[Serious] The Story

[John 6IX Breezy]

Yes, indeed, I have a more esoteric perspective in part because growing up congregationalist we were not committed to a literal reading of Scripture the way say Southern Baptists were. That was the 70's though and it seemed like the more fundamentalist people started forming this wierd Christian sub-culture. Anyway.

I may fall more under the literal category, though I think fundamentalism has more to do with behavior. I think the Bible should be read the way any other piece of writing should—to understand what the author is attempting to communicate. What's interesting about the Bible is that the thing many authors are attempting to communicate is often a vision or divine experience. These are events that linger at the boundary of what the author can understand or recognize. So, it's interesting to peel back the metaphors and similes and try to decipher or imagine what it is that they claim to have seen or experienced.

I've had to take my fair share of classes on perception and recognition. And it's interesting to read how Daniel, for example, saw a man with a face like lightning. You get the sense that his brain is overloading, sifting through his memories and experience, attempting to ground the visual perception to anything recognizable until his brain settles on lightning. The experience is perhaps similar to encountering a branch on the road, and for a split second your brain sees a snake. It's not that the branch looks similar to a snake, the branch becomes a snake. You see scales, eyes, a head, a body, and with a blink of an eye your perceptual system gains coherence and you see a branch and nothing else. 

To tie this in with my original post, I think the same thing can be done with narrative. We've learned a lot about how the brain processes events and transforms them into stories. So, it's interesting to read Genesis or the Gospels and pay attention to how the story is being told and get a sense for what the author has seen or heard or is attempting to make sense of.