Narrative vs. uncertainty in the Bible.
Anglican seminary professor Wesley Hill has written a delightful little piece that weaves together N.T. Wright, J.K. Rowling, and Tolkien in what seems to me to be a very Anselm-ish way:
“There is, it seems, more than one way to learn to read the Bible as a coherent story. One approach, represented by N. T. Wright’s covenantal, salvation-history model, stresses continuity and consistency, the onward rush of the story toward its “climax.” The other way stresses, in Käsemann’s words, “broken hopes and realized stupidities, disagreeable developments and vain service, broken existences and triumphant worldliness.” And, in the midst of all that human wreckage, it also stresses the single thread that alone makes any of it anything other than sheer waste: the strange, unpredictable element that we might call (with Tolkien) Mercy or (with St. Paul) the divine “righteousness”—the power of God for salvation that works its magic through death and resurrection.””