The Bible, stories and fiction

For many people ‘story’ equals fiction. During a recent lecture on the interpretation of Genesis, I experience a lot of resistance to the approach I was putting forward. It was only towards the end of the class that I realised that students thought of stories as fiction. Thus, my references to the ‘stories’ in Genesis resulted in all sorts of questions. Is the lecturer implying that the Bible is fictious? Does he then believe the Bible not to be true but made up stories? What does he believe in regards with the inspiration of the Bible? Etc.

The first question we need to ask is whether ‘story’ necessarily equals fiction. Can stories also be true? Tate (2008:102) agrees that the idea the parts of the Bible may be read as literature seems to be foreign to many readers. Taking it a step further and study God as a character among other characters would be, for many Christians, inconceivable. To view and study God as “a character in a novel” (Clines 1995:190) stops short of profanity.

According to Ryken (1990a:7):

Fictionality, though common in literature, is not an essential ingredient of literature. The properties that make a text literary are unaffected by the historicity or fictionality of the material. A literary approach depends on a writer’s selectivity and molding of the material, regardless of whether the details actually happened or are made up.

It seems important that we distinguish between fiction and non-fiction when we talk about stories. Although a biography for example, is written in the form of a story, it is still a true representation of what happened in a person's life. The author may use of all the literary devices available to him to give 'colour' to the story and make it more interesting, it does not, however, take away anything of the fact that what is portrayed really happened.

Modern history on the other hand, endeavours to be “scientifically objective as possible” – “writing history for histories sake” and will not utilise formal narrative strategies as you would find in narratives (Tate 2008:104).

The Bible is, according to Tate (2008:105), “storicized history”. In other words, history written in the form of a story – history writing that makes use of all the literary devices available. Being “storicized history”, the Bible is also more than just history. “Storicized history” is more than just a representation of history. It reaches beyond the cold hard facts of history to “guide the reader into the discovery of some universal truth” (Tate 2008:105). The biblical narratives is about more than the stories itself. It wants to show us a God who really cares for his creation and a reality beyond the one we live in.

Thus, although the same principals are used to interpret fictious and non-fictious narrative, story (narrative) does not necessarily equals fiction. Even though we might refer to a passage in Scripture as a story, it does not necessarily imply fictionality. It is thus, not only, possible, but also vital, to read the biblical “stories according to their own rules and conventions”, without giving up on the high regard we hold towards Scripture.