If an individual were able to keep a diary from infancy to old age, that diary would contain truths of many kinds. If a reader wished to understand the text, each stage of development would require a different mode of interpretation. Making coherent sense of the diarist’s life as a whole would require at least one more interpretation, if not a dozen.

The same is true of a people chronicling its existence, generation upon generation, over the course of millennia.

To impose one interpretive mode upon the entirety of the record would lead to major errors. One might misread the earliest dreamworld experiences from the perspective of relative maturity — or one might read mature reflections on a life of experience (that spans multiple interpretive epochs) from the perspective of a small child.

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I do consider myself a Christian — but one who believes that the truths in the Bible and the many traditions to which the Bible belongs are as profoundly heterogeneous as they are profound. The effort to understand what is said through the Bible requires the discovery of many modes of interpretation and ways of understanding, each able to say truth other modes cannot. The truths revealed through this process of pursuit are written and overwritten in layers across a perpetually transfiguring world — a divine palimpsest.