Suppose that you were orphaned as a baby, and then, say, at the age of 10, were adopted into another family. The people who adopted you were now your new parents, your only parents; their children your siblings, their extended family yours, their ancestry yours. This new arrangement spells your deliverance from the hardship and abandonment you’ve experienced until now, bringing you into a gloriously freeing and loving home.

Even as this delightful adoption comes about, you would be learning and locating yourself in your new family’s old story. You might pull the family record of genealogies off the shelf and study it, adding your own name to the empty lines near the bottom. You might sit enclosed gently in the arms of your new father as he tells you his story, joining your new brothers and sisters in hearing tales of what are now your great aunts and uncles, getting a deepening sense of the way your new family views the world and its place in it.

It would be your growing delight to come to own that this is MY father, MY people, MY story. This is who I am and where I belong. Imagine the sense of identity and significance that would be yours as a result, and the sense of purpose as you enlist body and soul in the family’s mission in life.  [1] Recently an adoptive father told me that the adoption must occur in both directions: while he had adopted his son, his son had to come to the place where he adopted him as his father.

When a person places faith in Jesus Christ as Savior, just such an adoption takes place. You find yourself in a new family. You may at first only know that this has been your deliverance from past hardship and abandonment. It is a delightful prospect to begin to explore what is now your family, your story. The more you know what has gone before, the more you identify yourself with that loving family and that story, the more you experience significance and purpose. I am a child of God the Father, and Jesus Christ is my brother and Savior. The Bible is the story of my family, God’s people, in an unfolding relationship of love with the triune God. This is who I am. This story is my story.

The family record and Father’s family stories, in this analogy, indicate the way the Bible means to function in the life of the adopted child and family of God. The Bible is the story of God’s unfolding covenantal relationship with his people, and now it is my story as well. There’s an officialness to the chronicle: I have been called to buy into it, and buying into it is what makes me what I am. The Bible norms my world with its narrative–that is its overarching purpose. It brings me on board with its story, intimately, savingly, disclosing my Father to me, orienting me to His vision, and enlisting me in the family mission.

Sadly, thinking of the Bible and of Christianity in this way is not as common as it should be among believers. Theologians have tended present Christianity as a collection of tenets than as the living, life-shaping story of the family that has embraced the believer, in which he/she/they find identity and purpose. And while our personal relationships with the Lord in prayer ought to incline us otherwise, we can think that the best theology involves articulating and defending propositions—carefully defined, timeless, but impersonal.

When we think of theology in this way, the Bible itself seems to fall into segments, each of which serves to prove or illustrate one proposition or another, an attribute, a doctrine. In all of this we are blinded to the living, breathing, historical, concrete, situated, unfolding, storied, interpersonal, covenantal, unifying relationship which Scripture both chronicles and bequeathes to us.

When we replace this impersonal approach to theologizing with an approach that takes its cue from the unfolding relationship between the Father and his people which is the covenant, we restore to new and veteran believers the life-giving identity and sense of mission to which the Bible entitles them. This is the purpose of Williams’ book, Far As The Curse Is Found: The Covenant Drama of Redemption (P&R, 2005), and the author’s longing for his readers.

And if it is critical for formal theologizing to practice with a view to Scripture as normative narrative, it is well-nigh life-giving for all believers to live out with intentionality the realization that this is my Father, my people, my story! May we place ourselves in the story, having known its transformation, and now enlisting in its mission.