Museum moments
Can we think of the Bible as a library?
We had two hours to fill, my youngest son and I, before an appointment. He suggested the museum. It was nearby and something we’d both enjoy exploring, he argued. An easy win.
He is eleven years old now and I’m not sure we’d been to the museum like this – just the two of us – since he started school.
Our museum is a bit of a mix, with a little of everything. Upstairs, there are rooms of art from the 16th century onwards while downstairs, natural history rules the roost. It is an old museum, and both the collections and curations are indicative of how museum conventions have changed over the decades. We looked at snakes preserved in tall glass jars and old hand-written labels for desiccated moths and beetles. Vast vitrines of rocks, minerals and fossils and aging dioramas of forest animals: foxes, owls and voles. In front of a display about local geology, we talked about the layers of the earth and the slow passage of deep time.
Wondering out loud
My son has a scientific mind. My two other kids are more artistically focused, but my youngest has always enjoyed thinking things through methodically, and he likes to know the reasoning behind any answer. He reminds me of my father. He likes to think about categories and methods of organization.
Recently, he and I have been talking about how the Bible is really a library made up of different books written in different genres at different times. The idea of different authors has caught his imagination. Different people see the world differently and so they tell stories differently. He and I are both third children, and maybe that is why this truth resounds with both of us.
After our museum visit, we returned again to this idea of different expressions of truth, and I asked if he thought the wider world might work like that, too? Could he think of examples based on what we’d seen?
Which was to ask if he could think of any other truths, expressed in different languages and vocabularies, that might sit beside each other.
First, he thought about the different states of water: solid, liquid and gas. Then we thought of DNA. We share 99.7 percent of our DNA with neanderthals, 98.8 percent with chimpanzees and 60 percent with bananas.
And time. Doesn’t time work like this, too? Time is one thing when we think of the earth’s slow layers and something else when we think of the life of a butterfly. Neither focus is wrong. Either can fill us with awe and wonder. And both give us perspective on our own experiences of time.
Four stories
No one vocabulary is complete. Each field – each point of view – provides unique light. Thinking about this now, returns me to the idea of the Bible as a library, and I think about the fact of the four gospels. The life of Jesus could not be fully expressed in one written record. So, in wisdom, the Spirit preserved four separate versions, each a unique expression, each serving the life of the Church to the glory of God.
