Horizontal Bible Quotes

My overarching point is that the Gospels, and all the books of the Bible, are distinct and should not be read as if they are all saying the same thing. They are decidedly not saying the same thing—even when talking about the same subject (say, Jesus’ death). Mark is different from Luke, and Matthew is different from John, as you can see by doing your own horizontal reading of their respective stories of the crucifixion. The historical approach to the Gospels allows each author’s voice to be heard and refuses to conflate them into some kind of mega-Gospel that flattens the emphases of each one.

But there is another way to read them: horizontally. In a horizontal reading you read a story in one of the Gospels, and then read the same story as told by another Gospel, as if they were written in columns

For now my point is that most readers don’t see these differences because they have been trained, or at least are inclined, to read the Bible in only one way, vertically, whereas the historical approach suggests that it is also useful to read it another way, horizontally.

Genesis 2 is not out of synch with Genesis 1. Nor is the Bible's opening chapter a rough draft that God tosses out to start over with a scaled-down vision when he sculpts the first woman into being. The larger vision he is casting in the beginning remains firmly in place. Genesis 1 draws our attention vertically to the foundational and utterly vital bond between women and God by revealing our image-bearer calling. Everything about us depends on a solid link with God. For both men and women, this relationship alone completes us, defines our identity, and gives our whole lives meaning and purpose. Genesis 2 focuses us horizontally on the second most foundational relationship in all creation--the relationship between male and female.

There is something that assaults God even more directly. It is the subtle sense that grows in us, usually unconsciously, that the real effectiveness of our spiritual acts is at the horizontal level among people, not before the face of God. In other words, if my children see me pray at meals, it will do them good. If the staff sees me fasting, they may be inspired to fast. If my roommate sees me read my Bible, he may be inspired to read his. And soon. Now that’s not all bad. Jesus’ public prayers certainly inspired the disciples (Luke 11:1). But the danger is that all of our life—including our spiritual life—starts to be justified and understood simply on the horizontal level for the effects it can have because others see it happening. And so God subtly and slowly can become a secondary Person in the living of our lives. We may think that he is important to us because all these things that we are doing are the kinds of things he wants us to do. But, in fact, he himself is falling out of the picture as the focus of it all.

What’s perhaps most surprising, however, is that a science of storytelling is possible. Our narratives almost always conform to certain patterns, which raises the strange possibility that our mental processes have evolved for specific templates best suited to understanding change—a literal physical embodiment of storybook reality, encoded into our minds. Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest authors of all time, demonstrated that most human stories could be graphed, with the vertical axis related to whether good or bad things happen to the main character, and the horizontal axis representing time as the story unfolds. The idea came to him when he noticed significant similarities between the “shape” of the story of Cinderella and the New Testament of the Bible. In another story shape, what he called the “Man in the Hole,” a person gets into trouble, then gets out of it to end the story on a happy note. The Wizard of Oz is this kind of story, as is virtually every sitcom episode ever written. If you’re unlucky, you’ll find yourself in a story arc that Vonnegut calls “From Bad to Worse,” in which the character experiences one misfortune after another. (May you never find yourself in this kind of story, as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.)

Ultimately, all church mission statements have certain common threads. They contain a vertical dimension such as loving and obeying God. And they emphasize a horizontal dimension: how Christians treat those both inside and outside the church. They answer the question of why God left the church here on earth. The secret of success is not the wording but the fact that the people of the board have dug the mission statement out of the Bible for themselves, have decided to commit their church to it, and have made it theirs.

Thus, our main point to make here is that there is not only a crucially vertical (God-humanity covenant) and eschatological (new exodus) aspect to the enacted parable of the Last Supper, but there is equally a horizontal, new covenant community aspect.

Homosexual practice is an example on a horizontal plane of our vertical rebellion against God.

In Paul’s mind, same-sex sexual intimacy is an especially clear illustration of the idolatrous human impulse to turn away from God’s order and design. Those who suppress the truth about God as revealed in nature suppress the truth about themselves written in nature. Homosexual practice is an example on a horizontal plane of our vertical rebellion against God.

When we view things horizontally, we feel confusion; but when we see things vertically, life makes sense—including the direction of history. Everything changes when we interpret events below with wisdom from above and see things as the Lord does in heaven.

Horizontal comparisons tend to stimulate self-righteousness. Think of the contrast between the words of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Jesus’s parable in Luke 18. He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9–14) In comparing himself to other people who are obviously more sinful than he is, the Pharisee essentially tells God that he doesn’t need him, and he surely doesn’t need his forgiveness. How ironic it is to tell the One to whom you are praying that you don’t need him. How strange is it to turn prayer into an argument for your independence rather than a humble confession of personal need. The argument of the Pharisee has two parts. First, he compares himself to others, and then he offers evidence that he is really quite righteous. Sadly, in this man’s prayer, he is participating in his own deception—​​​a deception that will be his doom. The tax collector does just the opposite. Why is he so quick to cry out for God’s mercy? He’s quick to do so because he’s looked into the mirror of God’s Word. You cannot read God’s Word without becoming deeply aware that you are a person in desperate need. You cannot read God’s Word without being confronted with the sin that lives in your heart. You cannot read your Bible without facing the fact that you constantly fall beneath God’s wise and holy standard. You cannot properly celebrate the Christmas story without also being willing to receive its clear and loving rebuke.

Scanning the next two centuries, we see that the pattern changes dramatically (see page 229). Solo, amateur innovation (quadrant three) surrenders much of its lead to the rising power of networks and commerce (quadrant four). The most dramatic change lies along the horizontal axis, in a mass migration from individual breakthroughs (on the left) to the creative insights of the group (on the right). Less than 10 percent of innovation during the Renaissance is networked; two centuries later, a majority of breakthrough ideas emerge in collaborative environments. Multiple developments precipitate this shift, starting with Gutenberg’s press, which begins to have a material impact on secular research a century and a half after the first Bible hits the stands, as scientific ideas are stored and shared in the form of books and pamphlets. Postal systems, so central to Enlightenment science, flower across Europe; population densities increase in the urban centers; coffeehouses and formal institutions like the Royal Society create new hubs for intellectual collaboration.

Eventually everyone vacates church where God is not obviously present and working. Getting people back to church is pointless unless God comes back first—that’s what Vertical Church is all about! Ritual church, tradition church, felt-need church, emotional-hype church, rules church, Bible-boredom church, relevant church, and many other iterations are all horizontal substitutes for God come down, we all get rocked and radically altered, Vertical Church.

The Bible’s storyline, we have discovered, has, from the opening chapters of Genesis, set up a massive tension—cosmic in scope but descending all the way down to the level of the individual. The tension is grounded in the fact that God made everything good. God himself, the Creator, is different from the creation, but all that he made was initially God-centered and good. The nature of evil is tied to revolution against this God. In Genesis 3, we saw how this is depicted as obsessive desire to challenge God—to become God ourselves, to usurp to ourselves the prerogatives that belong only to the Creator. Out of this idolatry come all of the social evils, the horizontal evils that we know. With everybody wanting to be at the center of the universe, there can only be strife.