When Alice finally reached the bottom of the rabbit hole, she found herself in a ‘long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof’. All the doors around the hall were locked, but there was a small golden key on a glass table with which she was able to open a little door, about fifteen inches high, hidden behind a curtain. The door led into a small passage, ‘not much larger than a rat-hole’, at the end of which she could see a beautiful garden with beds of bright flowers and cool fountains. But she was unable to get her head through the doorway – and even if she had succeeded, it would have been useless without the rest of her body. ‘Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!’ Alice lamented. ‘I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.’
She returned to the glass table and this time found on it a small bottle with a label attached that read ‘Drink me’. Having sensibly checked to see whether the bottle was marked ‘poison’, she drank its contents, and found herself shrinking to a size that would comfortably fit through the door.
The fact that Alice had inadvertently left the golden key out of reach on the glass table, and that it would be some time – and some odd adventures – before she could get through the door into the mysterious garden, is a warning to us that the mental exercise on which we have embarked is not at all an easy one. We need to imagine that the world of the New Testament is to be found down a deep rabbit hole and through a door that our large modern heads cannot enter. We need to take the risk of drinking a strangely intoxicating, disorienting potion that will shrink our minds to the dimensions of an ancient, constricted, and in many respects disturbing worldview.
From Andrew Perriman, Re: Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church, 24-25
