Pictorial Bible Quotes

An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture.

The Bourbaki were Puritans, and Puritans are strongly opposed to pictorial representations of their faith. The number of Protestants and Jews in the Bourbaki group was overwhelming. And you know that the French Protestants especially are very close to Jews in spirit. I have some Jewish background and I was raised as a Huguenot. We are people of the Bible, of the Old Testament, and many Huguenots in France are more enamoured of the Old Testament than of the New Testament. We worship Jahweh more than Jesus sometimes.

come alive and to speak, had to be chosen by the reader, who would vary the sounded breath according to the written context. By this innovation, the aleph-beth was able to greatly reduce the necessary number of characters for a written script to just twenty-two—a simple set of signs that could be readily practiced and learned in a brief period by anyone who had the chance, even by a young child. The utter simplicity of this technical innovation was such that the early Semitic aleph-beth, in which were written down the various stories and histories that were later gathered into the Hebrew Bible, was adopted not only by the Hebrews but by the Phonecians (who presumably carried the new technology across the Mediterranean to Greece), the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, and indeed eventually gave rise (directly or indirectly) to virtually every alphabet known, including that which I am currently using to scribe these words. With the advent of the aleph-beth, a new distance opens between human culture and the rest of nature. To be sure, pictographic and ideographic writing already involved a displacement of our sensory participation from the depths of the animate environment to the flat surface of our walls, of clay tablets, of the sheet of papyrus. However, as we noted above, the written images themselves often related us back to the other animals and the environing earth. The pictographic glyph or character still referred, implicitly, to the animate phenomenon of which it was the static image; it was that worldly phenomenon, in turn, that provoked from us the sound of its name. The sensible phenomenon and its spoken name were, in a sense, still participant with one another—the name a sort of emanation of the sensible entity. With the phonetic aleph-beth, however, the written character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon (as with the rebus), but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth. There is a concerted shift of attention away from any outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image, away from the

There are a number of questions about which there has been much speculation and argument but which Genesis does not answer to the complete satisfaction of human curiosity. One of these is the meaning of the term "day." There are some writers who hold that the entire account in Genesis 1 is so strongly pictorial and poetic that the term "day" cannot be pressed at all. In the judgment of the present writer, however, this view is to be rejected as hardly doing justice to the language of Genesis 1. Other writers believe that the chapter can only be interpreted as meaning six twenty-four-hour days in succession. Indeed, this is a natural way to understand the language, and were it not for the evidence which Christian men of science are now accepting, this would be undoubtedly the common belief of Bible-believing Christians. Nevertheless, in reference to this world there are two sources of truth: the first is those broad metaphysical foundations sketched for us by the Word of God indicating that God is the Creator of all things, that He is the Preserver of His universe, that He is sovereign in all things, and that He is both transcendent and immanent in reference to His creation. The other source of truth is the research and investigation of men of science. This is God's world and He has seen fit to allow created human beings minds which are able to unlock many of the mysteries of His creation. The Bible helps believing Christians who are working in the field of science to avoid the mistakes and false theories of unbelieving scientists who do not accept the revelation which God has given to men in the Scriptures. In other words, the Bible throws light on the creation. But the opposite is also true: that which is learned by scientists about the creation also helps us to understand, or at least not to misinterpret, the revelation contained in the Scriptures. The evidence from science seems to be that this world is older than was held by Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656), whose chronology was added to the King James Version in 1701. It is not a question as to whether God could have created the universe and performed His activity in reference to this earth in six twenty-four-hour days or in six seconds; the only question is, What did God do?