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?"

Here's an article that every pastor and theologian should read and think through: Leland Ryken's "'With Many Such Parables': Imagination as a Means of Grace."

It begins as follows: "The aim of this article is to explore a heresy that rules vast segments of evangelical Christianity. That heresy is to defend a neglect of the imagination and the arts on the ground that believers must be busy in God's work, assuming that God's work is never artistic. Yet the Bible itself, to say nothing of the creation in which humankind lives, shows that God's work is partly artistic."

God's creation, including the creatures in it, have meaning and importance because God made them. The world is therefore worthy of the writer's portrayal and understanding and love. The same doctrine assures Christian readers that their interest in the portrayal of human experience in literature is not frivolous but essential.

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

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 Biblical endorsement of [artistic] creativity is matched by its respect for beauty and enjoyment. When God formed paradise, the perfect human environment, he "made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food" (Genesis 2:9, ESV). God's design for human life, in other words, is aesthetic as well as utilitarian.

How can a person read literature to the glory of God? By enjoying the beauty that human creativity has produced and recognizing God as the ultimate source of this beauty and creativity. Christians do not need to defend literature, as most people have done, solely on the didactic grounds that it teaches us. Literature has a reason for being quite apart from that. In a Christian worldview, literature exists for more than our enjoyment, but not for less.

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"