1/6 The Bible is full of poetry. Sixteen books are composed entirely of poetry. Fourteen other books have a high percentage of poetry. Only 7 of its 66 books have no poetry.
2/6 Yet many people are unaware that much of the Bible is poetry and song, because the way teachers and preachers deliver the Bible to people is largely in the fragmented form of prooftext arguments, which is a way of thinking and communicating that is foreign to the prophets.
3/6 The prophets are more like spoken word artists and less like academic professors, more like singer-songwriters and less like fact-firing evangelists, more like practitioners of love and less like preachers of logic. They want us to act justly, not merely to argue correctly.
4/6 The prophets are artists. They specialize in painting pictures on the inner canvas of the imagination in order to awaken a heightened emotional sense of holiness or horror, adoration or anger. They are are trying to arrest attention and incite action.
5/6 In our post-Enlightenment Western academic tradition, we have reduced the Bible to a tool for proving ourselves right and our opponents wrong, thus forcing the Bible to be what it is not and using it to serve ends for which the prophets didn't write it.
6/6 Reading the Bible for what it is, on its own terms, will open the heart to love and arouse the will against evil, enliven the imagination with a sense of awe at who God is and marshal the powers of the soul to resist injustice.
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