The Bible is, first and foremost, a story. Books of stories make up about 35% of the Bible’s table of contents. However, if you break it down by the actual length of each book, you find that story-books make up about 65% of the Bible. If that surprises you, it might be because you were taught to treat the Bible as a reference book, full of facts, figures, doctrines and commands for you to obey. Of course, it is true that the Bible contains many facts, figures, doctrines and commands—but most of those are actually part of the story —and overall scripture seems much more interested in teaching us a story than in teaching us facts and doctrines. This is very foreign to our modern way of thinking. We prefer to have everything laid out in formulas. We want to put things under the microscope. We like to classify everything the way our scientists classify living things—kingdom, phylum, class, order, anatomy, etc. etc. And we do this in our theology, as well. Think of how we talk about God
(or, A Fragment of Theology)