is love" and then go through the entire Bible and see it illustrated. Or you can read "The Lord God omnipotent reigneth" (Rev 19:6). Then you can go back over Scripture and see that laid out in its broadest sense, from Creation to the Flood, from the promises to Abraham to their fulfillment in Christ, from fighting for Israel (I particularly like the story of Jeshoshaphat in 1 Chron 20 when he took the choir up to watch God fight with their enemies.) to taking them into captivity, from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection to the end of the story. The Bible offers sprawling narratives to lay out just what "omnipotent" means when applied to God.

The Bible is full of all sorts of literary types. One of those types is the declarative -- propositional statements. Propositional statements are nice. They declare something to be true. Easy. Clean. But it is in the narrative that we can begin to experience the propositional. It is in the stories of the Bible that we can "see" and "feel" what God is like. Sure, He could just say, "I'm this way and that way", and it would be true and valuable. Still, it is the narratives that end up providing more clarity than the declaratives ... if we are looking for it.