Theological Fragments

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...

There are three basic types of literature in the Bible: narrative, poetry, and discourse, and each type communicates in a different way. Last month we talked about reading Bible stories; this week we’re talking about poetry. Did you know that one out of every three chapters in the Bible is poetry? When you think of poetry in the Bible, you probably think of the Psalms, or maybe the Song of Solomon—but there’s a lot more poetry in the Bible than that. In fact, Hebrew prophets tended to also be poets. You can’t tell as easily once it’s been translated into English, but when the prophets wrote down their prophecies from God they were writing deep, sophisticated poetry. Even the Apostle Paul incorporates some poetry into his writings! (I’m glad we don’t expect that from our pastors now—I can’t imagine writing an entire sermon in verse!) So why do we care that there is so much poetry in the Bible? Because poetry is read differently from other kinds of writing. When you see a passage of s...