Bully's Blog

or The New Downgrade

She drove a Plymouth Satellite
Faster than the speed of light…

“Pastor, if the local atheist knows the Bible and understands its basic implications for morality, society, politics, education, economics, history and science better than the people you instruct every week, and most likely he does, you are failing them.”

It seems to me that good Christians go off to Bible college and seminary little suspecting that these institutions are places where they teach you how not to read a book.

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Structure of Psalm 91, with comments on Matthew 4:6

For the tools to make sense of the parsing below, get the Bible Matrix books. Book 1 describes the sevenfold Creation pattern. Book 2 describes the fivefold Covenant pattern from which the sevenfold pattern is derived (and how both of them are derived from the threefold Trinity).

T R A N S C E N D E N C E

Strangely, the RSV does a better job of the flow on this one than the NKJV or ESV. Here is where literary structure helps translation of Hebrew! Line 5 does not begin a new sentence.

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Food, Commerce and Art made for Reproduction

“He was most American of artists and the most artistic of Americans,
so American in fact, that he was virtually invisible to us.” – Dave Hickey

These are the infamous soup cans by Andy Warhol. Initially, the work attracted little response. But Irving Blum, the art dealer who took a risk on Warhol, told the artist that as he observed them day after day in his LA gallery, they had a profound effect upon him. He couldn’t put it into words, but he realized that, together, as a unit, and only as a unit, they silently but consistently presented a deep question.

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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Another chapter from Bible Matrix III:

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“Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.”

Finally received my hard copy of God’s Kitchen: Theology You Can Eat & Drink.

“The Old Testament is a violent, bloody book, but the more we modern Christians neglect it, the more our gospel loses its teeth. This little book will call you out, cut you up, lift you up, and set you on fire. It begins where all spiritual meat does: not at the dinner table, not in the kitchen, nor even at the market. It begins in the abattoir. The God of the Old Testament is a butcher only because the Christ of the New Testament is a chef.”

Here’s what’s on the menu:

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An excerpt from Bible Matrix III:

Just as Esau was the line of Cain rolled into one, so Jacob was a true son of God. In fact, being blameless as Noah was, the Lord granted him a vision of the true Gate of God, a tower reaching to heaven.

In Bible Matrix, we mentioned the significance of Jacob’s “ziggurat” vision as it relates to the mountain of God. [1] Jacob was laid out on the ground like Adam. His slumber brings a “Bridal” vision.

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“Jacob didn’t steal the future. He rescued it from a Man who put food first and whose eyes were not yet opened.”

James Jordan has done the Church a great service by rehabilitating the reputations of Noah the drunk, Abraham the liar, Jacob the swindler and Moses the murderer. He has shown us that the context of these so-called sins and crimes mean that they are nothing of the sort. [1] By this, I don’t mean “cultural context” but Covenant context. The reason these great men of God (and their wonderful women) get such a bad rap is because their stories are treated like a bunch of separate things that occurred, from which we must draw obvious and disconnected morals, rather than a single narrative begun in Genesis 1.

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or Bible SatNav

The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image. It also aptly characterizes one of the main goals of visualization, namely making it possible to absorb large amounts of data quickly. (Wikipedia)

It struck me this morning, as I read one of my regular theology blogs, that theologians don’t much use diagrams. The blog post in question used over a thousand words to describe something that is inherent in the architectures (both literary and spatial) found in the Bible.

What this means is that, for the most part, the way we communicate theology is foreign to the way our God does it.

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A design concept for TC.
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Here’s a chapter from Bible Matrix III. If you think this one’s just okay, rest assured that the subsequent chapters are a lot more fun — typologically speaking.

(Note: It still has some typos and the footnotes haven’t been numbered yet!)