The Temple of Time
The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of the love between the Father and the Son by the Spirit.
We have noted that the well-meaning safeguards put in place by conservative theologians have prevented the Scriptures from informing the imaginations of modern Christians; we have discussed the resulting biblical illiteracy of the contemporary academy and its inability to comprehend the relevance of much of the Bible; we have examined the Spirit’s practice of arranging symbols into repeated “relational” patterns, as a means of conferring greater meaning upon each part; and we have also observed how this homologous “fractal” structure, a similarity of literary shape, enables every text of the Bible to “speak” to every other text in the Bible.
Hopefully, through these stages of consideration, we have arrived at the heart of the matter. Metaphorically speaking, you have been invited from the outer courts of common Bible reading, via the priestly domain of biblical theology, to the core of the Bible’s operating system, the source code which dictates its shape and contents. Here, close analysis of the texts breathed by the Spirit is the blessed pastime of a peculiar few, those whose hearts delight in literary miracles which are invisible to the untrained reader. A degree of labour is required but the returns are extraordinary.
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