A couple weeks ago, I had a not-entirely-atypical experience in our homegroup. I had given a fairly brief (20-minute) teaching on authority and the Kingdom of God, a favorite topic of mine. I had used some 11 passages from the Bible and one quote from Karl Barth. Literally, my teaching notes were just 11 passages and the Barth quote.
During the discussion time, one of our small group members arrived late and was rather insistent that we explain to him what the teaching had been so that he could engage in the conversation. He was especially resistant to responding simply to the quote from Barth; he wanted to know, “where is it written?” (a favorite mantra of the Old Swedish Covenanters, familiar to me from my childhood) A couple members of the group stumbled to try to recount the long narrative from Genesis to Revelation that I had recounted. Finally, they gave up and passed him my notes. He had a fistful of Scripture, but I’m sure it did him no good in helping catch him up on the conversation. He wanted a verse or two; I was trying to teach a grand narrative. Admittedly, no single verse of all we gave him really encapsulated what I was trying to say.
Our problem reminded me of a favorite feature of a youth science magazine my parents subscribed to on my behalf when I was a child. (I think it was a National Geographic publication.) They would present eight pictures of various objects observed at very high levels of magnification (usually under a microscope). The game then was to figure out what each object was. Each object was something quite familiar, but the intrigue of feature was just how unfamiliar the objects would appear when observed at such a small level, under such great scrutiny. Smooth surfaces suddenly appeared quite porous; “solid” images appeared as collections of dots.
Of course, there are other sorts of geometries and topologies. There are, of course, fractals, among whose remarkable features is self-similarity at varying scales. Zoom in and out on a fractal, and you will see certain contours repeated again and again. It has been suggested that fractals are “natural,” for example, that the contour of the coast of Cape Cod is a fractal. (http://necsi.org/guide/concepts/fractals.html)
My hunch is that this self-similarity is something that appeals to us naturally as human beings. From music theory’s Schenkerian analysis, which supposes that all Western tonal music functions more or less identically at various levels of detail, to physic’s pursuit of the Big ToE (Big Theory of Everything), that would seek to unify the physics of the very large (gravity) and the very small (various forces involved in quantum mechanics), it seems “natural” to us that our world should exhibit such self-similarity; it just seems “honest” for objects to do so.
Certainly, part of the intrigue of the feature in that science magazine was that it projected an image of a world in which seemingly tame objects held secrets that only a microscope could extract. The world, so projected, was amusingly deceptive.
What is the geometry of Scripture? Do we expect it to exhibit the same contours at every level of “zoom” or detail? Would a canon that did not exhibit such self-similarity be in some sense “deceptive”? Do concepts like “inerrancy” or “infallibility” or even “unity” require such a topology?
I have certainly been trained within the biblical guild to say that Scripture certainly is not a unity in the fractal sort of way. Whatever unity one would hope to find in Scripture would have to exist on top of a recognition that, at the lowest level, Scripture describes faith communities with internal disagreements and varying beliefs and, even where they agree, different ways of describing who God is and what He is doing in the world.
This view would predict a number of surprising differences between interpretations done at the micro and macro levels of the text, you know, the kinds of differences that would hold that, on the macro-level, Scripture describes salvation available by faith apart from works, even though all will be judged “according to what they do.”
It seems we’ve traditionally allowed for these kinds of apparent disagreements across scales. The question is: at what resolution is the Scripture normative? And, if that resolution is the widest, highest, macro level, do we really have the time and patience to listen to the Lord through the Scripture, and hear what He is saying?