This hymn brilliantly and poetically summarizes the goals of the current bible study for St. George’s Women of the Word (WoW!):
 
     We limit not the truth of God
     to our poor reach of mind,
     to notions of our day and place,
     crude, partial, and confined:
     No, let a new and better hope
     within our hearts be stirred:
     O God, grant yet more light and truth
     to break forth from your Word.
 
     Who dares to bind to one's own sense
     the oracles of heaven,
     for all the nations, tongues, and climes
     and all the ages given?
     That universe, how much unknown!
     that ocean unexplored!
     O God, grant yet more light and truth
     to break forth from your Word.
 
     Eternal God, incarnate Word,
     Spirit of flame and dove:
     enlarge, expand all living souls
     to comprehend your love;
     And help us all to seek your will
     with wiser powers conferred:
    O God, grant yet more light and truth
     to break forth from your Word.
 
                                    Hymn #629, 1982 Hymnal

In order to understand our world, to make sense of our lives, and to make our most important decisions about how we ought to be living, we depend upon some story. We need a "large background story if we are to understand ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. Individual experiences make sense and acquire meaning only when seen within the context or frame of some story we believe to be the true story of the world: each episode of our life stories finds its place there" (Bartholomew & Goheen, p. 18). This larger, comprehensive story gives us the meaning of not merely personal or national history, but universal history.

According to Dr. David Parris at the lecture he presented to WoW! on January 10th, narratives allow us to enter into worlds and then extract from them criteria with which we interact with our own world. Stories provide the framework in which we:

• Predict
• Evaluate
• Plan
• Explain

• Project

​Here's the video that Dr. Parris showed as an example.

If we agree that the metanarrative, the narrative CONTEXT, is indeed the vehicle through which we interpret, evaluate, shape and direct our lives then we as Christians must be very intentional about the narrative to which we give this power. We must be able to count on it to be a true, timeless, and universal narrative -- "a 'real story' that provides a framework of meaning for all people in all times and places, and therefore for my own life in the world."

As the authors of The Drama of Scripture remind us, the Bible must be the narrative that directs our lives. They further argue that it is only through understanding the unity of the narrative across the entirety of Scripture that we can allow this metanarrative to be the life-directing foundation that should be. "If", they say, "we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should" (p. 14). 

In speaking to this point, Dr. Parris brought up the concept of "attentional blindness" where our attention is so controlled and directed by a false narrative, that we are literally unable to see what is right before our eyes.

Here is the clip of the "The Amazing Colour Changing Card Trick" video that he used to illustrate this very important point.

Through watching the entirety of this video it is easy to see (though surprising!) how easily our minds are directed away from truth through false narrative.

Therein lies the importance of our new bible study. It is to allow us to understand and experience N.T. Wright's bold claim that the "whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is public truth" and that we must "tell this story as clearly as possible, and to allow it to subvert other ways of telling the story of the world" (New Testament and the People of God, p. 41-42).

Plato claims, "Those who tell the stories rule society." Shouldn't the true story of the world -- that God is acting in history for the salvation of the world -- be the dominant story told? Let's all absorb this unified story and get out there to tell it in the most compelling and consistent way possible to everyone we see!

And just to reiterate the power of the narrative, here's a TedTalk from 2014.

Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen, The Drama of Scripture
Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2004. Used by permission.
 
If you have ever visited one of these magnificent churches, like the National Cathedral in Washington (D.C.), Notre Dame in Montreal (or its more famous older sister in Paris), or St. Paul’s in London, you know that you can spend days exploring one of them. There are many different angles from which one can approach a cathedral. Inside are fascinating side chapels and main chapels to explore, full of stained glass, paintings, statuary, and other treasures. What at first seems to be one huge room turns out to be a multitude of rooms and corridors, towers and balconies, stairs and hidden passages. And this is only what the public sees. If you secure permission from the dean, the head of the cathedral, to explore the whole of the great church, you discover all sorts of additional ways in and out of the building and many different vantage points from which to see it.

Imagine that the Bible, with its sixty-six books, written by dozens of human authors over the course of more than a thousand years, is a grand cathedral with many rooms and levels and a variety of entrances.

You can, for example, enter the Bible through one of the Gospels. Indeed, many people are encouraged to start reading the Bible with the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of John. Many Christians begin to explore the Old Testament relatively late in their journey of faith. Few find themselves drawn again and again to the genealogies at the start of Chronicles or the long lists of dietary laws in Leviticus.

If you want to gather a sense of the cathedral as a whole, you face an important question: Where is the main entrance, the place from which you can orient yourself to the whole? A traditional cathedral usually has a main entrance through the west door, from which one can look down the long nave to the eastern end of the building, where the altar stands. In the West such churches were always built with the altar eastward, toward Jerusalem (which originated the word “oriented,” now also more generally meaning “given a sense of direction”). The “cathedral” of the Bible has many themes. People have proposed various overarching themes of the Bible, and these are different doors from which we can gain a perspective on God’s whole stunning revelation.

In our opinion, “covenant” (in the Old Testament) and “the kingdom of God” (in the New Testament) present a strong claim to be the main door through which we can begin to enter the Bible and to see it as one whole and vast structure. In the Old Testament, God establishes a covenant with Noah, Abraham, Israel, and King David; in Jeremiah, God speaks of a new covenant that he will make in the future. In the Gospels, it is clear that the main theme in Jesus’ extensive teaching ministry is the kingdom of God. Mark (1:14–15) thus sums up Jesus’ ministry: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!’ ” Taking covenant and kingdom to be the main entrance into the Bible does not deny that there are other entrances. Readers have suggested many other entrances as the best ones from which to gain a view of the whole: entrances such as “promise” and “presence.” All these are helpful, but they are a bit like side chapels or side entrances rather than the main entrance. We certainly glimpse a view of the cathedral from them, but we do not gather that same overview of the whole that we obtain from covenant and kingdom.

You may ask, Are covenant and kingdom the same entrance or two different ones? This is an important question. The kingdom of God, as we explain below, is all about the reign of God over his people and eventually over all of creation. Covenant is particularly about the special relationship that God makes with his people as he works out his plans in history. In fact, covenants were relationships established by kings with their subject peoples. When God’s people enter into a covenant relationship with him, they are obligated to be his subject people and to live under his reign. As we soon see, covenant also insists that we take seriously God’s purposes with the whole of creation. Thus, covenant and kingdom are like two sides of the same coin, evoking the same reality in slightly different ways.

After all our study, we find covenant and kingdom to be the double door of the same main entrance to the scriptural cathedral, evoking the same reality. That is why we have used “kingdom” to structure this book. Both alert us to God as the great king over all, who wants to have a people living under his reign and spreading the fragrance of his presence all over his creation. Both also alert us to the fact that this has always been God’s plan from the beginning, but that things went badly wrong. Now God is doing remedial work to restore his project and pursue his original and persistent intentions. In the covenants of the Old Testament, the focus is narrowly upon Israel and yet always for Israel to be a light to the nations. In the New Testament, “the kingdom of God” clearly has all the nations and the whole creation in view. Either way, as we enter the Bible through this main double door, covenant and kingdom alert us to the importance of the story line of the Bible. It starts with creation and moves on from there. This entrance gives us the right perspective for understanding what God is up to and what he is saying to us today.

We may not start reading the Bible in Genesis, and we may hardly ever spend loads of time in the genealogies of Chronicles and the laws of Leviticus and Numbers. But if we enter the Bible through covenant and kingdom, we soon find ourselves asking questions like these:

How does God’s covenant with Abraham relate to his purposes for his whole creation?
​
If Jesus is our king, what about the rest of creation? 
If this is God’s world, what went wrong with it? How come he lost control over it? 
How does the church fit in to God’s kingdom purposes for his whole creation?

The only way to answer these questions is to go back to the beginning of the Bible and read the story as it unfolds in its various acts, starting with “In the beginning . . .” And that is what we are going to do in this book. So yes, provided we do not understand the matter simplistically, the Bible certainly is a single unfolding story. And in this book we are going to tell that story. ​