For my lunch at work today I ran over to Kroger and brought back a TV dinner to reheat in the microwave. But as it was cooking I realized that I forgot to bring a fork and the only thing in the drawer in the break room was a set of chopsticks. So I ended up looking like a complete idiot eating burritos with sticks. It got me to thinking, though, what would someone from a thousand years ago assume about our time if they happened to be sitting in that particular room for an hour? They would most likely assume that our culture used this oriental device as our eating utensil among other things.

This is precisely what happens when we look back on time. Our perception on reality gets narrower, not only through time, but as well with interpretive blindness, such as the event just mentioned. The person from 1008 A.D. sitting in on that hour lacked the perspective of context and experience of our day. As a student in theology I am interested in how our interpretation of Christ's day is also blinded in an attempt to clarify the meaning of scripture. When one reads a passage in the gospels he is in effect sitting in for just a small period of time. Of course there are several levels of truth in perspective. Plato explains this well in his Divided Line Theory. For our example we will use 4 perspectives in decreasing truth.

1. The greatest truth is in the form, or what something actually is. I could have hallucinated my entire experience of eating with chopsticks, but the truth is either that I was or I was not.

2. Second to truth in form is that which is in my perception of the form. I experienced myself eating with chopsticks and thus understood that it was out of the ordinary, a fluke. Only my mind could have interpreted it that way because I was the one causing the event.

3. Now if someone was watching me eat with chopsticks this would be very close to my experience. They would assume that something was wrong with what I was doing. Although, it could have been my daily routine and thus this experience loses some truth.

4. Let's say that the person watching me wrote down what happened, then later on someone read this work. The words on paper are an extension of truth in experience. Once again, what was written could have been fiction and thus lost some truth.

5. I suppose I could add a fifth element to this example by saying that the person reading the piece of writing was less informed than the document itself, but we are dealing with realities of consciousness, and furthermore, sentience.

Below, I doodled my idea of how perception works through time. I've drafted it out to make it clearer than my hand drawing. The point in the middle represents this very point in time. It is important to understand that time does not belong to material or motion, but to a point. I will explain this better later. The lines, -x and +x, are 180° of all of reality. You could say (thought this is putting parameters on God and only used to support what we can humanly understand) that this is what God perceives, everything. The cone setting at 60° is our perception of the past. It is narrower that the God perception because we can only know by our senses and the additional facet of mind and memory. So we cannot know what is happening in Fiji but we do know that the room is cold, the light is bright and that something tastes familiar.


















Within that cone is another. This is an even more limited truth through the use of a second hand view point as we listed above. We could put another cone within that represented a written work of something perceived. For instance let us think of the inner cone as the bible. Through time the words have remained the same ignoring the facts of translation and human error. However, as time travels along the y coordinate* experience becomes something different, civilizations change and its symbolism is reinterpreted. So the words are the same but the meanings have become convoluted. The further we look back (and the further from form) the less we can see truth. Unfortunately, with the brevity of human life the closest we can see truth is in written, passed down or causal form. These three could easily be placed within number four above, not very good. Our intuition as mankind can be very good and at time exact. The problem is we do not know when we are exact or horribly wrong... oddly enough, sometimes it is through time that we advance truth. For instance, in my New Testament class we have been studying how through most of the Church's history we have believed that the gospel of Mark was a paraphrasing of Matthew, though now we know that it was written before it and used to write Matthew and Luke.

My philosophy on the diagram above† is that in the event that God knows and perceives all time, then all time must exist in a single event or point. If we were to expand on the diagram to represent all time but in the perspective of what can be seen, the point of sight would be wrapped around a perfect circle with a single point lying in the middle as seen below. Of course the entirety of the diagram would be dynamically within the point. It would intrinsically be the point while maintaining a full circle that connects at all points.












This is all to say that we can only come close to seeking truth in biblical interpretation studies and never actually attain truth without God. We might say that he is not necessarily the God of substance, but the God of form, the ultimate perspective on truth. Through him we can transcend the barrier that our intellect places on physical reality and seek understanding while yet being within our limited realm.

*Along with the idea that time is only a point and cannot actually travel through any physical manner as such, it never actually exceeds -y or +y but travels on the non-point of 0,0 as represented equidistant from -x and +x.
†The cones as they are represented are actually opposite attributes of what is actuality. For the ease of understanding they are made in the direction of the imaginary coordinate z which represents time and direction as well, but allows for the point of perspective to remain in time and perceived with reality being greater at 0,0 than back on the -y plane.

Posted in: on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 at at 8:07 PM