I have been a licensed operator of cars for more than thirty-five years now and have driven untold miles. I have also (mostly) successfully taught my six children to drive. That part was a little stressful but easy enough.
What has been more difficult is teaching them where places in Louisville, Kentucky, are in relation to one another. My otherwise intelligent children simply don’t think in terms of the compass points and the spatial relations of Shelbyville Road to Fourth Street like I do. When I’ve tried to explain where things are geographically, they are blank eyed and impatient. “I’ll just put it in my phone” is the exasperated answer I get. When my kids plan to go to a friend’s house, they think of the destination in terms of minutes away, and they think of the drive in terms of the turns dictated by their phones. I’m certain my kids are not alone in this. That is how many people think now.
I finally realized that most people under thirty don’t care about spatial relations because they don’t see the world the same way I do. When I think of Chicago or Louisville or Orlando, I see them in my mind’s eye on a two-dimensional, color map with roads and points of interests with me looking down from above. This is because when I learned to drive, we had no digital GPS tools but only a Rand McNally Road Atlas. This 18x24-inch book of color maps had to be consulted to figure out which roads and interstates—combined with a diligent watching of road signs—would enable you to get someplace new and unfamiliar. Without an atlas you were lost and dependent on potentially inaccurate oral directions at a gas station.
It is not an overstatement to say that we each think about the space we live in differently because we see it differently. The type of maps we use enable us to see the world in a certain way.
The making of a map of any sort—whether AT&T’s fiber coverage in Cincinnati, migratory flight paths that cross oceans, favorite movies per US state, or the twenty-two countries that Great Britain has not invaded—enables us to see our indescribably rich and complex world in certain ways.
No map can be comprehensive or even come close. Even a perfectly scaled map of a tiny area must make a myriad of choices about what to include and not include: bird song, utility lines, dog markings, number of acorns. Most information must be left out. An entirely comprehensive map of an area would be the world itself, which is what we already have. Maps exist to enable us to see something about our world, to see it in a particular way, to see connections and relations between mere data points within the story and song of the world.
In 1933 Harry Beck changed the world of urban mapping with his unique new graphic representation of the London subway system. Before Beck the maps of the London Underground were accurate in giving the distance and direction of train lines but, it turned out, actually too accurate. There was simply too much information for people to interpret and use these subway maps.
Beck’s revolutionary mapmaking involved a simplified and attractive representation (the characteristics of a good map) of the different train lines—color coded and with neat angles. The distances and length of stops are not represented in his maps, nor is information about neighborhoods. But riders are given what they need to successfully navigate the Underground: which train lines stopped where and in what order. This approach to urban transportation maps has now been adopted around the world. According to Peter Turchi, what Beck’s cartography shows is that “the most accurate map, and the most detailed map, is not necessarily the best map.”
The most important thing to learn from Beck is that maps enable us to see things in a certain way, often by blank space and deselection as well as by curated selection of information. Maps enable us to see things in a certain way, often by blank space and deselection as well as by curated selection of information. Mapmaking enables a perspective that is never coextensive with reality (only reality itself is that), but its selectivity empowers us to understand in a certain way.
What does this have to do with being a good Bible reader? Understanding our creaturely limited perspectives on the world invites us to humility. Our inevitably limited understanding reminds us of what is most true about us: we are not God. Our perspective, insights, and perceptions are imperfect and incomplete, even at our best moments.
For example, when we determine what we think is a good interpretation of a text, we should not assume that these verses are now locked up and solved. If later we see something we did not see before or hear someone teach or preach something about the text that is different than what we thought, a posture of humility is open to consider an adjustment in our thinking. We are not to be “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14), but neither are we to hold on to a sacred cow of interpretation, even if it was personally meaningful to us before. Recognizing our limits as knowers and readers invites us to a continual posture of humility and teachability as we continue our lifelong journey of knowing God through Scripture.
This a slightly modified excerpt from Jonathan Pennington, Come and See: The Journey of Knowing God through Scripture (Crossway, 2023).
