Over at NEO, Audre and I have been chatting and the thought occured to me that having a structure into which we can arrange narratives, verses, and ideas goes a long way to overcoming confusion. I am a very visual thinker: I often conceptualise using diagrams, visual metaphors, and symbols.
When I first started reading the bible in earnest after my conversion or in the lead up to it, I was often bewildered. I had little in the way of frameworks to understand core doctrines, Hebraic expressions, or historical sequence. Prophecy was even more confusing.
It has taken years and various wrong turns and refining to become comfortable. Of course, I am conscious that I have much to learn and there are matters where I make no intellectual commitment or where I favour something but on the balance of probabilities, not with certainty.
I have found diagrams, intertextuality, historical context, reason, moral intuition, and personal revelation all helpful in various contexts. Without the direct help and providence of God in inspiring commentators and preachers, I would be confused indeed. As many expositors have remarked, Scripture is written for us, not to us. We are not Bronze Age Israelites or Jews of the First Century. But God has preserved what we need to know and has given us inquiring rational minds. He speaks to us in divers ways, not least through His Son and His Spirit.
I suspect that’s why I gave the link to Hagee – I remembered his diagrams and pictures and that’s what I thought you would find interesting.
I think that any thought, any research we have done or do is pleasing to God. It’s a form of devotion.
Promise when you get it all figured out you’ll explain it to me, ok?
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I think it would be good to do a series on the framework and the principles I use. I think the best starting point would be Matthew 24.
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How interesting, Nicholas. I am precisely the opposite, I can’t take in things visually very easily, I need actual words, which I can take in – funny how our minds work. Be interested, along with Audre, on knowing more xx
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I will get on it and try not to be boring.
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It’s also words forme. My visual memory is appalling which I have just realised is why I frequently get lost when driving.
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My visual memory varies. I tend to focus on some things over others. I couldn’t tell you someone’s eye colour, but I could tell you that the style of arches in the nave of Durham Cathedral is romanesque, that the columns are very thick, with diamond patterns, and that the stone is brick-coloured.
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