Reading the Bible Imaginatively

Last week I posted a lengthy quotation, from Eugene Peterson's book A Long Obedience In The Same Direction, about reading the bible slowly. In this post consider what he writes about reading the bible imaginatively.

Imaginatively. The Bible includes us, always. Our lives are implicitly involved in everything said and done in this book. In order to realize this we must enter the story imaginatively. We must let our conversations and experiences and thoughts be brought into the story so that we can observe what happens to us in this new context, through this story line, rubbing shoulders with these characters. We have picked up the bad habits of reducing what we find in the Bible to ideas or slogans or principles or out-of-context ‘verses.’ Forget the details; skip the mystery; we want a definition we can grasp and be comfortable with. We depersonalize the Bible into abstractions or ‘truths’ that we can reconfigure and then fit into the plots that we make up for our lives. But the Bible shows us God present and active in and among living, breathing human beings, the same kind and sort of men and women that we are. Imagination in the capacity we have of crossing boundaries of space and time, with all our senses intact, and entering into other God-revealed conversations and actions, finding ourselves at home in Bible country. (Long Obedience In the Same Direction, Eugene H. Peterson, 2000)