Bible pixellation

Pixellation example

Take any digital photograph and zoom in and there will come a point where you can see the individual pixels. Put another way, a digital photograph has a certain resolution - you cannot go on usefully magnifying it as one supposes one can with real life. Unlike the maps in Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which

"though the towns and mountains looked at first just as they would on an ordinary map, when the Magician lent them a magnifying glass you saw that they were perfect little pictures of the real things, so that you could see the very castle and slave market and streets in Narrowhaven, all very clear though very distant, like things seen through the wrong end of a telescope."

Example of film grain

It is much the same for an "analogue" photograph on film - only, instead of rectangular pixels, useful magnification is limited by the more random individual grains that make up the photographic emulsion.

Actually, even in real life it seems like you cannot go on magnifying. Light itself has dimensions and these limit the amount of optical magnification that is possible - but there are other ways of "seeing" things that are smaller than the wavelength of light. Eventually we get to elementary particles like quarks and these seem to answer to pixels in limiting how far you can keep zooming in.  In short that the world is quantised. Mike Adams sees this as evidence that reality is in fact a grand computer simulation, possibly created by God. A little bit like the arena in Hunger Games.

Some books and some videos have fairly obvious layers of meaning. Like the Matrix or Lewis's Narnia chronicles. We are used to this sort of thing but we do not expect hidden layers below layers and so on ad infinitum. After all the authors are mortal aren't they?

The same sort of analysis can be applied to the Bible. Most Christians would be happy enough that the Bible has layers of meaning - after all a parable is just that - a story with a hidden meaning. We might baulk at ideas like the Bible Code that purport that there are messages hidden in the fabric of the text of the Bible that, frankly, would have required a supernatural intelligence to plant there. But what about spiritualising the Bible? The idea here is that the obvious or literal meaning is rarely the real meaning and that the real meaning is tied up in types and shadows. The church I go to is heavily into this idea which I am not wholly against, just that sometimes it seems rather arbitrary whether or not one should spiritualise and, if one does, how to do it and to what extent to bother about the context of the particular phrase in question. Doubtless it is the Holy Spirit who reveals the truth to us, but some then add that for this to happen one has to cross certain t's and dot certain i's and blame a person's inability to discern such "truth" on their lack of purity. Which doubtless has some truth in it but I find curiously unhelpful.

Interestingly this site applies the idea of spatial quantisation (pixellation) and time quantisation (strobe lights) to Biblical prophecy - though I confess I got a bit lost in the detail.

Here's a passage from the Bible, by way of example:

And King David was old, going on in days. And they covered him with clothes, but he got no heat. And his servants said to him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin. And let her stand before the king, and let her nurse him, and let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may get heat. And they sought out a beautiful girl throughout all the borders of Israel, and found Abishag, a Shunammite. And they brought her to the king. And the girl was very beautiful. And she nursed the king and served him. But the king did not know her.

Bearing in mind that the Bible is inspired by God, why was this passage included in the Holy writ? Was it just to give us a more complete account of the history of King David? Or does it also have some deeper significance? I'd go for the latter if, for no other reason, I see layers of meaning in everything that God has created. But what meaning? Frankly I haven't got a clue. Should I be bothered? Well, I want to be one of those who "diligently seek Him" and, in this particular case I am curious, but also I don't want to fall foul of forcing an interpretation that isn't valid. So I'd rather wait. Doubtless if God exists and if He is interested in me and if He wants to bring some truth home to me through this passage, doubtless He is able without me having to go through mental gymnastics.

For those of us who tend to analyse the Bible at ever increasing depths it seems to me to be of vital importance to know how valid this process is - can one keep magnifying ad infinitum and expect to see new vistas of meaning? Frankly I have heard enough whacky and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the Bible to make me rather wary of this approach.

Lewis sums up the idea well in his Till we have faces where the narrator Orual is asking the priest Arnom exactly who the god Ungit is and observes:

"If that's all they mean, why do they wrap it up in so strange a fashion?" 

"Doubtless," said Arnom (and I could tell that he was yawning inside the mask, being worn out with his vigil), "doubtless to hide it from the vulgar." 

I would torment him no more, but I said to myself, "It's very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out (why not hold their tongues?) wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling." 

What brought all this to the surface was a recent sermon in which the preacher was saying some things that didn't sound right and, afterwards, this was explained away by saying that he didn't actually mean what he said. My comment was similar to Orual's - if this was the case then why on earth did he not say what he meant instead of something that, frankly, was very different?