Out of Context? Out of Our Minds

This thought occurred to me tonight:

To take any single verse of the Bible and claim that it represents God, or describes God, or gives insight into the mind of God, is like taking one cell of a body and claiming that it represents the whole person, or describes the person, or (especially) gives insight into the person’s mind. And larger parts are not much more definitive–a chapter is like an organ, a book like a bodily system, but only the entire living body really represents, describes, or gives insight into the person.

Some part of the person is in the cell, in the organ, in the system; even at the subcellular level (the letters, the words) resides the DNA that outlines the totality of a person. But cellular DNA is only potential, and the cell is not the person. Just so, the verse is not God, nor even a microscopic glimpse of God.


(Image: “The Gutenberg Bible,” by Kevin Eng, on Wikimedia Commons.)

More literally, the verse is not the Bible, and the Bible taken as a whole is still not the Lord God. The Bible, taken as a whole, is a picture of God–and often not a very clear picture–but it is not God.

It may be that a single cell describes the entire population of human beings that have ever lived and will ever live, better than a single verse in the Bible describes the totality of God.

But, what do you think?

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One Response to Out of Context? Out of Our Minds

  1. Daniel Newcomb says:

    Isaiah 55:8 & 40:28 backs up what you blogged. 1 Corinthians 13 says a lot about it. Right now we know in part and once we cross over into God’s presence we’ll know fully.