As a child, I loved stories from the Bible. Who wouldn’t be enchanted by the little guy beating the big guy in David vs. Goliath?

The Scriptures are chock full of stories of shipwreck and adventure, adultery and murder, passion and lust, conquest and failure. It’s fascinating reading, really. But you wouldn’t know that by visiting most churches on a Sunday morning. It seems we preachers view these biblical stories only as repositories for “principles” and “promises.”

Like scientists working on a cadaver, we dissect the text, extracting tips and techniques for congregational consumption. If we can’t turn a story into three points and a practical conclusion, we haven’t any use for it.

In so doing, we often obscure the very truth we seek to proclaim. For God works in a full palette of colors, not simply black and white–no matter what we’d like to believe. Life is a story, not a formula. It is not tidy. It’s complicated. It’s got rough edges. You can’t reduce life to principles and promises, tips and techniques. It’s deeper and richer than that.

But our Christian theology rarely allows for ambiguity. When many Christians read the Old Testament, they’re compelled to sanitize and systematize everything. In so doing, they make it sterile and lifeless.

In fact, it appears to me that we seem intent on turning life into a “paint by numbers” affair, rather than affirming the rich, messy, beautiful tapestry of colors God meant for it to be.

It’s odd that we, who claim to believe the Bible, would do that. For if we read it simply and honestly (without our “systematic theology” lens), we encounter an unruly story of drama and passion, love and betrayal, guilt and grace.

We see, for example, a God who told Hosea to marry a prostitute as a human object lesson. What’s that all about? How do you systematize that?

Or consider Bathsheba. Was she meant to be Jesus’ great ¼ grandmother? She entered the family line through King David’s adultery and murder. Was that God’s will? Why, among David’s many wives, was Bathsheba the one through whom Jesus was born? How do we view that through the lens of principles and promises.

I guess what I’m saying is this: God knows life is messy; and God embraces the messiness that it is. Apparently, God’s relationship with his people is as complicated as love and just as difficult to figure out.

God gave us a book of stories, not principles, and he doesn’t need us to tidy it up with textbooks. He knows that stories teach truth better than “truths” do. (Or was Jesus’ style of teaching was wrong?)

Not long ago, I read “The Red Tent.” It is a novel about Dinah, Jacob’s only recorded daughter in the Old Testament scriptures, written by Anita Diamant, a devout Jewish woman. I wonder: What kind of book would a typical Christian have written?

Judging by what I’ve observed, Christian writers would not craft a story rich with ambiguity and wonder, love and betrayal, drama and passion. We no longer seem to have such Christian authors as Tolkien and Lewis, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chesterton and MacDonald, Sayers and O’Connor.

Instead, if recently successful Christian fiction is any indication, our version of Dinah’s tale would be stale, heavy‑handed, preachy and poorly written.

Perhaps I should say it like this: By minimizing the role of the imagination in communicating truth, we have left effective storytelling (and its life‑transforming capabilities) to others. In the quest to say something meaningful about God’s continuing love affair with the human race, we’ve been, sadly, left behind.