Character Theology 

EMQ » Jul – Aug 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 3

Summary: Tom Steffen discusses how to shift from traditional systematic theology to a story-based approach. He highlights the importance of biblical characters in teaching theology, emphasizing that characters drive the narrative and help convey theological truths through their experiences. This approach, known as character theology, engages readers by connecting biblical stories to human experiences, making theology more relatable and impactful. 

By Tom Steffen 

Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin” rings true today. Since we tend to teach as we were taught, our good-news message may be sinking “like a stone.” Most of us have been well taught in systematic theology; some in biblical theology, fewer still in narrative theology. So, we tend to keep our theology objective, supported by evidence based on prooftexts, catalogued into formalized, abstract categories, and taught linearly using propositions. What could go wrong?  

Ifugao Rice Terraces (Photo by Tom Steffen. Used with permission.) 

I attempted this approach with industrious Antipolo-Amduntug Ifugao of central Luzon, the Philippines, known for their majestic rice terraces (stairsteps to the sky), one of the wonders of the world. They were totally unimpressed and let me know I was not communicating successfully. So much for church multiplication if I couldn’t even get past evangelism. So, I switched to telling Bible stories using Bible comic books. What a change. From young to old they told the stories to family and friends. 

That start demanded a restart. The Ifugao taught this foreign Bible teacher about orality and stories in which I had had no formal training. There was so much to learn. Fortunately, help was on its way. This article highlights some of the lessons I learned on that journey. 

A Story-Based Evangelism-Discipleship Model Is Born and Multiplies 

The Modern-day Evangelical Orality Movement (MEOM) began on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. It changed missions globally.ⁱ A people movement began among the Palawanos. Missionaries with New Tribes Mission (NTM, now Ethnos360), the McIlwains, were assigned to disciple them. McIlwain soon found out the Palawanos had not understood the gospel. Rather they had followed one of their myths that told them if someone comes with a black book do whatever they say. And they did, including baptism. Now what? 

Out of this syncretistic movement the Chronological Bible Teaching model was born. This story-based model moved through seven phases. Only the first four would have lasting impact: Phase 1: Genesis through ascension (evangelism); Phase 2: Genesis through ascension (security); Phase 3: Acts; Phase 4: epistles–Revelation. In 1981 this model spread throughout SE Asia and eventually throughout NTM (see figure 1). 

From the Rural to Urban 

Born in a tribal setting, this storytelling yet-to-be-movement became rightfully associated with rural people. For several decades oral storytelling dominated as the main media. Chiang and Coppedge therefore correctly called story “the lifeblood of orality.”ⁱⁱ Many onlookers, saw story as dangerous. They thought it had too much ambiguity, too many murky metaphors. As one pastor claimed, “Truth is too important to leave to story. Another said, “I prefer ‘Thus saith the Lord’ over ‘once upon a time.’” “Stories,” declared another, “offer shallow theology.”ⁱⁱⁱ Others working in more urban settings saw things they appreciated in the model but concluded Chronological Bible Storying was for tribal people. 

Jim Slack, J.O. Terry, and others of the International Missions Board (IMB) in the Philippines learned about Chronological Bible Teaching from McIlwain. They made multiple adaptations over time, including renaming it Chronological Bible Storying followed by Bible Storying. IMB personnel were instrumental in advancing it into a global movement among mission agencies and churches.   

Old Testament		Gospels	Acts	Epistles— Revelation
Phase I	Unbelievers Mixed groups Believers	Separation Solution
Phase II	New believers	Security
			Phase III New believers Preparation for Epistles
				Phase IV New believers Function of NT church Christian walk

Figure 1 – Chronological Bible Teaching 

Leaders in the IMB, however, also applied it to those living between tribal and urban settings in the Philippines. Eventually they adapted the model for fully urban settings,^iv recognizing that reading had become a lost art for the majority of urbanites.  

From Evidence to Embodied Demonstration 

From rural to urban settings, practitioners of the now multiple versions of Chronological Bible Storying realized their audiences had moved beyond evidence that demands a verdict^v to evidence that demands embodied demonstration through character-based stories.  

This era change requires a cast of characters rather than prooftexts. Just as the audiences continue to change (oral-print-digital-AI), so things within the MEOM continue to do the same to keep up. So, what’s new?  

Character Theology 

A question arose in my mind, what drives story? Most presume it is the plot. I concluded, however, that it is its characters. Others agree. Kendall Haven defines a story as: “A detailed, character-based narration of a character’s struggles to overcome obstacles and reach an important goal.”^vi Will Storr adds, “the focus on plot should be shifted onto character. It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in.” He continues, plot exists “only to support its cast. … plots develop as they should – from characters.”^vii Such research, along with praxis among the Ifugao, pushed me towards Bible characters.  

Character theology was born. Actually, it was something old, just recently rediscovered. 

This was a natural outcome of oral hermeneutics (a communal-experiential tool for interpreting the narrative sections of Scripture) which Bill Bjoraker and I introduced in 2020.^viii Character theology is holistic in that engages with all aspects of human experience. It respects and focuses on the narrative genre which comprises more than half of the Bible. 

So, what is character theology? Simply stated, “character theology is engaging God through ‘reading’ biblical characters in the context of story.” This “memorable story-centric interpretive process”^ix paints the face of the chief character in greater definition. It changes text-defined dogma into dynamic dogma-drama by situating it in lived experience. 

A character “refers to humans and anything personified – spirits, animals, insects, plants, elements, objects – that help drive the story.” They can be “an individual or group, real or fictional, visible or invisible.”^x In this article the focus is on humans.  

Ruth Tucker defined theology as “humans’ attempt to understand God as revealed through characters and events documented in Scripture.”^xi As there are some 3,000 plus characters (human, spiritual) in the pages of Scripture, this gives ample scope for developing theology based on them. 

The people of the Bible personify like us. They love, hate, bless, murder, help, steal. They are unpredictable. Tucker asserts, “Yet for many publishers and preachers and ordinary people, the Bible is largely a manual of propositions. The colorful personalities pushing their way out of its pages are seen as secondary – if that.” She continues, “But any attempt to turn this incredible chronicle into a theological dissertation destroys the very essence of it message.” How so? “We learn how to live and how to die by putting ourselves into the narrative … by looking in the mirror.”^xii Bible characters care the same as us. 

As we identify with biblical characters, they inadvertently enter our consciousness and confront us, breaking down our defenses. “Bible characters easily enter our lives through familiar pedagogical pathways and leave their footprints forever imprinted on our hearts, thereby challenging, and sometimes even transforming, present practices and postures.”^xiii And by doing so they serve as connection points for God to talk with us. 

Through people’s wise and unwise words and works we learn about our Creator. We learn about the Merciful One when we see a prostitute hide some Israelite spies. We learn about the Holy One when we see what happened to Moses when he hit the rock rather than speaking to it as commanded. We learn about the Jealous One when we see Moses descend from the mountain top with the ten commandments written on tablets of stone only to discover the Israelites worshiping false gods. We learn about the Great Protector though the lives of Joseph and Daniel when taken prisoners in foreign lands. We learn about the Strength Giver when we see what happened to Haman after Esther courageously visited the king. We learn about the Mighty One when a young shepherd boy defeats a giant veteran warrior. We learn about the God of Blessing when we see a couple’s (Aquilla and Pricilla) efforts in business and church planting in three settings. We learn about the Forgiving One when we see what happened to Peter after three denials. We learn about the Graceful One when we see what happened to John Mark after Paul and Barnabas had a “sharp disagreement.” And the list goes on and on. 

Bible characters embody four binary value systems of which one or two tend to dominate in different cultures. Examples of these include: (1) innocence (Jesus and Pilate, Luke 23:13–16) and guilt (David, Psalm 51:3–4); (2) honor (Hebrews 11, ancestors in faith) and shame (Tamar, 2 Samuel 13:13); (3) power (Deborah, Jude 4–5) and fear (Jonah 1:1–3); (4) purity (leper, Matthew 8:3) and pollution (leper, Matthew 8:2). Bible characters cover all bases when it comes to global values, some of which we may have yet to discover.^xiv 

Character theology requires interpreters to move beyond grammatical analysis to reading characters and reading rooms (context). When this type of theologizing is done in community, insights can multiply even as they draw critique. The process of doing character theology involves asking questions such as: What do the characters say? How do they say it? What actions do they take? What actions don’t they take? Does the author offer any clues? See figure 2.  

Figure 2 – Character Interpretation  

Reading people and contexts is something that all people learn to do from infancy. It is naturally learned in all cultures and opens up Bible interpretation to an “army of amateurs.”^xv    

Character theology takes interpreters on an imaginative, emotion-packed journey of twists and turns, peaks and valleys, as they attempt to decipher what the Holy Spirit wishes them to internalize as they forge faith and faithfulness. Character theology asks interpreters to align their lives with selective ancients, people in the Bible who have gone before (Hebrews 12:1). Why? Because we become who we hang with. Character theology focuses strongly on concrete human relationships. Relationships are the lifeblood of characters. 

Stories of people in the Bible immerse readers or listeners in places, scenes, events, themes, topics, theologies, ethics, and outcomes. They create pictures in the theater of our minds about all of life. They offer God-directed actionized-wisdom whether through constructive or destructive characters. 

Human experience lived out through the lives of Bible characters serves as the principal interpretive key to unlock and uncover biblical truths. Whether characters’ experience is cautionary or creditable, the deep well of Bible characters showcase their Creator’s values. Like creation, Bible characters make God visible, perceptible.   

God’s Cast of Characters (by Sarah Drobnack. Used with Permission.) 

Bible characters serve as a viewfinder, either confirming, negating, or supplementing present perceptions. As metaphors, Bible characters pull back the curtain, revealing the Creator’s grace and wrath. And as they do so, they incrementally and aggregately paint a more detailed and defined portrait of God.  

Yancy cites Miles as saying, “God is like a novelist who … can only tell his own story through his characters.”^xvi Schillebeeckx continues, “people are the words with which God tells his story.”^xvii Character theology brings the ancient past into the present. Characters are the lifeblood of story as the experience of biblical characters aligns with people’s experience today. Like metal shavings to a magnet, characters stick in our minds, and they’re not easy to detach. As we process the content of their stories in relation to our own lives, the Creator is unveiled.  

Wrap Up 

When I started using character theology, I wrestled with whether my teaching put God first. Did it begin, like Genesis 1 and John 1, with God and quickly move to biography? Or, did it spring from the embodied truths of characters as demonstrated in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), and move towards where John began – God?  

Then, I realized these approaches are partners. To illustrate, after a discussion on character theology, one pastor told the group of pastors, “I want my kids to know the doctrines.” So I asked, “Can they understand Romans without knowing something about Adam, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, David, the Israelites?” He responded by repeating his first comment although not with the same level of confidence. 

Without forfeiting the cognitive, we must also unleash the imagination and emotion (people are holistic) to move beyond what to who. Gains reflects, “often times the deepest joy of doing theology is when the how is deeply connected to the who. … Methods that reduce theology to a kind of speculation about spiritual matters, holding them apart from the concrete realities of life in the real world ignore the methodological of God becoming flesh.”^xviii  

Today’s audiences will tend to prefer the synoptic Gospels’ model which takes the hearer/reader initially to the who. But their positive and negative stories must eventually take hearers/readers to the first chapters of Genesis and John – the Chief Character. They point us to a theology which is so necessary today for today’s world – one that is easily remembered because it is relational. As the biblical cast of characters embody theology, we connect with them and meet with God in our lives today.  

Summarizing, story is the lifeblood of orality, characters are lifeblood of stories, relationships are the lifeblood or characters, and the lifeblood of relationships is the Trinity. We’ve come full circle. Evidence for today’s era requires embodied demonstration through God’s colorful cast of characters; they require character theology. 

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[1] For an overview of the first four decades of the movement, including forerunners, see chapters 2–4 in Tom Steffen, Worldview-based Storying: The Integration of Symbol, Story, and Ritual in the Orality Movement (Center for Oral Scriptures, 2018). David Hesselgrave labeled McIlwain’s work as one of the major contributions to missions in the twentieth century. David Hesselgrave, Scripture and Strategy: The Use of Bible in Postmodern Church and Mission (William Carey Library, 1994), 119.

[1] Samuel E. Chiang and William Coppedge, “Connecting Orality, Language, and Culture,” Orality Journal 6 (2017): 8.

[1] For a discussion on the big forgot and the fatal flaw in many to today’s ministries see Tom Steffen, “Should Orality Return in Bible Interpretation and Communication?” Journal of Evangelical Missiological Society 4, no. 2 (2024): 25–45, https://www.journal-ems.org/index.php/home/article/view/125. We have tended to forget that the ancients lived in an ancient world and thought in ancient ways. Our print-dominated world has buried orality’s media role in how Scripture was composed, communicated, comprehended, and conserved, thereby making it under communicated in many of our Bible teaching institutions. See also Nick Ackers, Exegeting Orality: Interpreting the Inspired Words of scripture in Light of Their Oral Traditional Origins (Wipf and Stock, 2024).

[1] See Dan Barger and Grant Lovejoy, Unreadable: Another Book You Probably Won’t Read (International Mission Board, SBC, 2024).

[1] Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Thomas Nelson, 2017).

[1] Kendall Haven, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story (Libraries Unlimited, 2007), 79.

[1] Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better (Abrams Press, 2020), 6, 122 (emphasis original).

[1] See Tom Steffen and William Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics: As Good Today as It Was for the Hebrew Bible and First-Century Christianity (Wipf & Stock, 2020).

[1] Tom Steffen and and Ray Neu, Character Theology: Engaging God through His Cast of Characters (Pickwick Publications, 2024), 31.

[1] Steffen and Neu, Character Theology, 67.

[1] Steffen and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, 167–68.

[1] Ruth A. Tucker, The Biographical Bible: Exploring the Biblical Narrative from Adam and Eve to John of Patmos (Baker Books, 2013), 2.

[1] Steffen and Neu, Character Theology, 60.

[1] Steffen, Tom, “A Clothesline Theology for the World: How a Value-Driven Grand Narrative of Scripture Can Frame the Gospel,” In Honor, Shame and the Gospel: Reframing Our Message and Ministry (William Carey Publishing, 2020). Tom Steffen, “A Clotheline Theology,” Honor-Shame Conference, Wheaton College, June 19–21, 2017, posted September 18, 2017, YouTube, 57 min., 29 sec., https://youtu.be/1XBlm9HgqyU?si=kpTACGP9Wek7g06Q.

[1] Steffen and Neu, Character Theology, 119.

[1] Jack Miles quoted in Philip Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read: Why the Old Testament Matters (Zondervan, 1999), 37.

[1] Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God (Crossroad, 1993), xiii.

[1] Timothy R. Gains, Walking the Theological Life: Discovering Method for Theology in the Lives of Biblical Characters (IVP Academic, 2024), xiii, 188 (emphasis original).

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EMQ, Volume 61, Issue 3. Copyright © 2025 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.