Understanding

I worked hard on these issues, especially the word studies, but it's been a while. The Logos, I believe, is intelligibility. Without Christ the world will be unintelligible to you, to the point Christ is identified as intelligibility. That's an example, but my takeaway was that modern people must both drill down on meaning and let go of the need to place boundaries on words (and everything) and to strive for certainty. Or, strive at all because it implies a need or lack that's not there. We're born whole but flawed.

Literalism is an enemy, for similar reasons, presupposing something that's not true. Thematically and structurally I think the parables are the most important element in the Bible and that the Seed and the Sower is the most important of those. It says, shit happens, get over it. On multiple levels, like so much in the Bible, because we are seeds ourselves and we have seeds within us. The oak can't be implied from the acorn. What we can become can't be implied from the seeds within us but what's required is there.

The Garden of Eden story, I believe, is about taking things for granted, notably life, and losing perspective. Not accepting life on the terms to which it is given to us, as one part of creation and not as souls in isolation, and as a gift and with creation as a miracle we live within, for example. The apocalyptic elements, similarly, are about conveying the urgency of achieving the transformation because our lives are always ending. Not an urgency in time but existential urgency. Again, not taking stuff for granted.

Words have a semantic field or range of meaning. Words must be free and not corralled by us because it distorts meaning, a problem moderns have by the influence of the Enlightenment.

But even there we see that what they really discovered was indeterminacy, uncertainty and relativity. So I am, not a relativist, really, in the common sense, but a communitarian and contextualist because people are unintelligible in isolation. It's not that nothing exists outside of creation, we don't known that, be that we exist within it, as whole beings, but with elements that possibly transcend it. The 'truth' is always seen in a context of humility and humor which are expressions or an acknowledgement of human limitation.