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Friday, July 12, 2013

The Binary Aspect of the Biblical Worldview

By Alice C. Linsley
Special to virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
July 12, 2013

"All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another."--G.K. Chesterton (Autobiography)

"Limitation as limitation is good. Any limitation makes something, as an outline takes some shape. This is the true and thrilling meaning of the tale of Adam and Eve. God put something forbidden in their garden because without limit things are without form and void. The dark stem of the strange tree threw up all the green and gold. But they clamoured for 'infinity'... They destroyed the outline of Eden. They ate the one thing that kept everything else sacred. Immediately they had everything and therefore nothing."--G.K. Chesterton (From the Notebooks of G.K.C, The Tablet, 4 April 1953)

The Biblical worldview has a binary feature that is expressed in the language of the Biblical writers. This worldview distinguishes the Biblical belief system from Asian dualism. In a dualistic worldview the entities of the binary set are regarded as complementary and equal. This is symbolized by the ying-yang.

In dualism, reality is comprised of opposite but equal principles (male-female, night-day, spirit-matter, heaven-hell, God-man). One entity in the set is no greater than the other. The idea of divine condescension is meaningless in this context, as is the idea of God entering history.


Read it all here.


Related reading: Questioning the Common Ancestry Hypotheses; Biblical Anthropology and Common Ancestry

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