When I first came across the idea of the Bible being One Story with a grand metanarrative, I was intrigued, curious, and more than a little wary. I grew up in church, heard the Bible preached all my life, and loved Jesus since I was a little girl, but had never heard that the Bible was One Story.

I had read and re-read the Picture Bible, kept my eyes glued to the flannel graph that depicted Joseph and the coat of many colours, Zacchaeus climbing a tree, and Esther’s bold rescue of her people, and asked my mom to read yet another Bible story at bedtime, but had never considered that the Bible was more than just a collection of random stories about faithful people following God.

The Bible, I’d heard, was our life manual—how to get to heaven and how to live in obedience to God. It was our Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

In the late 20th century, several scholars proposed the hermeneutical model of an unfinished five-act play—that is, they suggest that we read the Bible as a narrative of which we, readers in the 21st century, are a part of. The five acts are as follows:

Creation (Gen. 1-2)
Fall (Gen. 3)
Israel (Gen. 4—Malachi)
Jesus (Gospels)
The Church and New Creation (Epistles, Revelation, and beyond)

N.T. Wright first proposed this outline in 1989 and has since written Scripture and the Authority of God and provided several lectures on this topic. By placing the church in the fifth act, he states that the church lives under the authority of the existing story, which requires readers to pay attention to the entire preceding story. In doing so, he sharply distinguishes the Old and New Testaments, but states the importance of respecting the Old Testament as the beginning of “that story which has now reached its climax in Jesus.” (p. 20)

This model has several benefits as we endeavour to read and understand Scripture together.

First, it sees the Bible as a continuing narrative.

As discussed in last week’s post on why it matters that the Bible is a narrative, we understand that

Stories shape worlds. The stories that we tell—to ourselves and others—shape our beliefs and therefore, also our interactions with others.

Second, the Bible as narrative forms our understanding of who we are, who God is, and how God interacts with his created world.

The Bible is a book about God. It is God’s story. In his story, he chooses to create and interact with human beings. He tells them who he is and who they are, and he invites them into a relationship with him. He is an active God, not a passive deity in the sky for whom humans exist to please. This God is different than the gods of other stories.

Act One: Creation

The first act, Creation, tells us that the universe was

Created by a great Divine Being whom we know as ‘God’ (whom Israel knew as Elohim or YHWH), who demonstrates power over every other supernatural being because he created them,
Created good (Gen. 1).

A critical part of the narrative is that God created human beings as an image of himself and placed them into the created order to “work it and watch over it” (Gen. 2:15). There are Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) parallels here that modern readers miss, not least of which is that the worship of ancient gods would involve placing an image of themselves in their temple that represented the god and watched over their worshippers.

God, the Creator of the universe, by contrast created real live images who were given responsibility over the rest of his creation. To ancient hearers, this redefined the roles of god and human. In the pagan world, humans lived or died at the whim of the gods; in God’s story, he breathes life into his images and they are given responsibility to partner with him in caring for his good creation.

Act Two: Fall

This is the act in which some Christian traditions choose to begin the narrative, essentially stating, “Humans are evil and completely depraved, born in sin and doomed to die a painful eternal death as a result.”

But remember—the story doesn’t start with the Fall, it starts with a good Creation!

The Fall is the result of God’s good creation choosing a life outside of God’s goodness. They question the limits of their own created being, instead aspiring to be like God in knowing good and evil rather than trusting in his good protection and provision for them. It is rebellion.

The serpent creeps into the garden; the darkness gains foothold over the land; the wilderness encroaches onto the established order.

Thus, the beautiful relationship between Creator and created is broken. No longer will they walk together in the garden. No longer will they rest and work with wonderful purpose. Now, they will strive. They will struggle. They will know what it is to live in the darkness of suffering and pain.

Act Three: Israel

Despite their blatant rebellion, God does not give up on his creation!

(And notice, I say creation not people because an overly humanist emphasis in (particularly Protestant) Christian tradition states that Jesus came to save the people rather than all of creation. A narrative that recognizes that God created the universe also recognizes that Jesus came to save the universe. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

God intercedes, plucking one man, one family, one nation to represent him in and to the world. They are called Israel, and they are to be God’s new image bearers among the nations. It is a new creation.

The covenant that he creates with them is a two-way relationship—in the manner of ANE treaties between lord and vassal, God’s covenant says that he will provide for and protect his people upon the condition that they will obey and worship him only.

They are to “work and watch over” their land, creating a garden of life where all of creation, including the nations around them, can enjoy God’s protection and provision.

If the covenant is broken, then God will withdraw his protection and provision from the people. These are the terms.

If you have read the Bible, you know that Israel does, in fact, renege on their end of the bargain. In response, God faithfully upholds his end—he removes his hand of protection and allows the nations around them to crowd in and eventually capture them.

They are cast out into exile… boy, that sounds an awful lot like a sort of Fall, doesn’t it? Another relationship broken as a result of human rebellion.

When the Bible is read as a continuing narrative, we see that the entire third act is crucial in the telling of God’s story. It highlights his patience, mercy, and love for a rebellious people. It describes his repeated efforts to renew the relationship with his people and to draw ever nearer to them through worship at the tabernacle, through the Mosaic Law, and then at the temple. It tells of Israel’s deviance from the good life—instead of creating a flourishing garden for all of creation and the nations to enjoy, they become more and more like the rebellious nations around them.

The prophets mourn the rebellion of God’s people against their Creator and Redeemer, and they long for a day when restoration of this relationship will be made complete.

Act Four: Jesus

When read in context, we begin to understand that Jesus is the culmination of the entire story. Jesus, the God-man who lives a human life as a Jewish man and was killed by the authorities who did not understand his mission, is the last resort. Throughout the biblical narrative, we see how God interceded for his people, how he mercifully created a covenant with them, and how they rejected him time and again.

In Jesus, the relationship is finally restored; in Jesus, death, evil, and all of the wild darkness is absorbed in his suffering on the cross—an injustice that should never have been his to carry, and yet he did it willingly.

This is a Messiah who looks unlike a militaristic conqueror. It is not his human power that makes a way for the people to finally return to God from their exile; in fact, as a poor Jewish tradesman, he had very little power to speak of.

Many Protestant traditions emphasize the cross of Jesus at the expense of his life and ministry. The narratives of Jesus’ life and teachings are just as important as the cross to understanding the mission of God in the world. Jesus taught and exemplified what “the kingdom of heaven” looks like, and then demonstrated this by going to the cross.

The cross is the final deed that defeats the serpent, that dragon of old who continues to whisper sweet temptations of rebellion into the ears of humanity. It is the suffering of Christ at the hands of rebellious humans that made restoration of the relationship between God and creation possible.

Darkness came over the land; an earthquake tore rocks apart; the curtain at the temple was rent in two. All of creation submitted to the power of their God dying at the hands of humans.

And then—the resurrection! Jesus the Messiah is indeed victorious over the serpent, but he did it in a subversive way. He did not come with military power to overturn a human government; he came with the power of love and light to defeat death itself and did so definitively.

Act Five: The Church (New Creation)

Sometimes the retelling of the biblical story leaps straight from Jesus’ death and resurrection to “I’ll fly away, oh glory,” where those who believe in him will sing and dance for all eternity.

That’s not the whole story of the Bible.

The Bible tells us that Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to come upon his faithful disciples. He told them to bring the good news of redeemed creation to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the world—in other words, to your city, your province, your country, and the world. This good news isn’t just for me to enjoy; it’s for everyone else to take part in too.

The command to “work it and watch over it” now extends to every corner of the globe, every tribe and language, every race, gender, and class.

The Epistles describe what this new creation looks like in the first century Judeo-Roman context. Today, we continue to work out what this new creation looks like in our 21st century Canadian context. Or our South American context, or Asian, or Russian, or Israeli, or West African context. [Insert your own location.]

This is the mission of the church; this was Jesus’ mission. By the power of the Spirit, the church explodes into the world to “work it and watch over it.” The human mission has never changed throughout the entire biblical story—we are always called to bring God’s life into every place in which we work, live, and play.

And now, as the Church, this is made possible by the Spirit.

As much as I like N.T. Wright’s five-act play, I prefer the critique made by Sam Wells in Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. He rewrites the acts with Jesus in the centre and the realized eschatology of new creation at the end:

Creation (and the Fall)
Israel
Jesus
The Church
New Creation (The Eschaton)

Wells argues that “it is not the church’s role to make the story end well… the story begins and ends in God” (p. 52). God is the one who ultimately brings the story to an end, not the church. He also argues that Jesus should be the centre of the story since the creation of the world points forward to him and the end of the world points back to him. Lastly, he states that creation and fall cannot be separated, just as Jesus cannot be separated from the New Testament.

I agree with him, though I might add that it seems a little overly neat-and-tidy to have Christ smack dab in the middle of the model. This does, however, negate other critiques that suggest Wright’s model is too creational and not christological enough. Wells affirms the heart of Christianity—that Christ is the very centre of our belief, ethics, and hope.

Revised Act Five: New Creation (The Eschaton)

This is the hope to which we Christians look forward. Jesus made it possible for all people to enter into a renewed, whole relationship with him in the third act. The Church—the fourth act in which we now live—is the means by which this message is brought to our world and begins the process of restoration through peacemaking and reconciliation, caring for the poor, vulnerable, sick, and prisoners, supporting the education of the poor, advocating for the rights of all historically oppressed peoples including immigrants and women, and walking alongside those who are suffering in war, grief, or illness.

The New Creation is when we finally get to see all of our efforts on behalf of Christ realized in full. It’s where all of creation is made new—yes, even on a cosmic scale where climate change is reversed and Earth is not in imminent danger of imploding as a result of human destruction.

It’s where human relationships are restored—yes, even those in which we have been traumatically hurt, abused, or gaslit.

It’s where the powerful are brought low and the hungry, poor, and powerless and raised up (1 Sam. 2:1-11, Ps. 113:5-8, Is. 40:3-5, Lk. 3:4-6).

It is where all tribes and people groups work together, for and with one another—even the Russians and Ukrainians, the Americans and Canadian, and the Israeli and Palestinians (Is. 60:1-3).

It’s the hope of every good story—that the hero will win. In this case, the hero is a most unlikely one, a poor Jewish man who was more than he seemed, who empowered a movement that has changed the world. This hero expanded his vision of who the ‘heroes’ are to include those who are more often considered the scum at the bottom of society’s shoe.

And at the end of the day, when the new creation is realized fully, the garden is restored and “the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never close by day because there will never be night there” (Rev. 21:24-25).

Darkness and death defeated for all time.

This is the story of the Bible. It is our past, present, and future. We may choose to live into this story; we may do the work of identifying where we fit into it and where we are participating in God’s good creative work right now. It’s more than a story, it is a history and a vision; it is where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going.

Resources

McKnight, Scot. The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read Your Bible, 2nd. edition. Zondervan, 2018.

Powley, Mark. “What’s Wrong with Tom Wright’s Five-act Play Biblical Theology?” Feb. 13, 2024. Accessed Mar. 15, 2025.

The Bible Project. “The Story of the Bible.” May 7, 2017. Accessed Mar. 15, 2025.

Well, Samuel. Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. Baker Academic, 2018.

Wright, N.T. Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. Harper Collins Publishers, 2013.