Biblical Deconstruction and Abstraction
This is an interesting article about the “left behind” series of books. This passage in particular:
Misinterpretation, however, is not a new phenomena. The Church Fathers faced it too. In his book, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Professor Georges Florovsky recalls the image by the second century Bishop Irenaeus which bear an uncanny resemblence to our current “battle for the Bible.”
St. Irenaeus described an artist who made a beautiful jeweled mosaic of a king. Another came along and took apart the pieces of this beautiful mosaic, rearranging the tiles to create an image of a fox. This second person then claimed that the image of the fox was the true one, as the mosaic pieces were all “authentic”.
This is what heretics do to Scripture, St. Irenaeus maintained. They claim that because they use the words of Scripture, the doctrines they teach are true. But heretics ignore the design, the rule of faith—the Tradition—which the Church has always used to test interpretations of the Bible.
I think the same can be said about the totality of existence. People fail to see how all the different components work together as a dialectical, integrated whole. They take all the components apart and put them together in a way that fits, but in the process they lose the power of the whole. The total picture, as it is, holds itself together; the rearranged picture requires the use of force.
It’s as if you took a great impressionist painting and chopped it up into little pieces and put it back together as an abstract work of art. Impressionism relies heavily on breaking the component parts of light up into discreet units and putting them together in a way that fools the eye. But if you stand back from it, the abstraction disappears in the overall context of the picture which is realism. That is the great power of impressionism. Impressionism tells a truth about how components fit into a great, spectacular whole. It is its ability to portray that truth that makes it one of the most difficult periods in art to top.
If you chop that painting up and then put those pieces together in an abstract pattern, you could still get a visually interesting work of art but you would have lost the artist’s relationship to his original subject, his vision, his story, the unified whole that he had created. You would simply have taken those abstract components and organized them into another level of abstraction which has meaning primarily to the artist, without ever connecting with any objective truth about the organization of existence.
| Go to Home - Most Recent PostsProfessor Florovsky states, “…the point which St. Irenaeus endeavored to make is obvious. Scripture had its own pattern or design, its internal structure and harmony. The heretics ignored this pattern, or rather substitute their own instead. In other words, they re-arrange the Scriptural evidence on a pattern which is quite alien to the Scripture itself.”(p. 78). Isn’t this precisely what premillennial dispensationalism, with its pseudo-biblicism, is doing in our day?
To rejoice in the sufferings of our age is to take Christ’s name in vain. Christians are to see the face of Christ in the faces of all the suffering people in this world. We don’t rejoice in suffering but are called to feed, visit, clothe, them and to seek peace.