Duck-rabbit pictures are illustrations that look like a duck and/or a rabbit. A person can be seeing the picture as a duck and nothing else and then, all of a sudden, s/he sees it as a rabbit, especially when prompted to focus on a particular line of the picture.
Interesting philosophical questions can be discussed in relation to duck-rabbit pictures, such as the nature of perception, what is identity, and the nature of ambiguity. Our question for Bible study is this: what if you were in the unvarying habit of seeing a verse, a passage or a book, in the Bible as a “duck” and then all of a sudden you saw it as a “rabbit”. How dis-quieting would this be if you were always concerned for the truth of the matter?
You could change your stance and say that the text was both a “duck” and a “rabbit”, but is this a defeatist and lazy attitude? There is nothing wrong with ambiguity in a text provided the different levels of meaning are shown to have purpose and design in their overall context. But the danger is that lazy thinking will allow incompatible meanings to be attributed to a text. We have to be careful to ascertain whether we are being misled to now see a “rabbit” or whether the text is intentionally meant to portray both a “duck” and a “rabbit”.
Mistakes that are made with the bits and pieces of a text are inevitable and not so worrisome, but mistakes that are made with the whole, mistakes where you have got it completely wrong, are entirely possible and something to be feared. You see it as a “duck” but it was inspired as a “rabbit”. The difference between an Abrahamic and Biblical monotheistic Christian faith and a Trinitarian Christian faith is a duck/rabbit situation. Orthodox Christians see the same texts differently; everything is different.
How you see Jesus Christ changes everything; it changes not only theory but also the practise of worship. In Islam, Jesus is a lesser prophet than Mohammed; in Judaism, Jesus is not recognised as a true prophet; in Trinitarian Christianity, Jesus is the incarnation of the second person of something called the Trinity; only in Biblical monotheism is Jesus the actual son of God.
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