Cultural forces can sometimes affect how we “see” the Bible, how we approach the Scriptures. So we receive the Bible as a sort of divine encyclopedia full of revealed “facts,” or we treat it as an abstract rule book, or we revere it as merely a historic relic of a past when people seemed to actually encounter God. What gets lost in these functional “pictures” of the Bible is something central to the Scriptures themselves: the fact that the Bible is a story. God reveals himself to us in a narrative.
