‘Humpty,’ I said. ‘I don’t know about you but I wonder about the Bible. If it were any other book, we should notice the higgledy-piggledy way it’s put together/’
‘Oh?’ said Humpty. I noticed he was leafing through a dictionary. ‘I guess it’s a contrast with this,’ he said. ‘I know where I am with this. It’s laid out logically – in so far as the alphabet – any alphabet – can be regarded as logical. But the Bible is a collection of all kinds of writing. It doesn’t follow a numerical or alphabetical order. It’s more like an absent-minded poet’s garden shed than a library arranged on the Dewey Decimal system. I agree. You’re right.’
Humpty doesn’t like muddle. I let him be. I fell to thinking about this.
You might have thought that if the Creator had intended to make his wishes known to human beings, he would have chosen something like a guide-book, a chart, a dictionary or a mathematical treatise. He did nothing of the sort.
I find this intriguing. If we want to know how our human body works, we look at a book on physiology. But that can only take us so far. We need to do some dissection. But you can’t do that on a living body. A corpse is inert and readily available for examination. Flesh and blood are pulsating. We can’t handle them in the same way. We need an altogether different method. That is one of the considerations that make the Bible what it is.
It seems to me that in the New Testament an inquirer finds God’s purposes revealed in a Person. And the Bible as a whole uses stories, poems, chronicles, prophecies – many different vehicles – to convey the message, to do justice to the nature of truth. Keats spoke of the truth of imagination. Truth is not an abstraction and it cannot be wholly attained by philosophical speculation. Samuel Johnson took a balanced view when he said: ‘Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.’
We have to respond with imagination when we read the Bible. Reason can take us only so far. Imagination, too, has its part to play.
‘I’ll find my Bible and start with the Psalms,’ said Humpty.
‘Just one thing, Humpty. Don’t try bringing your imagination to the Bible when you’re sitting on your wall. There’s a good fellow.’
‘I don’t need a nanny,’ he said. Bible in hand, he was on his way to the wall as he said it.
BETTER THAN TRUTH
‘He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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