While reading Keith Ward’s book, The Word of God? I came across the following which is “spot on”:
The question, ‘Are the historical narratives of the Bible true or false as they stand?’ is natural but misleading. They are dramatic presentations of religious attitudes, projected onto the past, elaborating core discernments of God that cannot now be recovered in literal detail. These dramatic presentations are meant to be rehearsed in thought by their hearers. Repeating these paradigmatic episodes of their tradition, hearers are to renew in themselves a sense of the demand, calling, judgment, promise and power of their God. But they are to do so in the knowledge that the ancient narratives must take a new form in their lives, in conditions of life which are very different, and in the light of later qualifications and re-interpretations that are found in later biblical texts. These episodes are recited rituals, whose repetition is intended to renew devotion to the God whose presence they symbolize.
The ritual narratives are found in history, and in discernments of a historically active God who has a moral goal for the world and a moral vocation for Israel. The original history is never exactly recoverable and what is primary is the symbolic efficacy of the narratives in a present religious community. Is there a transcendent reality, a God with this character, who can be known and worshipped in this tradition? Can these ritual narratives, now so ancient in origin, still carry the power to evoke a sense of God, despite all their limitations of perspective and understanding?
Prophecy provides the best example of the projection of historical narratives onto a cosmic scale, when it speaks of contemporaneous political dangers for Israel, for example, in terms of judgment on the world (the ‘Day of the Lord’), of the darkening of the powers of the heavens, and of a Davidic king who will return to lead a faithful remnant into renewed world and to the true worship of God. These prophetic symbols were, Christians think, fulfilled in Jesus, and so they are tremendously important as pointers to future disclosures of God. But they were fulfilled in quite new and unexpected ways—for Jesus did not rule as a king in a Jerusalem palace, but he was crucified on a hill outside the city walls. So, for Christians, the Hebrew Bible anticipates and points to fuller discernments of God, but often in very obscure and imperfect ways. (Keith Ward, The Word of God? The Bible After Modern Scholarship [London: SPCK, 2010], 40-41)
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