The Full Creation

(Image credit: https://blog.obitel-minsk.com/2019/02/the-list-of-musical-instruments-mentioned-in-the-bible.html) I've been having a bit of a conversation about how chiasms are not that easy to grasp, which got me thinking along the following lines Jonathan Pageau makes the point that we generally do not read icons and other religious art correctly, because we regard such things as different sizes of person as unrealistic, the hand positions as unnatural, the various beasts as fictional/fantastic and so on. We moderns are thus at a disadvantage I contend that we have a similar problem with texts, including the text of most importance to Christians, the Bible. We generally read a text like it's a string of dominos, one thing leading to another. When coupled with literalism, this leads to a rather bland reading experience. Such an approach can lead us to see books like Proverbs as a collection of aphorisms thrown together hapazardly, with no guiding principle. We c...

This is a highly condensed version of how my map of reality developed; much is left out, and clarity is sacrificed for a packed sentence. My journey began in a tradition that has a deep respect for scripture, especially interpreted 'materialistically' or 'literally'. While there's problems with this, it has the strength of honouring the word of God: I was never persuaded by liberalism, which thinks it knows better than the Bible. My thought has always been that if God has spoken to us through Scripture, perhaps he knows what it means and we don't always, and to hold something in contempt is to place yourself in a position where you cannot understand it. But before I get in really deep, I should explain the basic problem I had, which was essentially a feeling of cognitive dissonance with my experience of the world, knowledge of history, literature, art and science etc, and what the mainline reformed-evangelical protestant church (I will use the word '...

So, I decided to have a little fun skylarking around with idiosyncratic interpretations of the movie Blade. You're welcome. Let's start with that odd character Blade. He has a dual nature, being human and vampiric. In this sense, he's like a mythical god-man, and is thus an ideal for what vampires should strive to be (and thus resembles Christ, the ideal man). But he's also a vigilante, named for a sword, and so reflects the idea of ultimate (or divine) justice being handed out: the vampires are never given a way out, but are rooted out as if irredeemable. All fairly standard mythical themes.  So, I went down another line of analysis, that of power. The vampires represent the powerful and gifted members of society: they control all the institutions and are blessed with extraordinary strength and agility, although Blade is the only one who refrains from exploiting others with his powers. Is this, then, a film about power and whether it can ever truly be used...

I've always found that Peterson has a far greater ability to make the Bible coherent than many contemporary Christian explanations. Generally speaking, there are two main methods of interpreting the Bible today. One is to see it as a book of mostly myths that convey truth about God and humanity. Putting it very crudely, I find this approach generally lacks respect for the text (I have very little time for people who don't respect their subject matter, because they operate from a position of pride and are therefore blind to its merits) and tends, in practice, to ignore stuff that isn't 'nice' (as defined by the fashions of the day). This approach is selective, taking whatever the author thinks to be truth and separating it from backwardness and barbarism; it is arbitrary and thus fragmentary. The second approach is literalistic, and though this often professes respect for the text, it largely ignores meanings that go beyond an account of what happened...

The Coen brother's Netflix film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, moves from the humorous to the profound, but also, as others have pointed out, from a romanticized version of passage to the afterlife to a chillingly serious one. **Spoiler warning** It is beautifully produced. All the scenes are splendidly shot and the acting is perfect. Despite being composed of six stories of varying lengths, the film coheres. The film could firstly be read as a somewhat cynical, albeit well-rounded tribute to the western genre in all its diversity, since the main characters are often anti-heros, and the stories are all haunted by tragedy: the normal order of things is often reversed. However, just as the book of Revelation refers to essentially every book of the Old Testament, but almost never with direct quotes and nearly always with modification and re-contextualization, so the Coen brothers do the same with Westerns, attempting a metareading of the genre. The effect of this technique is to rev...