Mind the Story: A Bible Reading Lesson from Ron Horton

Review: Alive to the Purpose: The Readerly Reading of Scripture (Greenville, SC: JourneyForth, 2020)
Reviewed by Brendon Johnson

If the Bible is the rule of the Christian faith, every Christian should know what it says. Furthermore, listening to preaching is not enough; your pastor is not going to tell you everything in the Bible. You must do some work on your own.

What that work looks like varies widely from one Christian to the next. Some tend to bury themselves in technical details, often relying on dictionaries, commentaries, and other study aids to squeeze every possible bit of meaning out of every verse. Others take an overly subjective approach: they are not satisfied with their daily reading unless they have gotten something immediately applicable out of it. They expect each passage to say something special to them directly.

Either group finds it hard to take in the whole of the Bible. The latter, gravitating as they do to passages that promote inspirational feelings, might leave entire sections unread. Neither fully appreciates the nature of the Bible.

In Alive to the Purpose: The Readerly Reading of Scripture (Greenville, SC: JourneyForth, 2020), the late literary scholar and Bob Jones University professor Ronald A. Horton¹seeks to correct unbalanced Bible study. There are multiple legitimate ways to study, but neither special study nor perfunctory reading should keep us from seeing Scripture for what it is. Horton proposes that Christians read the Bible as story.

Rather than exploring the Bible’s “grand narrative” as a piece, Horton focuses on how individual parts of the story contribute to our understanding of God’s truth (xiii-xiv). He illustrates the elements of a reader’s awareness: attention to setting (13-16) and audience (17-22), an imagination ready to make connections between portions of Scripture, and, especially, listening. “Speaking to Scripture rather than allowing Scripture to speak” leads to just “the meaning you want to find there” (23). Instead, a delighted receptivity, reading through the Bible with attention and enjoyment, allows you to hear what the Bible says.

Readers looking for a how-to manual might initially be disappointed. Most of the book contains examples of the author’s own reading, the bulk (if a 105-page book may be said to have bulk) being reflections on the story of Elijah (33-80). Horton only sometimes details how his process works.

While his book might benefit from more elaboration, part of the book’s worth is that it does not prescribe an exact pattern. Horton is not out to create another system. When he tells us to “mind the story and the story line, alive to the purpose” (xiv), he summarizes the entirety of his approach. Extended explanation is unnecessary. He offers some of the fruits from his own minding of the story.

For Ron Horton, the story brings life lessons. For example, “When obedience to God becomes a no-brainer, many troubling life questions fall away or fail to appear” (39). “In the revival of persons as well as nations, if spiritual change is truly genuine, repentance will be followed by direct action” (56). “The Lord never asked His disciples to abandon their good for His… They were to lay up for themselves treasures but in the right place” (90-91). These ideas did not come because he was looking for them. They came because he read the stories — and read them again — and thought about them, as literature, which is what they really are.² Though technical analysis and personal application are also necessary, letting the stories come alive in your mind will show you their purpose as parts of God’s revelation.³

Although the product of the author’s final years,⁴ the ideas in Alive to the Purpose had been in his thinking for much longer. As early as 1988 Horton wrote that “to detect the structural elements of a book of Scripture, we must try to view it as a whole. In order to view it as a whole, we must read steadily with passive alertness, holding initial impressions in suspense.”⁵ His last book shows that he consistently followed his own advice.

In the foreword Royce Short concludes that Horton’s proposal “requires a continuous (all the time) and comprehensive (all the Bible) reading plan” (viii). A Christian who wants to know what the Bible says can neither leave out a part nor take the Bible in such small pieces that he loses the whole. Ron Horton does not propose a specific plan, but he demonstrates a mindset, a necessary mindset for an accurate understanding of the Bible and the One whom it reveals. Alive to the Purpose challenges its readers to take the Bible at its full worth.

---

Brendon Johnson is the administrative assistant to the associate dean of the School of Religion at Bob Jones University.

1. Those unfamiliar with Ron Horton might read my memorial essay. [↩]
2. Sometimes the author’s inimitable humor comes out, too: “Baal is being tested. Poor Baal. Baal worship is being exposed. Poor religion. Baal worshipers are being shown the futility of their worship. Poor worshipers” (38-39). Horton’s students will readily recognize the voice! [↩]
3. Horton does not limit his approach to narrative; discourse and epistle also have their stories. [↩]
4. The book did not appear until a full year after Horton’s death. While noting that it “is published posthumously … based on the author’s work in progress” (ii), the publishers do not explain how much editing was done. A footnote on page 21 could conceivably come from the author, writing in anticipation of his death, but did it? And would Ron Horton have been responsible for the pronoun-case error on page 12? Editorial questions, however, do not subtract from the book’s value. [↩]
5. Ronald A. Horton, “Reading Romans,” Biblical Viewpoint 22.1 (Apr. 1988), 13. Incidentally, the author’s doctoral dissertation reads Spenser with what amounts essentially to the same mindset; see Ronald Arthur Horton, The Unity of The Faerie Queene (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978). [↩]