Bøger af Michael Bull

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A BOOK OF CONTEMPLATIVE THEOLOGY TO BE NEO-NOIR?In some ways, this collection of essays does resemble a detective novel: there are mysteries to solve, it always seems to be night-time, conventional methods are ignored, and nothing is what it appears to be.The Bible demonstrates that all good theology is not only a story, it is a movie, and not only a movie, but a movie deliberately designed to perplex, surprise and unsettle us.However, while the anxiety, alienation, romance, and dark wit (hopefully) remain, this book reserves noir's hard-boiled cynicism and nihilism for the foibles of those who rebel against God. For the Christian writer-director, the darkness is only a device employed to bring the reader to the light. The deliberate ambiguities are only temporary cowls that eventually will be stripped away. Like the Bible, which, if we are honest, is a very dark book, these Dark Sayings, in their fundamental mindset and ultimate trajectory, are unshakably optimistic.

For most people, reading the Bible is like watching a foreign movie with no subtitles. The keys to understanding the book are hidden in plain sight, but we haven't been trained to see them.The Bible is a story.The Bible has a shape.The Bible has a tune.The Bible is art.The Bible is fun.Contemporary culture has been shaping us for a fresh look at the Bible. This amazing book has been biding its time, waiting for a new generation of visual thinkers who are profoundly savvy when it comes to story, poetry and symbolism.This little book will give you your first glimpse of the potential of the structural and symbolic wonders in the Bible. It's time to open your eyes.

When Christ shared bread and wine with His disciples at Passover, He began their commission as witnesses of things they had heard and seen. The Lord's supper is a bittersweet scroll, honey with a sting, manna for a mustering host. Christ brightens our eyes that we might bear His two-edged sword. We taste and see that He is good, and go out to take possession of His inheritance, the nations.

How foreign the clinical instruments of theology are to the lyrical texts of the Bible!At heart, Paul's letter to the Galatians is neither a stream of propositional truth, nor a logical argument. Certainly, it communicates truth in a well-reasoned order, but it does so in a captivating "musical" form.The Apostle arranged all his texts in patterns drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures. Paul not only used words to convey meaning, but conferred greater meaning upon each word and phrase through its placement in relation to every other word and phrase. The literary conventions and historical outcomes which shape the Old Testament are the tunes playing inside Paul's head as he writes to the Galatians. If we use these patterns as a lens through which to view his highly structured prose, Paul's internal logic becomes immediately apparent, and the skillful allusions he makes hammer home his message of freedom for us with greater depth and clarity than ever before.

The problem with bad theologians is that they do not think in pictures. The problem with good theologians is that they do not think in moving pictures. Truth is a place to be inhabited and explored, a gallery with walls, doors, and windows. Its objects possess their meaning only in situ. Persons depicted are proposition in process. The Word moves, and the eye is a lens for the heart.Although the Bible is a book with no pictures, it is in fact a book of nothing but pictures, pictures arranged in a careful sequence. The textual flow is motion designed to make an impression. Visualizing while reading or hearing the Bible is the only way to comprehend all that is being said. If there is to be any further progress in theology, there must be some kind of artistic revolution. These short essays are a colorful, and practical, exhibition of some riches which the Bible reveals to the visual thinker.

The man of God on the mountain is not only given the blueprint for the City of God in a vision, he himself-in his flesh-is also to be the blueprint.The Gospel of John and the Revelation both employ the elements of the Tabernacle as a pattern for their literary composition. The possibility that John used the same pattern to govern the composition of the three preserved epistles is worthy of investigation. Indeed, the complexity of the multilayered "construction" of these letters indicates a miraculous gift from God, the literary equivalent of the cunning work of the Spirit-filled artisans Bezalel and Aholiab. The difference, of course, is that John is building tents out of words, ministering to the camp of the saints in anticipation of the coming holy city. Identification of the literary "tessellations" not only reveals John's internal logic, and explains many, if not all, of the oddities and ambiguities in the text, but it also sheds light upon the authenticity of its infamous textual variant. The Revelation can only be understood in the light of Old Testament symbols and sequences, and the same is true of the epistle of Jude, which employs the pattern of Israel's wilderness trek to sort the sons of men from the Sons of God, serving as a blistering hors d'oeuvre to John's fiery feast.

Are the Jews still God's chosen people? Was the establishment of modern Israel a fulfillment of Bible prophecy? The persistence of Judaism since the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 has been a perpetual conundrum for Christian theologians. History would have been so much simpler if God had never called Abraham. Theology would be so much easier if God had never established the nation of Israel. The Jewish people have been the targets of inordinate hatred, the subjects of inordinate love, and also the cause of endless conflict over the correct interpretation of many prophetic statements in the Bible, especially those of Jesus and Paul. A holistic, structural analysis of the Bible not only clarifies the "end" of Israel in AD70 as a fulfillment of its intended purpose but also extrapolates its patterns to explain the true nature of Rabbinic Judaism and the State of Israel today.

Jesus invented Twitter? Well, He was a master at throwing out brief, pithy sayings that were calculated to provoke and offend. But that put Him at the pointy end of a long line of prophets who trafficked in barbs, riddles and shocking object lessons. Instead of doling out rose water, these troublemakers went straight for the gasoline.Those who indulge in murder and adultery are often the first to insist upon table manners, which is why God sends a Jeremiah to smash the pottery or an Isaiah to preach naked in the street. King Solomon, who was also an accomplished tweeter, might tell us that there is a time to be polite and a time to give some obstinate official a poke in the eye.The truth wrapped in a riddle or a joke is irresistible. What looks like skylarking is sometimes the fowler's snare. This selection of airborne quips and eagle-eyed observations by Michael Bull will likely challenge, offend, anger and unsettle. But it will also edify and perhaps even amuse.

If we want to understand the book of Revelation, we must remember that it is at the end of the Bible, not the beginning.There are many conflicting ideas concerning what this intriguing and terrifying book is about, but the truth is that although it appears to be foreign territory - a hostile landscape filled with animal totems, confounding signs and confronting images including sacrificial virgins clad in pure white, chosen, slain and ascending with a disturbing sexual undercurrent - the Revelation is in fact a denouement, a revelation, of the natural world, like the last act of a whodunit.To solve the case, we are going to call on the testimony of an expert witness: the prophet Moses. The events, characters and patterns established in the Law are the foundation for the Prophets, and together these provide the context of this enigmatic final prophecy. The last book of the Bible cannot be understood without the first books of the Bible.

Aims to enhance our understanding of the role of media and technology in everyday life. This book challenges the visual approaches to culture by proposing an auditory understanding of behaviour through an ethnographic analysis of personal stereo use. It is for those seeking an approach to urban studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and more.

Using the example of the Apple iPod, this work investigates the way in which we use sound to construct key areas of our daily lives. It argues that the Apple iPod acts as an urban Sherpa for many of its users and in doing so joins the mobile army of technologies that many of us habitually use to accompany our daily lives.