RICHARD BAUCKHAM and NT WRIGHT on the Bible as a Story

Too often we think of authority either in relation to commands or laws which we must obey or in relation to doctrines we must believe. To some extent that is a legacy of the Enlightenment. But the Bible is not primarily a book of timeless doctrines or a book of moral laws. It is primarily a story. …

The Bible’s total story is a metanarrative. That is, it sketches in narrative form the meaning of all reality. To accept the authority of this story is to enter it and to inhabit it. It is to live in the world as the world is portrayed in this story. It is to let this story define our identity and our relationship to God and to others. It is to read the narratives of our own lives and of the societies in which we live as narratives that take their meaning from this metanarrative that overarches them all. To accept this metanarrative as the one within which we live is to see the world differently and to live within it differently from the way we would if we inhabited another metanarrative or framework of universal meaning.

…to accept the Bible’s metanarrative as authoriative is to priviledge it above all other stories. It is to find our own identity as characers in that story, characters whose lives are an as yet untold part of the story. For the metanarrative is, of course, no more than a sketch. The Bible tells that part of the plot that makes the general meaning of the whole clear and and points us ahead to the way the plot must be finally resolved. But it leaves the story open to the inclusion of all other stories, including those we play some part in writing.

Richard Bauckham ‘God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives‘ (2002)

- note the similarities with NT Wright’s well-known example of the ‘five-act play’:

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution. This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again. It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

Quoted from his lecture How can the Bible be Authoritative? and also found in his later book ‘Scripture and the Authority of God‘ (2005).