Traditional approaches to the Bible lean heavily toward the conceptual and the doctrinal. We have erroneously operated on the premise that a person's world view consists solely of abstract ideas--but it also includes stories and images. . . . The Bible is more than a book into which we reach for proof texts. What would happen if, instead of tracing ideas through the Bible, we traced a single image, such as light or food or garment or rock? We would have covered an amazing range of biblical doctrine, in a manner completely in keeping with the kind of book the Bible is.

Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature, p. 22

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.

. . .

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?"

"Piety without poetry is often dangerous to theological truth."

--David Lyle Jeffrey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ0d5TwsnWI

"[In Exodus 15,] the song of Moses and of Miriam is neither an interlude nor an interruption. Rather, it is the very reason God saved his people: so that he would receive the glory of their praise."

Note on Exod. 15 in  The Literary Study Bible

"Misunderstanding literary form can result in misunderstanding Scripture."

 --Gene Veith,Reading Between the Lines

The Bible is not a compendium of doctrines, ideas, or rules. Scripture teaches, but teaches through stories, poetry, exhortation, visions, letters. It addresses the whole man—our minds, but also our passions, imaginations, loves, and desires. Christians who attempt to apply the Bible to political life, for example, often focus so completely on discovering ethical standards that they ignore the significance of Scripture's rhetoric.

The Bible has done its proper work when it produces a certain kind of person. Scripture's target is not primarily ideas or worldviews. Scripture aims to shape people. And people moulded by the Word of God not only bring that Word to the city of man. In union with the eternal Word, they are the Word of God in the city of man.

—Peter Leithart, Comment, Nov. 2012

I took a class on Moses from a man named John Sailhamer. It was the best class I have ever taken. I didn't normally take Bible classes back then, but my friend John MacMurray told me John Sailhamer is one of the smartest guys in the world when it comes to talking about Moses. I told him I still didn't want to go to the class, that I wanted to watch television, but at the time I was living with John MacMurray and his family, and he told me that I had to go if I wanted to continue living in his home. So I went to this class and about five minutes into it I knew I was taking the best class I would ever take. If you ever have the opportunity to take a class from John Sailhamer, you should. His knowledge concerning the Old Testament is quite ferocious.

 At one point in the class, for instance, a lot of us were getting confused because we couldn't figure out what translation of the Bible he was teaching from, so we asked him. It turned out he was teaching from the ancient Hebrew, translating it in his mind into English as he went along. And you might think a guy like that would go around speaking Hebrew all the time to impress people but he didn't, except one time when he read a long piece of poetry that Moses wrote. He read it in Hebrew and it sounded so beautiful that when he was finished, even though none of us knew what he had said, we sat around very quietly because we knew we had heard something profound, something Moses had sat and labored over for a very long time, something that ancient Hebrews would have read and then stopped to slowly note the complexity of its beauty, and the depth of its meaning.

 The thing about John Sailhamer is, he helped me love Moses. I don't know if I had given Moses much thought before that class, but after hearing John Sailhamer talk about him, he became a human being to me. Dr. Sailhamer said Moses, unlike most writers in Scripture, would stop the narrative to break into the kind of poetry he had quoted earlier, a kind of poetry called parallelism, which is when you say something and then repeat it using different phrasing. He said the way Moses wrote wasn't unlike the way people who write musicals stop the story every once in a while to break into song. At first I thought Dr. Sailhamer was just making things up, but he showed us in the text several places where the writer clearly stopped writing narrative and began writing poetry. The reason Moses would do this, according to John Sailhamer, is because there are emotions and situations and tensions that a human being feels in his life but can't explain. And poetry is a literary tool that has the power to give a person the feeling he isn't alone in those emotions, that, though there are no words to describe them, somebody understands.

I can't tell you how beautiful I thought this was; I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth. By that I mean if you have to describe loneliness or how beautiful your sweetheart is or the way a rainstorm smells in summer, you most likely have to use poetry because these things are not technical, they are more romantic, and yet they exist and we interact and exchange these commodities with one another in a kind of dance.

 This comforted me because I had grown up thinking of my faith in a rather systematic fashion, as I said, listed on grids and charts, which is frustrating because I never, ever thought you could diagram truth, map it out on a grid, or break it down into a formula. I felt that truth was something living, complex, very large and dynamic and animated. Simple words, lists, or formulas could never describe truth or explain the complex nature of our reality.

What John Sailhamer was saying was meaningful because it meant God wasn't communicating to us through cold lists and dead formulas; it meant He wanted to say something to our hearts, like a real person....

God used a great deal of poetry in the Bible. David was a poet and his son Solomon created a musical called Song of Songs . . . , and even Paul had memorized the works of Greek poets so he could speak them from memory when giving a talk. If you quote a poem in a sermon today, some people think you are being mushy, but if you quoted one back in the day, people would have felt you were getting to the core of an idea, to the real, whole truth of it. And after taking John Sailhamer's class, I started wondering if the message God was communicating to mankind, this gospel of Jesus, was a message communicated to the heart as much as to the head; that is, the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the ideas could not be presented accurately outside the emotion within which the truths were embedded.

And if you think about these things, it only makes sense that if God was communicating a relational message to humanity he would use the multilayered methodology of truth and art, because nobody engages another human being through lists and formulas. . . .

I began to wonder if the ancient Hebrews would have understood this intrinsically, if they would have sat around . . . reading poems knowing this is where real truth lies, and if our age, affected by the Renaissance and later by the Industrial Revolution, by Darwin and the worship of science, hasn't lost a certain understanding of truth that was more whole. If you have a girlfriend and you list some specifics about her on a piece of paper--her eye color, her hair color, how tall  she is--and then give her this list over a candlelight dinner, I doubt it will make her swoon. But if you quote these ideas to her in a poem:

She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes. . . . 

. . . she is more likely to understand the meaning, the value inferred by your taking notice of her features. The same ideas, expressed in poetry, contain a completely different meaning. She would understand you were captivated by a certain mystery in her aspect, in her eyes and her stride and the features perfectly met upon her face. And while our earlier conceived list of features might have been accurate, it certainly wouldn't have been meaningful.

 Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

Christian subculture . . . has had an unwarranted tendency to think that abstract ideas and facts are the only valid type of knowledge that we possess. Literature challenges that bias, and so does the Bible. The Bible is not a theological outline with proof texts attached. It is an anthology of literature. When asked to define "neighbor," Jesus refused, telling a story instead. . . . Our fund of important knowledge is not limited to ideas but includes the characters and events of stories and the images and metaphors of poetry as well. In a startling challenge to our customary thinking in this regard, C. S. Lewis claimed that it is "a mistake to think that our experience in general can be communicated by precise and literal language and that there is a special class of experiences (say, emotions) which cannot. The truth seems to me the opposite."

Literature is [true] to human experience and external reality. . . . Literature offers a kind of experiential knowledge and truth that everyone needs. Literature and the Bible alike tell us that we live by more than abstract ideas.

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

The example of the Bible confirms the importance of [literature]. If the message of the Bible were all that mattered, there would have been no good reason for biblical poets to put their utterances into intricately patterned verse form, or for biblical storytellers to compose masterfully compact and carefully designed stories. In God's economy, the writers of the Bible did not have something better to do with their time and ability than to be artistic to the glory of God. The writer of Ecclesiastes speaks for other biblical authors as well as for himself when he tells us that he arranged his material "with great care," and that he "sought to find pleasing words" (Ecclesiastes 12:9-10, RSV), or "words of delight" (12:10, ESV).

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

A Christian view [of the arts] should stand as a corrective to the prevailing utilitarian spirit of a technological society, though in fact Christians have often perpetuated the utilitarian outlook to the disparagement of literature.

Faced with the charge of the nonusefulness of literature, Christian apologists for literature have tried to meet the argument on its own terms, showing that literature is useful after all. It teaches truth, apologists say, or it moves people to good moral behavior. While there is truth in these arguments, there is something inherently wrong with minimizing the aesthetic dimension of literature. A defense of beauty, form, and creativity can be rooted in biblical example and doctrine. . . .

God himself is a creator, and the world he created is a world that is beautiful as well as [functional]. This creative God made people in his image--that is, with a capacity for creativity and beauty. . .

The example of the Bible confirms the importance of literary form and beauty.

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

Christians have traditionally found it difficult to grant integrity to this world of the imagination and have found ways to suppress or discredit the imaginary element in literature. One tendency has been to denigrate fiction and fantasy as being untruthful, frivolous, a waste of time, escapist, and something to be left behind with childhood. Others have tried to excise the imaginary aspect of literature by acting as though literature is a direct replica of everyday life, ignoring all that is unlifelike about it. . . .

[But] there is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. 

The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of expressing truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or theological outline but the story, the poem, and the vision--all of them literary forms and products of the imagination. . . Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts.

LelandRyken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"