The Bible is Contrived
James Jordan Interview
A reader wrote:
After spending about two weeks on Bible Matrix, I’ve found that my greatest challenge has been learning to think differently. Have you written anything on learning how to make the transition from thinking about the Bible as a specimen in a laboratory to thinking about the Bible as a work of art? I sense that to communicate this stuff to the average Joe (and even to take on this mode of thought as my own) it would be helpful to know how to explicitly go about making that transition. Or maybe you see that as part of the problem? This stuff is more caught than taught?
Briefly, one needs to think in images – even musical themes. That’s why I tend to use images from movies and TV to grab people’s imagination and connect it to the Bible. It’s basically the same stuff, the same method of getting a point across. So we are already familiar with this method — just not with the Bible. God’s painting, symphony or cinema is history. The Bible is history but there is nothing random about the events whatsoever.
As I was beginning to understand the high frequency of the matrix pattern in Scripture, I had one of those doubts that are now very rare. The thought was this: “The entire Bible is contrived.” If we can get to the point where we are willing to admit these structures exist not just in the literary composition but in the history itself, either the book is an enormous hoax, or the Holy Spirit oversaw every event and also the manner in which it was recorded. Considering that the entire book itself — and consequently the entire history — follows the structure of the Creation week, there is clearly a single Author. So, yes it is contrived, but contrived by God.
How do we appreciate art, music and film? We become familiar with the methods, context and character of their creators. A film or a painting is never a list of facts, but we moderns think we can distill the Bible down to its essence by scanning the images, converting them to binary code and poring over ones and zeros.
A friend asked on his blog if it was okay to observe that 3000 were killed when the Law was given and 3000 were saved when Peter preached? He is an avid reader of theology, and has forgotten more church history than I will ever know, but this is basic stuff. It’s like studying art history and never appreciating a single painting.
So, read the Bible like a poem or a song. Take a step back and let the literary rhythms become familiar. Here is a James Jordan interview from 2008 that might help. The interviewer is Gregg Strawbridge (www.wordmp3.com)
