All too often intellectuals, whether they are believers or skeptics, treat the Bible as some kind of engineering document. They argue over the Bible as if it were a blue print for building a plane and every particular must be examined in order to determine if the plane will fly. The whole question of the Bible becomes a question of utility with the believer arguing that it is useful and the skeptic arguing that it has no use.

Rarely will you see the Bible treated as a work of art in which the intentions behind it matter as much as the particulars. Rarely will anyone ask the question “what effect is the Bible trying to achieve?”

Like all manmade distinctions, this distinction that we are trying to make is a little bit artificial. You cannot really divide people’s approaches to the Bible so neatly. Yet if you read G. K. Chesterton’s Introduction To The Book of Job perhaps you will understand what we are trying to say.

One might not agree with everything that G. K. says. But as an artist himself, he knew something about how to approach a work of art.