Many Christian intellectuals will admit to a secret sympathy for Buddhism, though few go so far in embracing the religion of emptiness as Merton did in the end. Maybe because I’m not intellectual enough, or because my temperament is the opposite of ascetic, I don’t share this sympathy. 

But I do have a liking for some aspects of another Eastern religious philosophy: Taoism. Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu and the other guys who formulated this philosophy really penetrated, I think, to something of the true nature of the world—they just didn’t know that Yahweh made the world. The Taoists say that, while all reality is ultimately unitary, it is expressed in terms of duality. And doesn’t there really seem to be a twoness that runs through everything in life: male and female, wake and sleep, light and dark, sweet and sour—even war and peace, as Lev Tolstoy would say? For the Taoists, though, no two opposites in a pair are truly unconnected. There’s always a flow of energy across the divide: one partner is in the ascendancy now, but in time it will be the second partner’s turn, and the seed of the one is planted in the other. (Think of the copulating swooshes on the South Korean flag.) The Taoists’ advice to fall in with the cycles of life and to optimize your effectiveness by striking in the potent hour is a cousin—distant, perhaps—to the Reformed Christian’s emphasis upon cooperation with providence (I’m Reformed). Some of Jesus’ puzzlers, like “you must lose your life to save it” and “those who humble themselves are exalted,” are near kin to the paradoxes of which the Taoists are so fond.

            What would Lao-tzu think about the binary bits of computer code unleashing a creativity revolution in our day, including the birth of AI and its “fuzzy logic”?

            What would he think about brain research, which is showing that one hemisphere tends to handle creativity, while the other does analysis, but neither absolutely?

            Personality tests often try to shunt people into pens with these labels “analytical” and “creative” (or “rational” and “emotional,” or “linear” and “nonlinear”). Here’s my take on it: people in fact often do have a bent toward one side or the other, but no one is all the way over to one side and neither capacity ever works properly without the other. Rationality is sterile without creativity, and creativity is diffuse without rationality. (My favorite writer, Nabokov, lepidopterist as well as novelist and poet, spoke of “the precision of art” and “the passion of science.”) Furthermore, people can grow in either capacity, and from life-stage to life-stage, even from day to day, their balance changes, willfully or otherwise. Am I trying to have it both ways—affirming the division between reason and emotion while also not affirming it? You bet. If that seems irrational to you, try to understand it with your intuition.

            Now let me introduce another pet theory of mine. (If you read my earlier “Matrix: The Postmodern Organization of the Church” here in Next Wave, you’re getting it twice, you poor thing.) It’s simply that Western society as a whole tends to oscillate between an Apollonian option (order, symmetry, mind) and a Dionysian option (freedom, asymmetry, heart) as each metaparadigm in each great cultural-intellectual era replaces the former. The modern era—for convenience, I bracket it at 1500 to 1999—was an Apollonian era, giving us, among other things, Enlightenment Rationalism. And since each era reacts against the last, the postmodern era now finding its legs is Dionysian, with the present-day cries to raze Rationalism coming as no surprise. Of course, the law of the interpenetration of opposites holds here as well. The yin of Dionysus lies within the yang of Apollo; switch it around and it’s still true. Individuals, for instance, may run counter to the metaparadigm of their time; I think of William Blake. Eras-within-an-era may run counter too; I think of the Romantic movement. Still, the more fundamental fact is that there’s a discernible pendulum swing from Apollonianism to Dionysianism occurring today as we move from modernism to postmodernism.

            If about now you’re wondering what all this has to do with something cool about the Bible (see title), I’m getting there.

            As people are now slipping into the new-old outlook of Dionysus, they are finding that the Bible contains the sort of material that can touch their hearts as postmoderns. They like the poetry in the Bible. They like the Bible’s wisdom polished into little proverbs like river pebbles. Most especially, they are drawn into the Bible’s stories and through them sense what it is like to live in relationship with God.

Meanwhile, as I recommend to writers in my booklet Publishing for Postmoderns, the Bible uses words as toys as well as tools: The book of Lamentations employs several forms of the acrostic. The Psalms contain numerous metaphors (admittedly, pretty basic ones)—shield, tower, wing. If you know the original languages, you can find instances of wordplay: Peter/rock. The chief characteristic of Hebrew poetry is parallelism, or the so-called “rhyming of ideas.” And, then, the Bible is nothing if not variform and multivocal.

As a case study for what I’m saying, the teachings of Jesus do nicely. Like the Bible as a whole, many of the red-letter passages have a slippery quality to them: you can’t always say this means that and be done with it. You’re forced to stop and walk around the sculpture of Jesus’ words, examining his enigmatica from all sides and trying to tease out their multiple potential meanings. Wise Bible students are cautious about claiming they’ve ever got Jesus pinned down. (The Sanhedrin-Herodian-Praetorian nexus thought they’d done it with nails, remember, and he rose.) Better to admit the slippery element in Jesus’ words and—as I’ve begun to do—enjoy it. With God, there’s always something more.

But to reverse perspectives once more, even the teachings of Jesus contain much that is plain and clear. Indeed, if you were to look at the Bible from the position of modern, as opposed to postmodern, tastes, you would find just as much that would appeal to you in its material (law, doctrine) and its techniques (propositions, straightforward description). So the cool thing about the Bible is that it contains both: the propositions and the narratives, the head fillers and the heart warmers. The Bible itself, in other words, includes both Apollonian and Dionysian components, beautifully double-helixed. You can always find something that appeals to you, and the bits that seem less appealing … well, they are still there between the table of contents and the maps to prevent too extreme an unbalance in your perspective.

Now let’s ask ourselves, why does the Bible contain both kinds of components? Answer: Because it was all inspired by the one God who encompasses in himself both sides of reality, the rational and the emotional. We are made in this God’s image, and so we can all respond in some measure to both aspects of his book. The Bible is right for everyone, for every age. Cool.