Why Should God Care Less? part 4

This carries on from the post below:

Is it true? … ah, very quiet out there. And, partly, that‘s because I’m Australian and you know I’m sneaky! Well, it’s kind of yes and no, isn’t it? If we think The Simpsons are about people who run about with very serious kidney and liver ailments, then no, probably not true. But why is it so popular? Because it is profoundly true, in other ways. Now what helps us make that distinction? Form and content – it’s the genre. You recognize from the form it’s a cartoon. So you’re thinking, it’s going to be over the top. There’s going to be some ridiculous, unreal elements to this. But at the same time, it does that usually in the service of making another point. So, the form: cartoon. The content: you know people don’t look like this; the kinds of things that go on are too extreme. You recognize that and you don’t read it, as it were, too concretely – you’re able to distinguish between, kind of, the extreme stuff, and the real point it’s trying to make. A very powerful way of communicating. Why do you think political cartoons are so effective?

Now, we can make that distinction. Well, o.k., that’s great for The Simpsons but we’re talking about the Bible here. Well, yes we are, we’re talking about literature. What about this one: ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night.’ Is it true? Well, not if you think Blake’s talking about the propensity of feral cats to ignite spontaneously during their nocturnal wanderings! [Laughter] You like that, did you? I had practiced that so it’s really not quite as astounding as it sounds [laughter]. And it’s not going to help to keep saying: ‘Blake says it. I believe it. And that settles it!’ It’s not going to help anything. The question is: have we understood the genre? Now, you look at the form – it’s poetry. Dut da dut da dut dad a, dut da dut da dut da da. That immediately alerts you to metaphor, symbolism. To be open to these kind of things. And then the content. You KNOW tigers do NOT spontaneously combust. You know that. And you know what? Blake actually hopes that you know that. He’s assuming you know that. And for someone to say then that Blake is actually arguing for the fact that tigers explode in forests, you’d laugh. But you’d be amazed at how many Christians do that with Genesis 1. Hm.

Well, what about the Bible? Yup, it’s in the Bible too. There it is folks; Isaiah prophesies that one day the trees will grow hands. Well, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Did you know that most of what the prophets write is poetry? So be really careful about how you interpret it that stuff. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. In fact, if you think about it, when there’s some really important things you want to say …. (for instance) as a guy you find this really nice woman… wow! Eh? Thank you Lord! And, you know, you take her out to dinner and what do you start saying to her? “Oh I’m really, I just love the way that radiation in the 55 kilohertz band width just strikes off those retinal cells and they just cause this chain …” What’s she going to do? She’s going to throw her soup at you and you deserve it. You don’t hear people going: “E equals M C squared da na da na da na!” That’s not on the radio. [laughter] And the reason is, and our culture doesn’t really understand this, knowing e=mc2 will not give you a better marriage. Now that’s a trivial example but our culture thinks that scientific knowledge is the way to learn what it means to be human. They need to listen to the radio. That’s not what being human is about and yet we are convinced that we can discover what it means to be human by reducing ourselves to these kinds of things. Now we write poetry about the things that matter most to us. Why? Because equations constrain. They confine. Metaphor opens up horizons and there are some things that are just too big, they are just too alive to be captured by mere proposition.