Boxes Within Boxes
Richard Bledsoe has kindly reviewed Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key on amazon.
“The Bible is an earthy, pungent, dazzling, aromatic book…”
(p. 191 Bible Matrix II)
Bible Matrix II following Bible Matrix I is a development and advancement. In Bible Matrix I, the author cut his teeth, and wrote an interesting and very helpful introduction and guide through the Bible. Here, he is chopping his way through thick, dark forests, and not many have been where he goes before. Mike Bull certainly can see things and put things together that I never could. The author sees fractals as perhaps the most basic reality of Bible structure (as it is also utterly fundamental in nature, God’s other book) and he sees them everywhere. He sees boxes within boxes as one revelation from God unfolds into the next with greater complexity and fullness.
The great American political philosopher, Leo Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) with the theme that medieval and earlier philosophers practiced writing books with complex structures and hidden meanings, in order to hide their true meaning and escape persecution by illiberal regimes. Some of Strauss’s own disciples have perhaps written their own books with complex and hidden structures and messages hidden within them. Allan Bloom purportedly did so in several of his volumes.
There is an interesting parallel to what Michael Bull has written. God has hidden his meaning, not per se to hide it from illiberal regimes, but from sinful and unsubmitted eyes. But, if one will submit to God’s covenant structure, one can begin to unlock the hidden meanings previously hidden everywhere. A five-fold covenant structure begins at the beginning, and is a prism through which the seven creation days in Genesis 1-3 shines through, and is then this is unfolded fractally, through the whole Bible to the very end. In the Creation Days, we see the first three days being days of creating a form, and the last three days as days that fill that form. The seventh day is a day of completion and rest. The author is a graphic designer, and has the gift of visualizing and graphing patterns that are very complex.
I recently wrote this to the author:
“As far as I can see, all of the long, ‘mind numbing’ descriptions of architecture in Exodus, Ezekiel, and elsewhere, supply patterns that have been waiting for gifted interpreters (such as you) to come along and decipher for the rest of us. I have long used the ‘form and fill’ pattern in the creation days of Genesis. But then to replicate that all over the place… well it is wonderful. Your capacity to SEE things as a graphic designer, and to be able to diagram them. I well remember diagramming sentences in the 7th and 8th grades. I was no good at it. Here you are diagramming the whole structure of the Bible and God’s Covenant workings.
“I recently read CS Lewis’s introduction to a new translation of a little volume (On the Incarnation) of Athanasius. He said that it was often his experience that in reading a serious work of theology (like that volume) it was far more devotional than reading a devotional work. I have felt that way in reading MATRIX II. Your book deserves to be widely read and absorbed (it is not the sort of book one just reads–one needs to live with it and let it soak in).”
BMXIIreview
