That’s a valid concern. Since scripture is divine revelation of God’s unfolding plan of redemption any comparison with stories in general is going to have limits which require qualification.

For sure. But my point is that it seems it is not even getting off the starting blocks, since people understand it so differently: so much so, in fact, that anyone wanting to use it has essentially to handle the doctrine explicitly in order to explain the analogy!

I always understood the analogy to be that the conclusion is present in the story from the beginning but only visible in retrospect.

I think it’s clear that the “mystery novel” analogy is not helping to advance the discussion because different people hear it wildly differently. It seems to be heard by some as the idea of a book where the resolution does obviously flow out of the main story (the “surprise! bet you never saw that coming” school); but others hear the idea of a story where the resolution is foreshadowed, hinted at, and pointed towards in more and less subtle ways (the “author is dropping hints and clues; listen carefully and you too may be able to work it out” school).

If one reads detective novels the second way and adopts the analogy between them and Scripture, then surely one ends up with roughly the understanding of Scripture that Dr Tipton describes with approval.