REC Home*** Theological Forum Theological Forum Vol. XXI, No. 2, May 1993
THE BIBLE AND MYTH
Paul G Schrotenboer, Editor
I. Introduction
Metaphor, root metaphor, myth, modernism, postmodernismthese are some of the terms that have recently attained currency in theology and in philosophy. They are terms with overlapping meanings and interconnecting links to world views, systems of thought and common every-day understanding. It may be worth our while to attempt to unpack the interconnection of the ideas some of the terms signify. We shall do so by looking at the concept myth and considering it in relation to the Christian faith.
The Dictionary Definition
Your dictionary will likely distinguish three characteristics of myth: (1) it concerns the human explanation of the "supernatural". Myth concerns religion. It also (2) indicates the "natural" area of imagination or fantasy. A myth may be a legend, a fable, a saga, a fictitious story, a fairy tale. (3) A myth is a story without a historical basis. It often carries a moral or explains a phenomenon in nature. Our concern is primarily with the religious characteristic when we consider the place of myths in the Bible. But all three meanings are interconnected, as we hope to demonstrate.
The religious myth deals primarily with the area of the gods and how human beings relate to them. The general presumption is that myth is a primitive way of construing how the gods relate to humankind and vice versa.
Religious myths are very common. Few if any peoples have been found which do not tell their stories of the gods. We find them in the OT with the Canaanites, and with the natives in Lystra (who believed that the gods occasionally came down to visit people) and with the Greek intelligentsia in Athens (who were told that God does not dwell in temples made by man). The writings about the Greek myths by Homer and Hesiod, who lived a number of centuries before St Paul, are still read and studied today.
The myth also plays a role in ordinary human affairs. Myths arise in the marketplace, are appealed to in the legislature and are told in the family. Examples: In the family we think of the tooth fairy. As a defense of the free market enterprise there is the doubtful story that the seeking of self interest will be to the greater advantage of all, by the intervention of an "invisible hand".
The Nazi myth of the "will to power" and the "Ubermensch" was taken from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The American myth of "manifest destiny" is associated with President James Monroe and was later carried out to annex Texas by President James Polk.
Both liberal theologians and conservative Christians in the USA bought into this manifest destiny myth in the previous century in believing that the civilization produced on the North American continent placed upon them an "Errand to the world". Crassly stated, the myth is that what is good for the USA is good for the world.
When all is said and done the myth is a communal story. It is more than an opinion. It is like tradition. As one person alone cannot make tradition, no one in isolation can create a myth.
The Modern Downgrading of Myth
During the modern era people in the West have generally down-played the role of myth for two chief reasons. The first is the conviction of Christians that the revelation of God given in the Scriptures is of an other order than creative free-floating human fantasy. The biblical record, which is embedded in the thoughts and language, yes deep in the experience of human beings, is nevertheless a reliable and fully trustworthy Word of God. Therefore to explain parts of the Bible as mythical is seen as an attack on the powerful work of the Spirit and on the authority of the Holy Scriptures.
From an entirely different source, the idea of myth has come under fire in our modern age, namely from the followers of the 18th Century Enlightenment which glorified human rationality as the source of truth. In the Enlightenment view the myth belongs to a prescientific era that has been superseded with the much higher knowledge that science based on human reason and research has provided. To accept the myth was long considered to be unworthy of modern enlightened man. The ultimate putdown is to say that the mythical and the religious are unscientific.
Myth and History
The myth, as we noted in the dictionary definition, has often been seen as a story that has no foundation in historical fact and must be distinguished from reliable accounts of what happened. Whoever would characterize stories in the Bible as myth seems therefore to be saying that what is narrated there may very well never have occurred. According to this view of myth, Bible stories are like legends told to children. They carry a lesson. The legend is that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. When questioned about the felled tree he confessed that he did it with his little hatchet, for he could never tell a lie. Whether or not it happened, the story emphasizes truth in political office. Likewise, Abraham Lincoln walked several miles in the evening to return seven cents to a lady. Whether or not that happened, it teaches the need for honesty in government officials.
The myth featured prominently in the view of the positivist philosopher August Comte; he divided the advance of human civilization into three stages: 1. the mythical or superstitious, 2. the metaphysical and 3. the scientific. Scientific man has left the myth behind. This evolutionist view has had its effect in theology as well as in philosophy.
Liberal Theology and Myth
Some have sought to retain and even rehabilitate the myth in the area of human belief by attributing the so called primitive stories found in the Bible to the religious experience of the people of the bygone day. The primitive story is a human construction of a non-historical but important truth about the divine. The event may well not have occurred but the truth in the narrative is there. This reconstructed myth is often accompanied by an espousal of a liberal or a natural theology.
Well known is the theology of Rudolph Bultmann who held that in order to make the gospel understandable to modern scientific man the gospel record must be demythologized. Thus, inter alia, the resurrection of Jesus must be seen as a myth but the crucifixion can be accepted. For we can experience a crucifixion but a resurrection is beyond our experience. Miracles are out; ordinary events are in.
About 15 years ago John Hick wrote The Myth of God Incarnate. The book was quickly challenged by Michael Greene in The Truth of God Incarnate. Evangelicals, like Greene, hold that myth and truth are mutually exclusive.
II. The Restoration of Myth
Of recent date there have been those who stand in the line of secular Enlightenment thinking who have sought to make room, once again, for myth. They have reached this conclusion, not through returning to belief in revelation as a source of knowledge of God and the world (which the Enlightenment ruled out), but from a critical analysis of the human experience, specifically of the way in which human beings attain to knowledge. Many secular scholars today reject the view of a neutral, value-free science, a science free from religious bias. There is a growing body of literature that recognizes that all human knowledge is based on pre-theoretical world views in which the myth plays a constitutive role. Some will now even go so far as to say that the ideal of an objective science, free from human bias, is itself a myth from which scientists should distance themselves. One of the terms that is becoming a buzz word is that we need to undergo a process of remythologizing.
That the prescientific (call it faith, world view, myth) decidedly influences scientific theory has a tradition that goes all the way back to St Augustine. No school of thought has emphasized this more strongly than the "reformational philosophy" associated with the names of D. Th. Vollenhoven and Herman Dooyeweerd. The latter openly claimed that philosophy is to be understood as a religious exercise. A student of Dooyeweerd, Prof. Roy A. Clouser, in The Myth of Religious Neutrality makes a convincing case that all theory-making starts from a religious point of view, whether it is recognized or not.
An Unexpected Agreement
There is an unexpected agreement here between the remythologizing academics and those who openly start from a biblical faith that God created the world and holds it in being by his powerful Word. It should be recognized, however, that although there is agreement that the pre- scientific influences and may even determine the scientific, there remains a fundamental difference. Post modernists who stand in the Enlightenment tradition with its stress on the creativity of human rationality will likely not have broken with the basic faith in reason but only modified it by rejecting its absoluteness. The agreement between such post modernists and Roy A. Clouser, for example, is only partial.
In reflecting on what we have written this far, we should note that August Comte was right in one respect: the myth was prominent in the thinking of early humankind. It has been well documented and carefully analyzed how in Greece, before the beginning of modern science in about the sixth century BC, the myths were very popular. But when the scientific theoretical mode of thinking put in its appearance there, for the first time in the human race, the popular myth came under attack.
Xenophenes, who lived the 6th Century BC, openly poked fun at the popular myths by stating that the Ethiopians made their gods black and snub-nosed and that the Thracians made them with blue eyes and red hair. He went on to say that if oxen and horses and lions would make gods, they would look like oxen and horses and lions (J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p 119).
Let us now turn to what the Bible itself tells about myth.
The Pauline Judgment on Myth
The word "myth" occurs four time in the Pauline letters in the NIV Bible. All passages speak of myth in a pejorative sense. In these passages the apostle instructs the people of God not to teach false doctrines any longer nor devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. They promote controversies, rather than God's work, which is by faith (1 Tim 1:4). Timothy should have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives tales. He should rather train himself to be godly (1 Tim 4:7). Timothy should be aware of the people who have itching ears who will turn their ears away from the truth to myths (2 Tim 4:4). Titus should rebuke the Cretans roundly so that they will be sound in the faith and not pay attention to Jewish myths and to those who reject the truth (Titus 1:14).
It should be recognized that the "People of the Way" whom Timothy and Titus were shepherding had come from a culture that was strongly influenced by the myths of the Greeks and the Romans. Myth was an integral part of their pre-Christian life and constituted the bulk of their tenets of faith. Paul experienced this first hand in confrontation both in Lystra and in Athens, both from the common people and from the men of philosophy. Between these stories and the message of Jesus and the resurrection there could only be opposition.
In these passages in his pastoral letters Paul puts the Jewish myths in the same category as those that came out of the Greek culture. These Jewish stories also had an ill effect on the new converts. In view of his consistently held high view of the OT Scriptures, Paul may be understood to refer to extra-biblical stories that were told and believed in by the Jews who rejected the truth (Titus 1:14).
Although the word myth does not occur in Romans 1, The Apostle does deal directly there with the pagan religious activity out of which myths are made. He claims that the people who suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness have become futile in their thinking (vain in their imaginations, KJV) and that their human minds were darkened. They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles (Rom 1:21:22). Obviously in the mind of Paul the fabrication of myths is closely connected with the making of idols, in other words, myth is a product of false religious faith.
Apostle Peter: Cleverly Invented Stories
The Apostle Peter refers also on one occasion to myth. He does it in connection with the eye- witness reporting he and others gave of Jesus Christ. In dispute was the channel by which the message came. "We did not follow cleverly invented stories (mythois) when we told you about the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Pet 2:16).
Apparently the story of Jesus Christ could be (mis)construed as having come to the people to whom Peter wrote in the way all information of the gods was thought to have originated, namely by myth, a human fabrication. Against this common notion Peter posits the various forms of revelation that God used to convey the trustworthy message of Jesus Christ to and through the Apostles.
The first was through the apostolic eye witnesses. John and the others were with Jesus on the mountain and saw his glory.
The second was though the witness of God himself who spoke at the time of Jesus' glorification on the mountain (v 18). The Apostles, says Peter, heard that voice. The message of the glory of Christ, therefore, came from those who saw and who heard.
Then follows the reference to the words of the prophets (vs 19,21). Peter's message, in other words, rests not only on the reports of those who saw and heard what God did in Christ but it accords also with the word of the OT prophets. What distinguishes the word of the true prophet is that he does not come with his own private interpretation (thus not with a cleverly invented story). His word is like a light shining in a dark place.
The prophetic word was made more sure because the prophets were borne along by the Spirit of God (21). On all counts, then, the gospel is far superior to the cleverly invented story. The basic choice is therefore not between some human witnesses and others but between those witnesses who were faithful in retelling the Word of God and the fabricators of myths.
The words of the Apostles in describing myths as the creations of human beings are reminiscent of those of David. In Psalm 50, where he assumes to be the mouthpiece of God, he says to the wicked: "You thought that I was altogether like you"(21). In Psalm 27 we read that God says: "To you O my heart he has said 'seek my face'" and the reply is, "Your face Lord will I seek" (vs 7,8). We note in these two Psalms the two opposite reactions to the revelation of God: obey or reject.
No prophet ridiculed the making of idols more sharply that Isaiah. He portrayed the making of idols as sheer stupidity, for idols have eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, hands but cannot save. Those who make idols are like them. A deluded heart misleads these idol makers (44:20).
Following the low view that Paul and Peter had of the myths that circulated in Ephesus and Crete in their day and which held sway over the people before they were changed by the gospel, Christians through the ages have rightly considered the myth to be something that should be supplanted by a believing, obedient response to revelation. To validate the pagan religious myth as is done in liberal theology, is therefore to fall back into a pre-Christian frame of mind. The power of the gospel manifested itself in exposing the misdirected thinking of humankind and of pointing to the One who will renew the mind unto knowledge.
Myth, Faith and Revelation
The myth has been characterized as a derailed fantasy of faith, (D. Th. Vollenhoven). It has also been called a misdirected response to the revelation God has given in the creation (Johan Mekkes); it is thus both a misdirected response to revelation and it functions as a pseudo revelation.
Derailment is a useful metaphor in understanding myth. For a train to derail, it must first have been on the tracks. Likewise, for a myth to be a pseudo revelation it must be a perversion of a revelation that was already functioning. With the peoples which did not have the Word revelation, the response was to God's revelation in creation.
In misconstruing revelation the myth does not do away with the revelation of God but only corrupts it. As a result, the Word of God does yet, although in corrupted form, come through in the misconceived revelation. Like the lie, the myth needs the truth upon which to feed. The myth is therefore not pure nonsense.
In Lystra Paul referred to the revelation that came to the inhabitants there, and told them that God had not left himself without witness. That witness came in the giving of fruitful seasons. But when Paul found that the Lystra inhabitants had interpreted his healing of a man in terms of their myth, he, rather than accommodate to it, confronted them with his testimony that ran completely counter to their belief. In the riot that followed one senses how strongly the myth had control over these people and prevented them from accepting the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In his address in Athens Paul acknowledged that the Athenians had seen and retained some truth concerning God and understood somehow that human beings are related to God. He recognized some truth in the saying of their poet Aratus: "we are his offspring". But the Athenians scoffed at the idea of the resurrection, which in their view was a "myth".
Myth and Nornmativity
Myth as it manifested itself in the pre-Christian (pagan and Jewish) consciousness was characterized by a kind of normativity-exactly what one should expect from revelation and the human response to it. The myth in its various forms has exercised a formative power. Think of the story of Paul and Barnabus in Lystra. Think of the effect the myth had on the Greek nation. It was held by Homer that fate was a power that even the gods could not escape.
The will-to-power myth exercised a tremendous influence over the German nation under Adolf Hitler and, subsequently, affected the entire world. "Befehl ist Befehl". The end of influence of the free market invisible hand myth is not yet in sight.
Myth and Human Knowledge
The approach to the issue we have described (myth and revelation,) is only half of the answer. There is also the question we considered earlier whether there are elements of human experience which necessarily function as myth, bias, religious conviction, perspective, in all of human knowledge, including the (wrongly) presumed most excellent knowledge there is, namely modern science.
L. Kolakowski in Die Gegenwartigheit des Mythos, 1984, claims that the myth is an "anthropological constant". He is one of many who have "rediscovered" that specifically faith phenomena, such as myths, mythologies, life convictions, world views, ideologies, have been present in all phases of the development of Western culture. Andries Troost sees this as a tardy recognition of the structural presence of human believing as an ineradicable aspect of creaturely existence (Philosophia Reformata, 1992 Vol 1, "Normativiteit", p 23).
The Nature and Destiny of Man: We are Response Beings
The passages above from Paul, Peter, David and Isaiah should not only remind us that man's religion is a response to God's revelation but should also prompt us to recognize that human beings are themselves response beings. This is integral to the idea that we are the image of God, that is, we are reflections of him, not having any substance in ourselves. Here we deal with human responsibility
We are responsible. That is, we have an obligation to respond. We are more than respons-able; we are inescapably called to respond. We cannot but respond. There is what may be called a structural similarity between myth and the biblical story. Both are expressions of an "anthropological constant". Both are a response to revelation given in the creation. What distinguished the myth from the true story built on biblical disclosure is a difference in direction.
III. The Bible and Human Fantasy
The question is: Where does this leave the evangelical Christian who would still hold to the authority of the biblical revelation? What should we make of the widely held view that the Bible must be understood in terms of the literary form in which it comes to us? May we, without doing violence to its integrity, construe it in terms of our own view of the right way to record historical events or convey truth? Is there a legitimate role of fantasy, imagination, in the receiving and recording of the Word and Deeds of God? Is there any inherent reason why God would not have used the human story-making faculty as well as the human ability to think rationally and to write communicably (including story telling) in confronting humanity with his self-revealing Word? Does the exercise of human fantasy necessarily lead to the making of myths? Is it reasonable to believe that all of the biblical stories were free from fantasy?
Have we perhaps made the mistake of drawing the line of combat at the wrong place, namely fantasy or truth? Should we perhaps draw the line between those stories in which human fantasy, renewed by the Spirit of God, did not leave the rails and therefore could become a fit vehicle for God's word of redemption to man? In other words, should we perhaps distinguish between true stories and misleading stories (myths)? To answer we shall have to consider whether there are fanciful but true stories in the Bible.
Stories in the Bible
While we dismiss the myth, a story originating in misdirected human fantasy, we should not overlook that the Lord God did see fit to use a variety of literary forms in disclosing his will, including story telling. We easily detect and gladly admit that the Psalms are poetry and that they cannot be interpreted as entirely literal. Many of the Psalms are themselves stories or insist that the story of God's dealing with his people must be told from generation to generation.
But stars do not sing and hills do not leap for joy. Nor does God literally ride in a chariot on the clouds of the heaven. That is poetic license. We recognize also that the book of Ecclesiastes is a dialogue of the preacher with himself. And it requires a strenuous exercise in interpretation to distinguish between the words of the cynic who speaks from the perspective "under the sun" and the words of the preacher who speaks from the perspective of the God who made the sun and will bring every person into judgment.
In a similar way we read the Song of Songs. It is a powerful story presentation of the chaste love of a maiden for her one true lover. It is true whether Solomon is one of the lovers or not. (We do injustice to it when we use it as teaching Christ's love for his people. The Bible clearly teaches us of Christ's love, but not in this book. The Calvinist should have no problem believing that a God-pleasing exercise of conjugal love is of sufficient significance to require a place in the Holy Scriptures).
But what do we do with the book of Job (which Herman Bavinck described as a kind of "historische inkleeding"). Is it a dramatization or a straightforward historical report? And the book of Jonah? What do we do with the first chapters of Genesis? Some would flatly say that they should all be understood as any other historical narrative in the Bible, no less historical than the book of Acts, no less bound by the criteria that is recognized by modern historiography for else they are not true. Others would say that they are stories that were not intended to be true to historical fact according to the canons of modern historiography but which are nevertheless true and fully trustworthy in all that they intend to convey. As such they carry essential information of God and the world.
To decide this issue we shall have to let the text reveal what kind of literature it is. We simply cannot demand of the writers of the opening chapters of Genesis that they show that they made as thorough an investigation as Luke did before he wrote his gospel and the book of Acts
My point is that we cannot a priori (prior to ascertaining what the literary form is) determine what God is saying to us. I would like to suggest that God did make use of the story humans are accustomed to tell in revealing His truth. Sometimes stories arising out of popular wisdom. When Jesus spoke of putting new wine into new wine skins, he was not teaching the art of wine making but was using the accepted way of making wine as a means to teach that the new wine of the kingdom of God requires a new container, that is a new kingdom-faith response.
Our concern is therefore not only how we should read the Scriptures but should also whether we have altogether rid ourselves of myths. Myths are like idols; they take on many forms and often come to us in disguise.
Creation, Fall, Redemption
We would submit that one cannot understand myth in human experience apart from the biblical doctrines of creation, fall and redemption in Jesus Christ. Let us look at all of these three "stages" in turn.
The statement that God pronounced his completed work very good would include all the abilities that human beings had, even their power of imagination. The products of their imagination could then only be God-pleasing.
The fall did not obliterate the faculty of fantasy but changed it into a foolish, sinful, darkened imagination. Man's fantasy was misdirected. Paul explains this process by saying the minds of those who do know God were darkened and do not glorify him but suppressed the truth. They became foolish and God gave them up to baseful acts and wrong ideas. Here is the origin of myth, not in imagination itself but in imagination not tuned to the will of God.
But now, how far does the redemption in Christ reach?
The Redemption of Human Fantasy
In terms of right or wrong, the human faculty to devise stories is no different from speaking or writing. That is, although it can be and is often misdirected and it can be (and in God's people, by his grace is) redeemed. In Jesus Christ it is in principle restored. (Think of the stories of C. S. Lewis). Our rejection of myth may well have caused us not only to cast out the derailed myth but in so doing have moved us to do injustice to the God-given human faculty of imagination and the stories that proceed from it. If we impose on the revelation a literary form that is not there, in effect deciding that God would not have used such literary forms, we may be trying to be wiser than God. If God did not abandon human fantasy after the fall, neither should we. If God honored this human gift in disclosing his will, we should accept it as included in our obedience of faith.
Creation Restored
If God used the faculty of fantasy, which apart from his grace derails, and now is incorporated into the inscripturation of the sacred writings, then we should see in it a signpost of creation restored, a regaining of that part of the creation which God in the beginning pronounced "very good". He restored this faculty in order to give us a downpayment of and a means to understand that his plan is to restore the creation in its entirely.
Since many secularist scholars, without espousing the Christian faith, recognize that the pre- scientific faith-component (what they call myth) functions decisively in human rationality, we now face the generally recognized situation that at the deepest level faith confronts faith.
It is of course not new that the role of faith is recognized, for St Augustine already maintained that faith must seek understanding. What is new is that secularist scholars now recognize the key role of faith. Whether on a Christian or a non-Christian basis, it is "faith seeking understanding."
Literary Forms
We repeat: What is the literary form that the Bible uses in the disputed passages we mentioned? If Job was intended by God, and was so understood by the Hebrews who first wrote it and heard it read, as a kind of dramatization, then we misconstrue it to be the same kind of narrative as we find in the book of Acts. If the book of Jonah was intended by God and was so understood by the people of God of that day as a story whose lesson appears at the very end of the fourth chapter, then we should accept it as such. Only if we are convinced and can demonstrate from the text itself and knowledge of the time in which it was written that it was intended to be taken literally, may we require that it be understood in no other way. We leave unanswered at this time just what kind of literature Job and Jonah are. We would however take another look at Genesis.
Genesis Revisited: the Myth is Corrected
If the intention of God and the understanding of the people of God in Moses' day was that Genesis tells the history of creation which, simply because it is the story of creation, i.e., of what God did "before" human beings were on the scene, therefore cannot fit the category of simple historiography, then we misconstrue it if we make it conform to modern criteria. This happens when Genesis is taken as providing ready made data for the geologist to build on in constructing his science. This is the mistake of creation science.
To say that the early chapters of Genesis, simply because of their subject matter, cannot be like the ordinary recording of history, does not mean that the events related did not really happen. But it does mean that the knowledge of the events that happened came to God's people in a unique way, in a non-mythical literary form in which the human faculty of story telling was involved.
If there is one special area in which the myth must be considered contraband, it is in narrating God's act of creation. For man cannot reach beyond the horizon of his experience. All our knowledge of God is based solely upon the revelation by which God entered human experience. For human beings, therefore, to presume that they can explain the origin of the world, is akin to the deed of our first parents when they presumed to be like God, knowing good and evil. God's question directed to Job in pertinent today: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?" (Job 38:4).
The derailment metaphor, we hope to have demonstrated, has proved helpful in understanding myth. Actually it should be given additional use in our understanding of the Bible. Genesis 1-3 is not myth, but neither is it unrelated to myth. It was written at a time when myths were rampant. Genesis 1-3 is revelation that has corrected off-the-track myth.
(In one respect the derailment metaphor breaks down. A derailed train cannot go anywhere, but the myth can. It has been around since humankind sought to build a tower that would reach to heaven. The story of the tower is not a myth, but people who began to build it were believers in the myth that they could ascend to heaven, that they could assure their unity by means of their own achievements).
The Genesis story is in some respects like that of the Babylonian account current at the time but it is essentially different. In distinction from the Babylonian account, Genesis says that the world is not divine, nor are parts of the world to be thought to have divine power. The world is only world. God is not controlled by fate. He is the Sovereign Creator. Human beings are not pawns but stewards, nor can they supplant God or his revelation. They are only, unless redeemed, people who, like Adam and Eve, want to be like God. Matter is not eternal, the human soul is not a substance that needs nothing outside of itself in order to exist. We are only the image of God, reflections of his glory, representatives of his presence.
In Genesis Moses restores the creation story to its true meaning. In other words, he puts the train back on the rails by rejecting the myth and telling the true story. It is the only true story of creation that there is.
This means that right at the beginning of the Bible narrative God gives us an indication in the very way that his revelation comes to us that redemption means restoration. Nothing in the good creation may be lost. Human fantasy should therefore not be suppressed but should be brought into line with God's will. This happens when gifted people exercise their full liberty as children of God. God bless our story tellers.
Are there myths in the Bible? NO. But there are myths behind the Bible. Behind both the OT and the NT. These we have to identify; these we have to expose; these we have to supplant with the true story. These we should study to see where they have not entirely suppressed the truth.