One of the side effects of reading through the Bible is that by the time you come around again it is fresh. It always amazes me when I read something that I don’t remember seeing before. Even after all these years. Sometimes it is just a new understanding but often I don’t remember it at all.
It is something like the war games in which I played years ago. They were played on big paper maps of the battlefield broken down into hexes. One battle I enjoyed was called Quatra Bra. It was fought just before Waterloo. I would play both sides. Because it was so complicated when I was playing the English I couldn’t remember what I had done as the French.
Reading through the Bible also gives a good gestalt experience. The Bible is a complex book that is designed to be interpreted and understood in light of the complete story. We have a tendency to live by proof texts, one liners, because they don’t require much thought, but you can’t understand references to church [eklesia, called out ones] and love [agape] in the New Testament unless you have read about the synagogue [called together ones] and loving kindness in the Old.
It always amazes me how a book written over millennia can fit together so well. I enjoy the genre of science fiction. One of the saddest things about it is the ways in which it tries to deal with God. You read entire made up religions in some of the fantasy that duplicates the vocabulary of the Bible but makes little sense. Sometimes the authors even slip up and admit their quest. For instance,
“Newton and Einstein and McElroy had been fortunate: They’d lived in eras when much about the nature of things remained mysterious. But in Pete Damon’s age, no true mysteries remained. Other than creation itself, and the anthropic principle. What had started the universe? And why were all the myriad settings, gravity and the strong force and the tendency of water to freeze from the top down, why was all that tuned precisely in such a way to make possible the development of life-forms? Those two great questions had not been answered, but the consensus was that they would remain forever beyond the reach of science.” p. 48Read but keep your mind engaged. There is much to stretch the mind. Enjoy it.
McDevitt, Jack. Chindi. New York: Ace Books, 2002.
homo unius libri
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.