A second Bible Matrix review on amazon.com, by Andre Rook:

The church today is plagued with implicit Marcionism. Marcion, a heretic in the 2nd century, believed that Christianity did not need the foundation of the Old Testament, among other things. Today, many churches agree with Marcion in practice. And practice inevitably affects principle. The Old Testament today is seen as an irrelevant and over-lengthy text, relegated to the deepest dungeons of seminaries. The Old Testament is merely a prologue to the New Testament, and who reads prologues anymore?

Michael Bull is no Marcionite, and he believes the best weapon against this ancient heresy, as well as apathy toward Scripture in general, is to unveil the artistry and beauty of God’s designed Word. That’s right, God designed the Scriptures, as an architect designs a skyscraper, but unlike man’s attempt to build himself up to reach God, the Scripture is God’s building, a reverse Babel, reaching down to us. And it is masterfully constructed. Reading the Bible as doctrine manual or moral textbook can only bring a limited amount of satisfaction, but Bull teaches us to read the Bible as art, God’s art.

As Bull instructs, the Bible uses an ancient literary device called chiasm, and in the case of Scripture, hundreds of these sevenfold patterns emerge. This is the pattern of growth and maturity that God utilizes to reiterate, time and time again, his sovereignty over all things, history included. Creation, division, ascension, testing, maturity, conquest, and glorification: the Bible is full of this pattern, divine comedy after divine comedy. Allow Bull to walk you through this, and you will be thankful for the journey. The Bible is gloriously patterned, indeed.

As for the delivery itself, the book is very pithy, refraining from theo-jargon, and includes many helpful charts and illustrations. These help to reinforce Bull’s effort of giving his readers a big handle on the Bible. I have not yet read Jordan’s book, “Through New Eyes”, but this appears to be less dense and more of an introductory work on the topic. At times it even gives the impression of a workbook of sorts, Bull inviting his readers to think of other applications and connections that he does not explicitly mention. Overall, “Bible Matrix” is a very satisfying introduction to the typology and chiasm of Sacred Scripture.

The Bible Matrix is a literary version of the Mandelbrot Set. There is a brilliant documentary on the Mandelbrot Set and its implications (both scientific and theological) with Arthur C. Clarke (split into 6 parts – You really must watch them all!) here.

And here’s an example of the simple formula in action:

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Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses seeming to stoop this way and to sway that yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

The church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would havemade it too unworldly.

The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of th Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom — that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy , 146-147.