Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible

Seven Stories gives us the Bible as revelation of a nonviolent God. It identifies seven major themes or movements of transformation working through the text and the experiences from which it arose. Together these dynamic themes produce an overall movement of human change. They create a thrilling inversion of human meaning, from oppression to justice, from wrath to compassion, from violence to forgiveness. Seven Stories shows us a method of Bible interpretation that does not rely on a flat literal reading, but is something much more powerful and compelling. It shows a God working against the grain of violent human culture to bring about what has been intended all along: a creation birthed to peace and life by the revelation of a nonviolent God in the midst of history. The engine of human change as demonstrated in the stories is itself the divine self-revelation, and the measure, by which the truth of everything else is to be judged. Each of the seven stories contains three sub-stories or lessons, moving from the emergence of a theme in the Old Testament to its radical conclusion in Jesus. Together with introductory cycle the pattern produces a course of twenty four sessions, roughly a six month program. The way in which each motif builds on the other, both through history and the slow knitting together of new human meaning for the student, creates a teaching that is as urgently needed as it is transformative.