Bully's Blog

The Bible is a very strange book to modern minds. Even the passages we know very well contain a great number of oddities and we allow them to grow familiar without gaining an understanding of why they are there.

Those brave enough to regularly read the Old Testament often find themselves wondering what on earth is going on. “Just keep reading your Bible” our pastors tell us. Do you ever get the feeling they don’t have a big grip on it either? “Just stick to the basics. The rest doesn’t matter.”

A few years ago, I discovered the not-very-well-known theologian James B. Jordan. I didn’t understand everything he said, but I did realize that this was partly because he spoke just like the Bible: matter-of-fact, flesh-and-blood, and every now and then, outright bizarre.

He got me thinking, and I found that even the most curious things he spoke of became continuous threads. Jordan identifies what he calls the “universals”—themes that are repeated, not unlike a musical motif. After listening to many of his lectures, I began to recognize these themes myself, much as you would recognize the signature music when a hero or villain appears once again in a movie. Except the Bible does it a lot better.

The most amazing discovery, to me, was Jordan’s understanding of the Creation Week as a common literary structure in the Bible. There is no better way to research something than to write a book about it, so I started one. I intended to show how this 7-point pattern structured the major events of the Bible. I got to Abraham and found that the pattern was operating not only at a grand, over-arching level but also at levels within the larger cycles. And all in perfect harmony.

This incredible structuring means that the Bible is a “fractal,” a rough geometrical shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a smaller version of the whole.

Although the Bible’s literature often appears disorganized to us, it has in fact been extremely carefully crafted. Yet for the last hundred years or so, many scholars have treated the Scriptures as a shoddy, primitive jumble.

Analysis of the Bible’s literary structures has proven these scholars wrong. It has shown that this Book is smarter than we are. We have been harsh critics of something we didn’t understand—like drinkers of cheap beer ridiculing the wine fair.

Now, before you class me with the people who spend their time searching for hidden codes in the Bible (often while they calmly ignore its very clear and intended messages), this renewed interest in literary structure has some very solid benefits for Christians. This is not about hunting for mysterious patterns; it is about learning how to read the Bible in the way it was meant to be read.

The Big Handle

Ever wish someone could give you a big handle on the whole Bible without years of study? You pick up that Christian book and think, “Ah, I’ve finally found the answer!” only to be bombarded with an endless stream of data to assimilate. All you discovered was that the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know.

Well, this book not only promises to give you that big handle—it will deliver on the promise. Yes, you will realize how much you don’t know, but you will have such a handle on God’s way of communicating, and on the big picture of Bible history, that you will be able to approach and study any passage with confidence.

You should be asking, how is this possible? The Bible is one story told over and over again, with many variations on the same theme. The variations are based on Genesis chapter 1 (expanded upon in chapters 2-3), so they all follow a similar structure. This underlying framework is the skeleton key that opens all the doors.

I believe that much of the misinterpretation that causes Christian scholars to disagree can be avoided if we identify the use of this elementary pattern—the Bible’s DNA. This field is not something to be reserved for the mystic fringe (although such people are more used to thinking in this way). God’s work is both marvelously engineered and ravishingly artistic. He is not the author of confusion.

When we learn to recognize the shape of God’s sovereign work in the past, it enables us to understand how He is working in the present and how He will work in the future. God is bringing His people to maturity on every level. It becomes clear that our personal temptations and sufferings are significant  because they bear the same signature as the histories of families, churches, nations and empires.

Biblical Theology

A young Christian friend recently said to me, “You know, I just don’t get the Old Testament.” If we are honest with ourselves, we don’t either. A process called biblical theology will help us. It is the “big picture” process.

There are two basic theological methods. Systematic theology disassembles the Bible like Lego bricks and puts all the same colored bricks together in little plastic boxes (like many of those Christian books you have read).

It is a necessary process, but if that is all we do, we underestimate the powerful, carefully-crafted literature these “bricks” were removed from. Like coals abstracted from a mesmerizing fire, they soon become lifeless objects devoid of personality.

Biblical theology, however, is very different. It is like watching all the coals in the fire. It is like listening to a symphony and noticing the repeated themes (both how they are similar and how they have been altered). It enables you to analyze both the obvious and the more subtle ways in which the composer is communicating his message. It interprets the living Scriptures organically.

All those separate Lego bricks are part of a composition that links them together. The Bible uses a repertoire of repeated symbols, and the symbols describe the relationship of one “brick” to another.

For instance, when Satan is referred to as a serpent, he is using the weapon of deceit. When he is a dragon, he is persecuting and devouring. In Revelation 12, he is a serpent to the Woman but a dragon to her children—all in the same passage.

Very often, a Bible brick has greater meaning when observed in relationship to other bricks. Indeed, sometimes this is the only way it has meaning. Symbols are relationships.

In context, as part of a story instead of an item on a boring list, these elements are also easier to remember.

The Bible is like the Bayeux Tapestry, a long-running account of God’s people in history. Sadly, many modern conservative scholars prefer to spend their time squabbling over the mass of threads on the back of the cloth, all the while ignoring the exhilarating big picture on the front. They are technicians who see and record dots. To be fully understood, the Bible also requires artists who are able to “join the dots.”

While the academies, when it all boils down, have their students getting to know everything about the Bible but the Bible itself, is it any wonder many teachers are inept when it comes to communicating its big picture to their churches? Is it any wonder that most Christians are biblically illiterate and have to spend money on books—sometimes very suspect books—to tell them what the Bible says?

Biblical theology should be taught to everyone in church for three good reasons:

1. We don’t know how to read the Bible. We need to interpret it properly before we can apply it. We forget we are reading someone else’s mail, and take it out of context. We apply texts directly to ourselves or to current newspaper headlines with disastrous results. When we meet together, we search our feelings or latch onto any old idea we find rattling around in our subconscious, pool our ignorance and claim we are taking the Bible at “face value.” We wouldn’t treat any other literature this way. Who was it written to? What events were on their horizon? What previous events could the author be referring to? Where does the passage fit in history? What previous history does the text have in Scripture? Without checking for “previous,” we have no frame of reference for our interpretation of a passage before we make an application of its truth.
2. We ignore or isolate the Old Testament. We stay in safe, familiar territory, which leaves most of the Bible unexplored and foreign to us. And when we do deal with the Old Testament, it is presented as disconnected morality tales rather than as waves in an increasing conquest. This leaves Christians without a clue about how God works in history. We also fail to see Christ predicted throughout all the Old Covenant Scriptures. This is bigger than a “Where’s Waldo” hunt for Jesus. There are recurring event-patterns and symbols that must be observed if we are to understand the structure of Jesus’ ministry, the goal of the Great Commission and the history of the first-century church.
3. We misinterpret much of the New Testament, including some of its key passages, because we are ignorant of how God’s plan unfolded in the Old Testament. To interpret the last chapter of a book, you must understand everything that has gone before. For instance, understanding that the “Restoration” period laid the foundation for the events of the first century is the only way to interpret the “apocalyptic” passages of the New Testament successfully. [1]

All this brings us to the most important point of this introduction: the Bible’s use of symbols—typology.

Symbolism

The Bible’s symbolism is based on the fact that everything made by God has a message. All matter is like wax stamped with God’s seal, and all the elements of Creation say something about the nature of their Creator.

Like anything made today—especially clothing—Creation has a logo stamped on it. God’s logo is Man. Man is the primary symbol that points to God. That pointing has been corrupted by sin, and Christ came to be a perfect logo and then restore the logo in us. He is the Word, and by His Creative Spirit, He makes us Words.

The Greek word for a stamp or pattern is typos, which is where we get typeface and typewriter from. So the study of symbols and patterns in the Bible is called Typology.

Typology is a large part of biblical theology—I think the most exciting. Due to past abuses, it is currently unpopular. However, the Bible cannot be fully understood without allowing this upper layer of predictive symbolism to have its place in our thinking.

For sure, anything we want to see can be read into literature, and the fear of the “minimalists” is that if this door is opened, the Scriptures will be misused and our minds will be filled with crazy ideas.

But with this door shut, even the scholars are often unable to make much sense of numerous passages. They have banned driving because some people went off-road.

Is typology really that dangerous? Are there any built-in restraints on its abuse? James Jordan writes:

“Some [Old Testament] events are clearly and pointedly symbolic and typological, while some are only vaguely and generally so. We have to explain this in order to distance ourselves from the ‘interpretive minimalism’ that has come to characterize evangelical commentaries on Scripture in recent years. We do not need some specific New Testament verse to ‘prove’ that a given Old Testament story has symbolic dimensions. Rather, such symbolic dimensions are presupposed in the very fact that man is the image of God. Thus, we ought not be afraid to hazard a guess at the wider prophetic meanings of Scripture narratives, as we consider how they image the ways of God.

Such a ‘maximalist’ approach as this puts us more in line with the kind of interpretation used by the Church Fathers. It seems dangerous, because it is not readily evident what kinds of checks and balances are to be employed in such an approach. Do the five loaves and two fishes represent the five books of Moses and the Old and New Testaments? Almost certainly not. What, however, is our check on such an interpretation? We have to say that the check and balance on interpretation is the whole rest of Scripture and of theology. As time goes along, and we learn more and more, our interpretations will become refined. If we do not plunge in and try now, however, that day of refinement will never come.” [2]

There are two main “checks and balances” that restrain us from misusing the Bible’s symbols. The first is the Bible’s consistent use of the same symbols. There is a verse in John Newton’s hymn Amazing Grace which makes me cringe, because it describes God’s mercy as a flood and the end of the world as being like dissolving snow. I love that hymn, but I know the Bible only uses a flood symbol to describe the destruction of unfaithful Covenant people, and snow is always, somehow, related to righteousness.

Secondly, the symbols are most often contained in the repeated event-patterns which structure the Bible. In other words, the symbols know their place. To goad those too timid to venture beyond Lego brick systematic theology, I like to call this systematic typology. It is symbols contained in a repeated structure, like seven powerlines running right through the Bible, with each occurrence of the pattern as the power pole that holds them in place and in order. The repeated structure is what allows us to make and verify the typological connections between the events described.

Of course, each occurrence is not identical. The common pattern is refracted in a myriad of different ways. To illustrate this, imagine a dinner set where every patterned dinner plate has a piece missing. If we stack all of the plates, carefully lining up the corresponding bits of the pattern we do have, it is very likely we will be able to see the complete pattern using all the incomplete plates. This is exactly how the Bible is constructed. Although the first “plate,” Genesis 1-3, is extremely brief, it contains the seeds of the rest of the Bible in breathtaking potency. This primeval word takes on “flesh” as the pattern is replayed throughout Bible history.

The most basic event-structure is the Creation narrative in Genesis 1, and it is the chord from which the entire Bible “symphony” flows. When you see a passage that recapitulates the Creation Week, there are some very valid things you can draw from the text that aren’t actually written in it. This is a subtle element of Scripture that many bright scholars refuse to see.

Genesis 1 is the Bible Matrix. As it matures throughout the Scriptures, the identification of this pattern unlocks the books of Moses, Israel’s history, the structure of Jesus’ ministry and the book of Revelation. If the Bible is truly God’s Word, should we expect anything less? It also has staggering implications concerning the identity, purpose and future of Christianity—and these implications are thoroughly, joyously liberating.

Thinking God’s Thoughts

One reason we have a hard time understanding the Bible is because we keep imposing our modern world views onto it. The Bible speaks its own language. It comes in like a sword and violates our thinking until we think the way God does. God does not speak in theological jargon or ideology divorced from reality. He speaks in the energizing, intoxicating flesh-and-blood symbols of the Creation, and so should we.

This book draws a great deal upon the genius of theologians James B. Jordan and Peter J. Leithart. [3] These bold, godly, good-humored men have answered questions I have had for many years. I can honestly say that, due to their influence, I look at the Bible in a totally different way. I can open it to any book now and feel completely at home, even if I haven’t studied that book in detail. This is because I now recognize the furniture.

Bible Matrix is an introduction to the interpretive method used in my Bible commentary, Totus Christus: A Biblical Theology of the Whole Christ, which also summarizes a great deal of Jordan and Leithart’s groundbreaking work.

Once you get a handle on this method, I recommend taking the next step with that commentary and seeing these structures—and their exciting implications—in much greater detail.

But I have no doubt that this introduction is more than enough to get you understanding the Bible in a much deeper way, all on your own. And I can assure you, it is mind-blowing. You will never look at the Bible—or the world—in quite the same way again.

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…

Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

—Morpheus, to Neo, in The Matrix

WHAT IS A MATRIX?

ma·trix

Etymology:

Latin, female animal used for breeding, parent plant, from matr-, mater
Date: 1555

1    something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form

2a:  a mold from which a relief surface (as a piece of type) is made
b:  an engraved or inscribed die or stamp
c:  an electroformed impression of a phonograph record used for mass-producing duplicates of the original

3a:  the natural material (as soil or rock) in which something (as a fossil or crystal) is embedded
b:  material in which something is enclosed or embedded (as for protection or study)

TYPOLOGY

The Greek word typos refers to an image impressed onto something else, for instance, wax. It is the word used in Scripture for the imprint of God’s heavenly pattern on the earth, and thus it is absolutely fundamental to a biblical worldview.

In Acts 7:44 Stephen says, “Our fathers had the Tabernacle of testimony in the wilderness, just as He who spoke to Moses directed him to make it according to the pattern [type] which he had seen.” Similarly, Hebrews 8:5, quoting Exodus 25:40, reminds us that Moses was told, “See that you make all things according to the pattern [type] which was shown you on the mountain.”

As we have seen, there is a succession of such imprints. Each imprint is more
glorious than the one before. Solomon’s Temple was more glorious than the Mosaic Tabernacle.

Ezekiel’s visionary Temple (Ezekiel 40-48) was more glorious than Solomon’s Temple. The New Jerusalem is more glorious yet.

The study of how each of these models is transformed into the next, and the parallels between them, is part of typology.

Because all men are made in the image of God, all men bear His imprint. Every man is, thus, in one sense a type of every other man. More importantly, church leaders are to be types or models for kingdom citizens (Philippians 1:7; 1 Thessalonians 1:7; 1 Timothy 4:12; Titus 2:7; 1 Peter 5:3). In terms of a typological view of history, the kingdom of men in the Old Covenant was a type of the New Covenant (1 Corinthians 10:6, 11), and the first Adam was a type of the Last (Romans 5:14).

A great deal of nonsense has been published under the banner of typology; but in spite of this, the fact remains that typology is the fundamental biblical philosophy of history. Typology means that history is under God’s control, not man’s. It means that the successive stages of world history have meaning, a meaning related to the heavenly pattern and God’s purpose to glorify man and the world progressively.

James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes, Developing a Biblical View of the World, pp. 49-50.

_________________________

[1]  The “Restoration era” began with Israel’s release from captivity under Babylonian rule and ended in the first century.

[2]  James B. Jordan, Judges: God’s War Against Humanism, pp. xii-xiii.

[3]  See Recommended Reading and Listening.