"The Scriptures are many things – letters, parables, sermons, poems, histories, biographies, liturgies, songs. But behind all these multiple literary genres, the backdrop of everything is the greatest love story ever told. What if God means for all of Scripture to be God's love story to us? What if God never intended the Bible to be strip-mined for propositions, or dissected and analyzed like a stiff leopard frog pulled from a bottle of formaldehyde? What if God never wanted the Bible to be turned into an interesting library of varied and profound literature or a stringent code of conduct?
What if the Bible instead is our shoebox full of love letters, our living library of family scrapbooks and diaries that connect us to our ancestors, helping us know them so we can know ourselves and understand what our family name stands for. What if it's our storyboard of relationships from which we learn how to form friendships and deal with the people and problems we encounter?
The Bible is best read as a love letter from God, not a question book or an answer book, not a systematic theology or a scientific textbook or a dogmatics dictionary. The main subject of the Bible is God's relationship with what God most loves – God's creation and creatures....The source of our identity as Christians is a love story – or more accurately, a collection of love stories simple enough to be read by children, complex enough to elude total human comprehension....The Christian message is not a timeless tablet of moral principles or a code of metaphysics. The Christian message is the greatest love story ever told of love come down from heaven to earth, a love so vast and victorious that even hatred could not keep it down."
Dr. Leonard Sweet
Out of the Question...Into the Mystery
Waterbrook Press, 2004
pgs. 73-74
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