Editor Randy Frazee’s The Story, and Adam T. Barr’s Exploring the Story
Description
The Bible is a book that, regardless of the stock you place in it, has changed the world; but it’s not an easy read.
Pastor, author, and editor Randy Frazee has worked on numerous books that focus on Christian living and gaining a better understanding of the Bible. In The Story, Frazee has boiled down selected parts of scripture, sorted them into chronological order, and used their more modern NIV translation, to create a book highlighting scripture’s Bible-long story of God and his love for us.
With additional related works that offer further study or are written to appeal to children, The Story aims at making the story of God and his people easier to read and understand.
Disclosure
I personally bought this book. There was no agreement with the author, publisher, or any third party that I would publish a review. The following review is unsolicited, unbiased, and all opinions are my own.
Review – Spoiler Free
Within modern Christian circles, it isn’t uncommon to hear the charge to read the whole Bible. From basic reading plans with verse references, to printed Bible-in-a-year hardbacks, the idea is prevalent and it’s completion is an accomplishment.
Having attended Church all my life, I definitely got the cue, and have read the Bible in its entirety – once, back in 2014. I have been wanting to go back through it for a few years now as a refresher and reminder of parts I have forgotten about as well as to dig a little deeper than I had the last time (know what you believe, right?), but just kept putting it off. Eventually my husband and I decided to read through The Story and Exploring the Story together, while simultaneously reading The Story for Children with our kids (read my review of The Story for Children here).
Billed as “simple, accessible, and easy to use…”, with “Frazee’s scripture selections seamlessly woven together with transition text” to read “like a novel.” (These quotes are all taken from the book description provided by Zondervan.) We went into this expecting it to be a quicker read that highlighted God’s overarching message of love … because ultimately that’s the story between him and his people: love. From his love for his people Israel, who lived in covenant with him, to his love for the New Testament tax collectors, and even to his love for you and me.
In theory, this sounded great. Tell me the story of a God so amazing and awesome that he rescues a whole nation from slavery, that he lays the burden of both sides of the Abrahamic covenant upon himself (look up what a vassal-suzerain covenant is), that he fulfilled that covenant to the utmost degree with Jesus’s death on the cross. Yes, tell me the story. Not through an omnibus of books sorted by genre, but as one linear, Biblically-accurate story. It sounds amazing.
That definitely wasn’t what we got. Buckle up cause this review’s gonna be long.
I don’t think I had unattainably high hopes for this book, but it fell so sadly short of whatever hopes I did have. Both my husband and I struggled to finish it, and I had a hard time writing the book description above to be accurate.
The Story is not a “seamless narrative” that reads “like a novel”. It is selections of source material – some pared down and some clunky – set in chronological order, with summarizing text to bridge the gaps between. Certain books within the Bible are completely skipped in what I assume was an attempt to point The Story toward highlighting God’s love and telling the overall story of the Bible. Yet large chunks of other books and parts are included that cause the “seamless narrative” to more than fall flat (ex: large parts of Paul’s letters are included in the ridiculously long chapter, “Paul’s Mission”).
As I say in my review of The Story for Children (read it here): the Bible on its own can be difficult to interpret and any handful of well-meaning theologians can come to different conclusions about what certain passages mean, and even about what stories within the Bible are most important. So my complaint about the scripture selections included in The Story is not about what is or is not included, but that the presentation of the included scripture selections does not in any way read “like a novel” as the publisher describes it.
Yes, it is told chronologically, which helps immensely in understanding. It includes a convenient timeline at the beginning, but the timeline spacing included at the individual chapter beginnings is entirely irrelevant – all events being spaced evenly upon a line that runs the width of the page, regardless of when it happened. More than once, events that happened in the same year were separated on the chapter’s timeline by just as much space as they were from an event that happened years away from it. If you’re focusing on putting a story into chronological order, timeline events should have somewhat accurate spacing. And if it was simply summarizing what events the chapter would be covering, the events would have been better depicted as bullet points in a list.
While reading The Story, we lost all interest about halfway through and struggled through the last quarter, but stuck it out to finish it. It was not impressive, it was not helpful, or in any way “like a novel”. And, if you can’t tell, I was rather disappointed in it.
I’m combining both The Story and Exploring the Story into this review because I feel the works both suffer from the same scripture selection issues, so reviewing them separately would be redundant and they both would be so much better if combined into one work.
One of the main reasons The Story doesn’t read like a novel, and doesn’t really highlight the “intrigue, drama, conflict, romance, and redemption” from the Bible like Zondervan’s book description states, is because of the simple fact that the Bible was written in a different time and across different cultures. To understand the culture the part they are reading is in, readers need a bit of context and background. While The Story doesn’t provide that for readers, Exploring the Story does … somewhat.
Exploring the Story offers good summaries of the chapters from The Story, has some modern day pictures of the areas mentioned, and maps from the time periods; and it has completely irrelevant stock images of artifacts from the time period that contain no other connection to the Bible or The Story. At the beginning of each chapter, instead of a timeline, there is a chart including notable Secular historical events alongside the Biblical. The beginning of each chapter includes a cast of characters, some of which are helpful, others contain random information or characters not integral or not even mentioned in The Story. But, this is better than The Story’s Character Glossary which is haphazardly shoved in the book’s back matter and seems to be listed by the character’s appearance rather than alphabetically.
It is hard for me to think of who to even recommend this to. I can see its benefit as a Bible study that includes further discussion, or as an introduction to the Bible for someone who is intimidated by the length of the Bible. That said, I feel I can’t even recommend it in those specific situations without a disclaimer that quite a bit of the story is missing from The Story, both because of a lack of cultural context (which presents as an issue in reading the Bible outright, anyways), and because of Frazee’s transition text between scripture selections failing to bring The Story from a fragmented, chronological retelling, up to the novel-style read that it’s advertised to be.
And while the number of other companion materials available for The Story furthers its possible use in a Bible study, it also begs the question: if something that is designed to read more easily requires so much additional explanation, is it really making things easier?
Overall, I did not like The Story, – while combining it with Exploring the Story would have helped, Exploring the Story has its own faults similar to those of The Story and does very little to bring up my opinion of the pair. I am rather disappointed in it; it had promise, was marketed well, and heavily name drops Max Lucado for contributing to the forward (a prominent Christian author whose backing this makes me question how valuable his backing of a book even is), but it just fell so short. We will not be keeping any of the books we have in the series (The Story, Understanding the Story, The Story for Children), and I am happy to be done with this and wash my hands of it.
Quote
Our goal was to make the Bible read smoothly and easily, so that you can read it just like you’d read a novel.
Preface by Max Lucado, The Story, Randy Frazee
Ratings
- Quality of Writing – 2
- Insightfulness – 1
- Ease of Reading – 2
- Ease of Application – 1
- Pictures/ Illustrations (from Exploring the Story) – 3
- Overall Enjoyment – 1
- Final Rating – 1.5 (Actual: 1.6) – Didn’t Like It/ It Was OK
Want to learn more about the numbers I use for rating, and the qualities I’m thinking about when writing a book review? Check out my post How I Rate and Review.