michael-dean-k/

A goal of mine has to read the majority of the Bible—New and Old Testaments—by next Easter, which means I need to start soon, next month, September, and carve out 15 hours per month or so. My original plan was too simple. I decided on the The Oxford Annotated 5th edition, but that has limitations. It's academic and “non-confessional,” meaning, it’s not any particular church’s perspective; it’s the best in terms of secular scholarship, and is the standard in Ivy league religious departments. It’s probably great for the historical perspective, but it doesn’t include the other perspectives at all.

I do want to contemplate the allegorical, typological, and moral angles of the Bible too, but my decision is whether I want (1) a single perspective (the Orthodox perspective), (2) no perspective (so I’m forced to derive my own), or (3) a range of perspectives (which I would have to critically triangulate). Each approach would offer something different. I already have Kallistos Ware on my reading list—on theology, on the church, on the Philokalia: focused on Orthodox prayer—but all that doesn't include the Orthodox angle on the Bible.

I'm not necessarily looking for a traditional Orthodox outlook, but rather an Orthodox foundation for a personal and idiosyncratic outlook. I think creative liberty in interpretation is how to best engage with a religious text.

This ties into an idea I have about seeing religion through the three lenses of philosophy: ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. I find myself agreeing with the ethics and metaphysics of Orthodoxy (how to live, and the nature of reality), but disagreeing with the epistemology of religion in general; epistemology is about how we attain knowledge, and most religions are anchored in fixed answers to life’s biggest mysteries. (...Yes, even within a sealed worldview, there is still work to do in building a personal relationship with the material, but this does not include doubting the core dogmas...). My view is that the deepest form of spiritual practice comes from tolerating ambiguity and directly grappling with the mysteries; this involves questioning central axioms, inventing original interpretations, and extending scripture forward.

Here's the latest game plan on how to achieve this—it involves five different Bibles:

• I found three specialized translations (one for the Old Testament, one for the Gospels, another for Acts/Letters/Revelations) that are most faithful to the original linguistic intent. They’re translated by philologists/classicists/philosophers. After reading samples from a bunch, I found these to be the most literary and engaging to read. I’ll read these without commentary, and take notes with my own interpretations.

  • The Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter (2019);
  • The Gospels by Sarah Ruden (2021);
  • The New Testament by David Bentley Hart (2023);

• After reading a book (ie: Genesis), I’ll read the The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Fifth Edition), but only for the historical introduction for that book (ie: Genesis has about 10 pages, where the Orthodox Study Bible only has 2). The Oxford commentary felt a little too unstructured and pedantic, though I imagine for some books, I will dive in.

• Before moving onto the next book, I’ll read the commentary from The Orthodox Study Bible. In addition to line-by-line commentary, it also has short essays which I found great for synthesizing everything. This gives the frame for my church and the specific religious tradition I grew up in.

The value in this process is: (1) I start with the source text, without commentary, meaning I get to record my own idiosyncratic first impressions; but then, really, (2) I compare those impressions with a range of sources that don't agree. This ties to some good general reading advice I recently heard: simultaneously read books on a topic that have diverging conclusions. There's a tension when three different books interpret Genesis differently. Is the snake the devil? By levitating above any singular perspective, but taking all sides seriously, I can build a better understanding of the hyper-object (rather than a fixed perspective).

The syllabus: (NT = New Testament; OT = Old Testament; DSS = Dead Sea Scrolls)

• August 2026: (430 pages)
  • The Gospel of Mark (NT)—145 pages
  • Psalms, Book I (OT)—155 pages
  • The Book of Isaiah, Ch. 40-55 (OT)—130 pages
• September 2026: (500 pages)
  • Genesis (OT)—425 pages
  • Psalms, Book IV (OT)—75 pages
• October 2026: (440 pages)
  • Exodus (OT)—365 pages
  • Psalms, Book II (OT)—130 pages
• November 2026: (525 pages)
  • Samuel 1-2 (OT)—445 pages
  • Ecclesiastes (OT)—80 pages
• December 2026: (480 pages)
  • Letters of Paul, T,G,C2,R,Pp,Pm (NT)—330 pages
  • Damascus Document (DSS)—25 pages
  • Habakkuk (OT) + Habakkuk Pesher (DSS)—40 pages
  • Psalms, Book III (OT)—85 pages
• January 2027: (550 pages)
  • The Gospel of Matthew (NT)—225 pages
  • Deuteronomy, Ch. 1-11, 27-34 (OT)—120 pages
  • The Book of Jeremiah, Ch 1, 7, 11, 28-44 (OT)—160 pages
  • The Minor Prophets, Micah—45 pages
• February 2027: (525 pages)
  • The Gospel of Luke (NT)—240 pages
  • Acts (NT)—225 pages
  • Minor Prophets, Jonah (OT)—15 pages
  • Minor Prophets, Joel (OT)—30 pages
  • The Community Rule (DSS)—15 pages
• March 2027: (425 pages)
  • The Gospel of John (NT)—185 pages
  • The Gospel of Thomas (DSS)—30 pages
  • Proverbs (OT)—210 pages
• April 2027: (495 pages)
  • The Book of Ezekiel, Ch 1-3, 8-11, 18, 33-39, 43, 47 (OT)—130 pages
  • Minor Prophets, Zechariah (OT)—80 pages
  • The War Scroll (DSS)—20 pages
  • Psalms, Book V (OT)—140 pages
  • The Revelation of John (NT)—125 pages

The imagination is as ugly as it is beautiful; they come together. If your inner mind consists only of pretty landscapes, imagined scenarios, and clever compromises, all bound by a safe and familiar virtue, your net is cast not below the froth of the ocean. To dive into the depths is to expose yourself not just to shimmering coral, but to the jump scares of stingrays. The moment I thought this, as I lifted my arm to drink orange juice, I saw a monstrous bug on my sleeve, hairy and hissing; it was only a bee, but unexpectedly there, and so I leapt and shooed and booted into my aboriginal fight mode. What a synchronicity! You are not tapped into the Source unless the fear of it lifts you off the ground.

This is on my mind because I had a strange fantasy on my walk home—a fruit of imagination—and debated myself on whether I’d write about it. I decided I wouldn’t, but I suppose, now, here I am. I will spare you of the hot specifics, which unwillingly formed in my mind. Contrary to how you may think this started, I was looping a religious mantra and I saw with total purity, closer to Buddha than the drools of a leg-humping dog. My sin was not in lust, but in congratulating myself on my discipline. I imagined myself writing a paragraph on this victory of inner-chastity—“I didn’t imagine [X]… I didn’t imagine [Y]...”—but that summoned a fantasy weirder than usual, one with unbelievable metaphors that I’ll never put to paper, and an arc that ended in spasms, shapeshifting, and shrinking into a mono-droning ball of white heat that exploded and shattered the windows of nearby houses, spiraling the town into a front-lawn frenzy.

Creativity comes not without deviance; and so extreme creativity comes with flashes of imagery that will shock you, shock whoever you share it with. It cares not of your preferences or values, commitments or morals; to cast a line deep into waters brings all sorts of riches and squids to the surface of your mind, and the choice is yours on what to bring into the boat (and of course, sometime a whale emerges, and your language fails you, leaving you only able to speak of the whale with nothing to show).

A more conservative mind has no such problems, because a conservative dares not enter the mind of God. To be creative is not a frivolous hobby, it is to be a microcosm of the larger engine of creation. And if being creative involves attuning yourself to the instability of imagination, then one can’t know God without a fair amount of psychic turbulence.

(I promise I won’t stray too far into amateur theology here.) The popular caricature of God is the archetype of an architect—one with a divine “plan”—but a better image is a thunderous volcanic eruption. The Big Bang, the rupture of cosmic seed; reproduction—evolution, life, and creation, in many places at many scales —emerges from billions of scattered instances, so that the rare two can fuse into a higher order. I have trouble believing God has consciousness, intention, and agency, but find obvious a divine intelligence that folds chaos into order. The cost of divine intelligence though, in creating something as magnificent as a human, is misfiring, mutation, bad combinations, and all things upsetting—violence, death, and evil.

So if we want to carry the logos, hold the flame of divine intelligence in our own head to make beautiful things ourselves, to continue the process of God, as God, then we have to accept defects and abortions—to not cower in fear at the strange and grotesque, to not turn off the lights. This is probably a known truth, that the path towards Enlightenment runs through dark woods, but you forget that in a fit of terror from your own thoughts. This is at least, my rationalization of the stray and unexplainable thoughts that occasionally pass through me, thoughts of lust, violence, theft, vengeance, conspiracy, tyranny, hauntedness—all demonic antipodes to the dearest things I treasure.

Instead of narrowing the aperture of mind and retreating to shore, I have to learn to swim. I can go into the depths and marvel at weird creatures, but not grab a fin to follow where it goes. This is where I think “Self-Reliance” by Emerson goes wrong; he is right in the sense that you have to take seriously whatever is presented through your natural imagination, but wrong in the sense that you must follow all of nature’s impulses, wherever they lead. Nature produces mutations, Ralph. The decision on how to respond to the mental fruits of nature is where morality lives. Morality is not a purity of mind, nor is it the total absence of evil, but it’s the character you show when dealing with darkness. I can’t be blamed for trying this, for it’s in my name; Michael—“he who fights the Devil.”

A simple maxim might be something like “don’t chase it, don’t avoid it, let it wash through.” One complication is being a writer. Odd thoughts often make for good material. One view is that writing is a useful release valve, a controlled plane where monsters can roam, keeping the head pure when away from the page. But if your best writing comes forth from the ugly imagination, then you’ll find yourself calling upon it as your Muse.