A guest post by Andrew P. Becham
“If you were a tree, you’d want to be planted by this river.”
It’s come to my attention recently that we have a real problem on our hands, folks. A misstep, a faux pas. All was well just a moment ago, but there comes a rumbling over the horizon. You know how these things go.
We’ve lost the ability to use our faculty of imagination for understanding the Bible. We’ve replaced it with something like bare propositional analysis and are left with a flattened, inorganic way of connecting parts of the Bible. “Aha!” we say, “This word was used there too! This concept vaguely represents that one! Finally, a connection!” The Bible seems to us more like a jar of bees than a scroll of honey.
During my degree in philosophy, I was naturally enthralled with theological work set forth by thinkers like Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, and other standards in the canon of that particular theological niche. And I’m still happy with the bulk of their work! They represent (in my estimation) some of the best of twentieth-century theology, interfacing with worldly philosophies at the scholarly and popular levels. The issue, though, is that their work requires zero imagination and a good bit of technical knowledge in philosophical history and method to get a sense for what they are talking about. It goes without saying that there is a clear path to enjoying the unity of the Bible without a PhD in philosophy. We know this intuitively, but we aren’t really sure how to flesh it out.
Here’s a hint of good news. A firstfruits, if you will. Scripture holds together for the layman with tools he already has. We are already immersed in story through shows, movies, and video games. We already know what a bad ending is like. We already grasp poetic justice. Lots of us have read Harry Potter or Narnia, or at least Dr. Seuss. We know what a story is shaped like: an upward climb to the dramatic peak. The mountaintop. You camp there for a bit and then head downward, working out whatever happened up there. We remember the chart from middle school English class. Yet when we interpret the Bible, we put those tools and instincts aside and pick up, well, other tools and instincts. Foreign ones. I think we are missing out, and I think there’s a way forward. We’ll get there—but first, a story.
What I Saw
The piece that allowed me to even consider taking Mike Bull’s stuff seriously was Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia. In the introductory chapter discussing method, he talks about how Lewis is interested in two aspects of the imagination—contemplation and enjoyment. Contemplation is an aspect of the imagination that sees an idea from the outside, turns it over in the hands, and inspects the idea as object. Enjoyment, on the other hand, takes the idea, puts it up to the imagination’s eye, and then “sees” other thing through the lens of that idea. You might say it inspects the idea as subject, discovering what it is like to see the world as that idea. This distinction is important to get us where we are going. Lewis’s essay Meditation in a Toolshed lays it out for us:
I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing [contemplating] the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam [enjoyment], and looking at the beam are very different experiences.
You can see the light, and you can also see the world by the light. The mind’s eye can do both jobs just fine. Our imaginative deficit is that we are always seeing things without realizing we are using a particular lens to see things by. We are fish who don’t know what water is.
The toolshed account illustrates what I already believed in theory, that our minds are governed by presuppositions we are not always aware of. Van Til’s solution is epistemic self-consciousness—you have to know how you know things. And knowing how you know is only possible through salvation, in which God gives you a new heart with the law written upon it, as new lens to see the world by. The alternative is self-deception, which Bahnsen discusses at length in one of his earlier works. This happens when we don’t know what lens we are using, nor that we’re using using a lens at all, to see the world and trick ourselves into believing we can be lens-free. Not a good picture. Biblically, man is a creature of dominion, called to interpret the world around him, and fallen man isn’t able to do that. Redeemed man, though, is reinstated to his post and given the tools to get the job done. A new heart and a clear conscience before God let man interact with the world and himself without the trappings of sin. Accordingly he should use the tools God has given him to interpret the world. He knows how to find the right kinds of lenses.
Lewis’s account also reminded me of how we utilize perspective to navigate life in the sense John Frame has talked about at great length. Frame’s theological method, which he aptly calls perspectivalism, demonstrates the inescapability of perspective within the Christian worldview (even the term worldview implies perspective!). He thinks that anything you know is your creaturely approximation of what is first exhaustively defined, sustained, and known by God. We can use our imagination to change our perspective: to contemplate the thing and see it, or to enjoy the thing and see the world through it. We’ll never know it from God’s point of view, though, since He is the source of all knowledge, all perspective, all things—while we are merely chicken nuggets. Frame isn’t entirely without imagination, so I’ll give him due credit despite what I said earlier. Lewis’s toolshed meditation illustrated what Frame had already taught me.
With these pieces in place, I was primed and ready for Bull’s proposal. The thread was being pulled.
The Solution Accepted
Fast forward to summer 2020. The proposal struck. I read Bible Matrix and saw it. The charts. The typological unity and underlying logic of ordered symbols across the entire Biblical narrative. A friend of mine is a woodworker, and it was like seeing him join together a pair of dovetailed pieces. Things just fit.
It’s one thing to see the light of Genesis 1’s seven-day creation and appreciate it for what it is. You can think about the days, consider what had to have been the case for the events referred to, and evaluate it as a piece of writing. That is, you can contemplate it in the sense Lewis shows us. But it’s another thing altogether to see Bible by looking along the Genesis 1. We’re to enjoy the rest of scripture in this sense, through the seven-day lens. By His light we see the light. (Ps. 36:9). What if, I asked, God gave us the structure for the rest of the Bible on its very first page? Well, I had believed from the outset that He did. I just wasn’t sure how. Bull showed how. The key fit the lock, and it snapped open.
The seven days of creation should be used as an interpretive lens for scripture, and the results are as multitudinous as the tongues of Pentecost. Thematically they align with the story of the first seven books of the Bible, the seven feasts in Leviticus 23, the patterns of Jesus’s ministry, the overall argument of the epistolary books, and finally the seven cycles of Revelation—and that’s on the somewhat macro scale. On the micro scale, individual Psalms, verses, passages, sentences fit the pattern. When he pointed the paradigm out, it held up so frequently that I couldn’t unsee it.
Once grasped, the reader is off to the races. The best way to start is to pick a “home base” of text he’s familiar with and “work outward” from there, connecting that text to the the heptalateral pattern of the creation account, the national feasts, the chiastic structure of different Psalms, the seven cycles of Revelation, or anything else. Whatever one is familiar with. Pretty soon he’s overturning rocks that he didn’t know he should overturn. The scriptures begin to speak harmoniously.
The pedagogical value of this insight has yet to be appreciated by academic institutions. In due time, it will end up in the right person’s hands and take off. At least, that’s what I hope. Consider the prize. A group of thinkers able to work their way through scripture with his method would be tremendously helpful for discerning the claims of prominent evangelical theologians and writers. Pastors who write popular-level books on life would, upon understanding and utilizing the Bible Matrix method, be greatly helped in speaking plainly on biblical matters without having to use lame, worn out cultural references to demonstrate a point using narrative. The Bible supplies these tools and satisfied our need for narrative, and in a coherent, nonarbitrary manner. After all, it is God’s very word to His people; He knows what we need. It isn’t the frozen dinner of popular shows and movies—it’s the feast of fellowship at a glorious table with Him. Heavy plates, sturdy table, raucous fellowship. (This crucial feature distinguishes legitimate theological imagination from what liberal theologians propose, which is more akin to a food fight than a feast.) We need, then, to get off to the races. We need to see that we are not merely hungry for the propositional truths of scripture but for the narrative harmony of scripture. Man shall not live on propositions alone, but every word from the mouth of God.
But in the meantime, we need to set some things straight. We need to remember that Scripture interprets scripture—not just propositionally but narratively. It provides the tools we need to interpret it. In order to use the tools, we need to work out our imagination muscles. Consider how nimbly writers like GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, James B. Jordan, Peter Leithart, and ND Wilson move around to illustrate their lyrical theological points. If you’ve not read them, do, and see the theological imagination at work. It is simply not enough to assent to a proposition and then not see the world by it. There is poetry in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. There is drama in Proverbs. There is simple, accessible prophecy in Revelation. Putting these pieces together coherently the way scripture would have us requires familiarity with the seven-day creation. It sets forth the shape of the whole Bible on the micro and macro scale. It charts for us the upward spiral of history. If you were a tree, you’d want to be planted by this river. And by God’s kindness toward us, we have all that we need to discipline our theological imagination. Let’s use it.
Andrew P. Becham is a husband to Rachel, a full-time student, and a self-proclaimed generalist. He has a BA in Philosophy from Georgia State University and roasted coffee for an award-winning coffee company in Atlanta. He’s now working on a degree at Westminster Theological Seminary with an eye still toward philosophy of language, biblical jurisprudence, and normative ethics.
Check out his blog CobbleTome and podcast Raise the Standard.
