What does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? It means first of all to be sensitive to the experiential side of the Bible. It means to resist the tendency to turn every biblical passage into a theological proposition, as though this is what the passage exists for. The one thing the Bible is not, may I repeat, is a theological outline with proof texts.

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We should read the Bible with our imaginations (image-making capacity) as well as with our reason. If we are to read the Bible as literature, we must be active in recreating the experiences and sensations and events it portrays. We must be sensitive to the physical and experiential qualities of a passage and avoid reducing every passage in the Bible to a set of abstract themes. If we have "antennae" only for theological concepts or historical facts, we will miss much of what the Bible communicates and will distort the kind of book it is. 

The Bible appeals to our imagination and emotions as well as to our reason and intellect. It conveys more than abstract ideas because its aim is to express the whole of reality. The Bible recognizes that a person's world view consists of images and symbols as well as ideas and propositions. A noted theologian has said that

we are far more image-making and image-using creatures than we usually think ourselves to be and . . . are guided and formed by images in our minds. . . . Man . . . is a being who grasps and shapes reality . . . with the aid of great images, metaphors, and analogies.

There is no better illustration of this than the Bible, an authoritative religious book that conveys the truth about reality by means of stories and characters and images and lifelike situations far oftener than by theological abstraction. 

Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature, Ch. 1, "Is the Bible Literature?"