It's a Story

I met briefly today with Lori Nicol from Augsburg Fortress, and she showed me a new Zondervan product that looks really interesting. It's called The Story, and it's an edition of the TNIV Bible spliced and arranged to tell the Biblical narrative as a chronologically ordered story.

The first thing I like about is simply the format. It's printed in a single column with no chapter and verse numbers. In other words, it looks more like a regular book, and, imho, that makes it much more readable and inviting. Our usual Bible formats create a real sense of unfamiliarity and foreignness, which those of us who have been reading the Bible for years hardly notice anymore.

What I like even more, however is the reminder that the Bible is a story. It's a narrative of God and His creation that centers in Jesus the Messiah-Lord. It reveals wise rules, but it's not a book of wisdom or rules. It teaches theology but it is not a theology textbook. It includes prophecy, but is not mainly prophecy either. It is a story of God's past, present, and future with His world.

The Story shouldn't be anyone's only Bible because it isn't a whole Bible, but it's an interesting resource and could be very useful for the purpose of gaining familiarity with the narrative backbone of the Biblical canon.