Ignatius didn't look at the sky, so he couldn't see the sun. Bob didn't look at the earth, so he couldn't see the car in the swimming pool. Neither looked in a mirror to see what his eyes looked like.
The disciples often had to ask Jesus "What the heck did that mean?" after he told parables. Sometimes he told them, sometimes he didn't. You're not God, so I think maybe you should tell us.
Unto you is granted the secret of the kingdom of God!
All parables can be seen as blurred generalizations of specific ideas; this one has a handful of ways to understand it. What I was thinking when I wrote it is this:
The sky represents transcendent truth. The earth represents the material world. Bob represents someone who has the problem of using a "God of the gaps", ignoring material explanations for material phenomenon, e.g., it is intellectually dishonest for Creationists to not try to study science trying to figure out how evolution could have worked, just because we think that God's direct hand is a sufficient explanation for our origin. However, Ignatius represents a materialist (in the sense of believing that the material world is all there is, not in the sense of Madonna being a material girl), and so his presuppositions reject the idea of transcendent truth out of hand, his materialism is a sort of God of the gaps.
The last sentence, I threw in for fun. I think that it means that we have to consider not only what we perceive, but how we perceive.
Of course, the idea behind all stories I tell here (or anywhere) is that there's an even bigger truth than the one that I'm thinking of when I write the story. In fact, other interpretations of these stories are probably better than mine. What do you think it could mean?
The d
ReplyDeleteWow I just posted "The d".
ReplyDeleteThe disciples often had to ask Jesus "What the heck did that mean?" after he told parables. Sometimes he told them, sometimes he didn't. You're not God, so I think maybe you should tell us.
What the heck did that mean?
Tim,
ReplyDeleteUnto you is granted the secret of the kingdom of God!
All parables can be seen as blurred generalizations of specific ideas; this one has a handful of ways to understand it. What I was thinking when I wrote it is this:
The sky represents transcendent truth. The earth represents the material world. Bob represents someone who has the problem of using a "God of the gaps", ignoring material explanations for material phenomenon, e.g., it is intellectually dishonest for Creationists to not try to study science trying to figure out how evolution could have worked, just because we think that God's direct hand is a sufficient explanation for our origin. However, Ignatius represents a materialist (in the sense of believing that the material world is all there is, not in the sense of Madonna being a material girl), and so his presuppositions reject the idea of transcendent truth out of hand, his materialism is a sort of God of the gaps.
The last sentence, I threw in for fun. I think that it means that we have to consider not only what we perceive, but how we perceive.
Of course, the idea behind all stories I tell here (or anywhere) is that there's an even bigger truth than the one that I'm thinking of when I write the story. In fact, other interpretations of these stories are probably better than mine. What do you think it could mean?
ReplyDelete