🌱Seed 😐Neutral 🟡Consideration 📝Essay
Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
Resource that highlights Chiasms all over the Bible: Bible Literary Structure
The cosmic chiasm
The idea that creation is a chiasm with the important stuff in the center
Eden as a garden then becomes the even most central part of that chiasm
Exile is to be taken out of the precious middle and made to live in the chaotic waters on the margin
Deliverance from slavery or being delivered through the water is being brought back to the center
Heavenly Jerusalem as cubiform and a tangible symbol of that good center
Book or lamentation chiasm
Temple as a kind of chiasm
Mountain also as a kind of chiasm
Alpha and omega beginning and end. In the center is his death and resurrection the best part is in the center
We so often think in pyramids when Jesus always upsets those pyramids of importance or authority
Riven side of Jesus the precious stuff that comes in the middle is the blood and the water
What does the image of a chiasm do for our idea of dominion and responsibility for creation. Since the most immediate structure is a chiasm not a pyrimid
The wisdoms of having just enough. The good life is in the middle
Not mediocrity but balance
Christ as the true fulfillment if the cosmic chiasm
Splitting apart to make a chiasm is how we see God’s Grace
Chiasm of created waters
Chiasm of the stone
Chiasm of Christ’s side
Chiasm of cross in human history
What is, is divided and torn in two to reveal the good precious interior. By its very nature building pyramid and towers can ever approach this kind of creation of beauty and place. Only sacrifice and trust in the divider can usher in a true chiasm. Because anyone can tear things apart and create chasms but only God can truly divide and make life giving chaisms
The counterfeit of a chiasm is a chasm and can look much the same but is very different in the middle of a chaims is beauty and life and goodness in the center of a chasm is emptiness death and destruction
Death of Jesus is a chasm turned into a chiasm
Shape of a Christian life as a chiasm seeking to constantly make space for the precious center by dividing the waters
The waters only crash back together in judgment which allows for a redivision later
Chasm as exile and separation
The very presence of a chiasm is a little subliminal pointer to Christ
What if pointing to Christ really looks more like allowing God to create chaisms in and through us to push back the side to make space for the precious
Chiastic also shares the same starting Greek letter as Christ. Coincidence?
I need to sit with this idea more and see more chiasm directly from scripture in a literary and not just a narrative/physical sense
Email from Dr. Saleska
The first place I can send you is the introduction to my commentary on psalms. I have a section on Chiasms there. I think that there is also a bibliography that would give you some other resources. A couple of other sources that have some info on chiasms would be: Robert Alter. “The Art of Biblical Poetry,” and Adele Berlin. “The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism.” Also, probably one you will also really like is Wilfred Watson. “Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques.”
A Proposed Lens of Application: Human Rhythms
The Common characteristic of rhythm. Everything has a rhythm to it from our heart beats, to our brain waves, eating schedule, to the cycle of a day, schedule or work and rest, to our worship as a community. Everything can be expressed in terms of rhythms. We can also identify unhealthy and healthy rhythms.
Example of unhealthy heartbeat
In the boiling down and distillation of doctrinal theology have we lost the basic character by which Scripture describes and teaches the salvation story and humanities place in it?
We cannot directly access or organize the fullness of our own existence much less the grand realities of God and his plan of salvation.
Example of mother’s and baby’s body communication to get the baby the nutrients it needs from the mother. Totally out of the rational control of either but Mom does have instrumentality to encourage skin to skin contact.
The lens of rhythm is an honest tool to help us organize and access particular aspects of ourselves without claiming an absolute. Many lenses could be pulled from the basic scriptural and natural experience of being human. These lenses need not be in conflict but can exist side by side to help broaden our available categories for engaging with and thinking about our human existence.
Rhythm can account for the paradoxical nature of human existence. Body soul, mind emotion, Saint sinner.
Does not make a claim to completely capture all aspects of what it means to be a human
We need to take seriously the scriptural basis that we only “see in a mirror dimly”
Rhythm is a Basic creaturely lens that we can all understand regardless of background. If you are reading you are also breathing according to a rhythm
Metaphor of rhythm helps illuminate the interplay of passive and active righteousness
Healthy rhythm is literally just something doing what it was created to do. Paul’s verse we cannot boast in good works
Way the creation story is told is another foundation for seeing rhythms.
The continuity between major areas of human existence is another reason.
Beat and rhythm. Beats can help us think of a single occurrence or activity that makes up a rhythm.
Rhythms suffer from entropy. You start a child swinging and eventually they will stop. Decay and death of both natural and spiritual aspects of ourselves is outside of our ability to fix on our own. The deep need for the Gospel in our daily lives.
Rhythm helps us hold together both our worship practice on Sunday with our daily lives in a congruent manner. One feeds into the other.
Input and output is a simple way to conceptualize rhythm and how things are operating. What am I putting into myself and what am I expending or putting out into the world?
Example of consuming online content through social media or other means. What am I taking in and what am I putting out? What kind of rhythm does that produce in my life?
Possible future applications:
Application with two kinds of relationships
Application with two commissions
Application to doctrine
Application to worship and liturgy
Application to liturgy of church meeting
Application to work a productivity
Application to architect, aesthetics, and the built environment
Application to beauty, art, and creativity
Centers or Fuzzy Zones
Yet without some kind of mental model, wholeness quickly becomes a meaningless catchphrase. “Focus on the whole” is arresting and overwhelming if there is no starting point. The vast complexity of our internal and external worlds are far more than our conscious minds can handle all at once. Christopher Alexander further develops his philosophical perspective with the idea of centers:
What is a Center?
Each one of these entities has, as its defining mark, the fact that it appears to exist as a local center within a larger whole. It is a phenomenon of centeredness in space.
I am not referring at all to a point center like a center of gravity. I use the word center to identify an organized zone of space - that is to say a distinct set of points in space.
When I call the pond a center, the situation changes. I can then recognize the fact that the pond does have existence as a local center of activity: a living system. It is a focused entity. But the fuzziness of its edges becomes less problematic. The reason is that the pond, as an entity, is focused towards its center. It creates a field of centeredness. But, obviously, this effect falls off.
- Nature of Order, bk 1., p. 84
Thinking of the consitution of our bodies, this definition of centers is quite helpful. Our cardio vascular system is a prime example. It is easily identified as a distinct center without which the rest of our body quickly dies. But beyond the heart, and major veins and arteries, where exactly does this center truly stop? Tiny interfaces like capillaries are interwoven extensively throughout our whole bodies with the smallest pieces constantly changing based on the needs of the body. The whole body interacts with our blood system affecting and being effected by it. This is exactly why centers are helpful. Rather than obsessing over the arbitrary boundary lines imposed on the interweaving of our body, speaking in terms of centers allows for a way of noticing the major forces, or zones, within a whole while being able to leave the boundaries appropriately fuzzy.
If we move this to address the larger consitution of a human as a whole, we can see a perspective that is able to identify and speak about salient aspects of the whole while also retaining these aspects within their larger context. This is a much more dynamic and organic way of speaking and approaching the human person. This is particularly freeing in being able to honestly approaching the variety with which Scripture describes humanity. Rather than forcing a singular description of a human’s inner working, we can appreciate the true variety with which scripture speaks. Here are just a few examples:
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- How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? - Psalm 13:2
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- Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. - Psalm 31:9
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- I said, “Let me remember my song in the night; let me meditate in my heart.” Then my spirit made a diligent search - Psalm 77:6
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- My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. - Isaiah 26:9
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- And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ - Mark 12:30, Also see Deuteronomy 6:4-9
All of these verses describe particular kinds of experiences using similar but also distinct ways of describing what is happening within themselves. Whether it is: Soul and Heart; Body and Soul; Heart and Spirit; Soul and Spirit; or Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength each author uses descriptions freely
the idea of fuzzy zones or “centers” addresses different models or list of pieces within a human
Relation of righteousness and shalom with wholeness
the way god reacts to sin in the Israelite community makes so much more sense from this perspective as does the corrosiveness of original sin
The corruption in the whole of one human can’t help but affect the whole of the next generation which is literally what God says
Also kind of reference the idea of enchanted world and disenchanted world pull stuff from how the light shines through
Case Study: The Universal Problem of Internal and External Congruence
Idea that internal state needs to match external state
When external state looks good but internal is bad:
Jesus to the Pharisees are whitewashed tombs
Rend hearts and not garments
Jesus says out of the heart is what condemns you
When internal state is “good” but external is bad:
James faith without works is dead
Amos addressing injustice of princes and Israel
A needed piece of healthy human living is congruence between internal and external state. But there is a certain amount of lag between change in either side. This is also a way more complex piece of living than anyone likes to admit. But it is clear that neither internal or external is better to have in line if the other is not. In other words it is only in the healthy congruence of the whole human person that any true benefit can be found
Taking us back to the original definition of a Creaturely Anthropology: The Intermingling and Dependence of Parts
This is great and functions as a solid foundation to operate from but does suffer from being so general it is not immediately helpful in day to day life
Proposal to move to using common characteristics to help us organize things rather than reliance on a primary driver
One example of a common characteristic is the idea of rhythm