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The problem with theology-first reading. Most books built around the story of the Bible more often than not fall into the trap of theology-first reading. A great example is Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen’s The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Baker Academic, 2004). Bartholomew and Goheen’s work is perhaps the closest to what I present here—at least from a biblical theology point of view.

We hew closely on many of the main themes of the overall text and make use of similar language as far as the literary force of many texts is concerned. However, Bartholomew and Goheen still end up tracing the metanarrative of the Bible with theological threads rather than literary ones. Opting for the twin lenses of “covenant and kingdom” (322), Bartholomew and Goheen articulate a vision of the Bible’s story that’s certainly cohesive, but shaped by the constituent parts’ role with respect to the overarching theological themes of covenant and kingdom.

As a result, they are content to import data from all over the text to build their categories, and then to leverage those categories as interpretive lenses for determining the meaning or import for the story in its various movements. For Bartholomew and Goheen, the literary nature of the metanarrative is valuable only insofar as it can give color or structure to their predetermined theological categories for God and his work.

The book fails to present the progressive development of the Bible’s main character: God himself. He becomes a stagnant and ever-present reality almost behind the scenes to a primarily human story. Bartholomew and Goheen must then make statements about God deriving from the text rather than allow it to show God.